Big secrets do not necessarily cause hills to appear steeper

Slepian, Masicampo, Toosi, and Ambady (Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 141, 619–624, 2012, Study 1) found that individuals recalling and writing about a big, meaningful secret judged a pictured hill as steeper than did those who recalled and wrote about a small, inconsequential secret (with estimates unrelated to physical effort unaffected). From an embodied cognition perspective, this result was interpreted as suggesting that important secrets weigh people down. Answering to mounting calls for the crucial need of independent direct replications of published findings to ensure the self-correcting nature of our science, we sought to corroborate Slepian et al.’s finding in two extremely high-powered, preregistered studies that were very faithful to all procedural and methodological details of the original study (i.e., same cover story, study title, manipulation, measures, item order, scale anchors, task instructions, sampling frame, population, and statistical analyses). In both samples, we were unsuccessful in replicating the target finding. Although Slepian et al. reported three other studies supporting the secret burdensomeness phenomenon, we advise that these three other findings need to be independently corroborated before the general phenomenon informs theory or health interventions.     

Childbirth and Alcohol Consumption Impact of Recent Childbirth on Alcohol Consumption

While the devastating effects of parental alcohol use on children’s health are well known, the specific impact of childbirth on parental alcohol consumption has rarely been examined in the general population. We sought to examine patterns of alcohol use associated with childbirth. Data were drawn from the US National Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions. We compared successively the characteristics of alcohol use among females living with a child under 1 year with (i) those of females not living with children under 1 year and (ii) those of females living with an older child. Mean daily ethanol intake was lower among females living with a child under 1 than among females either not living with children under 1 year (p?<?0.001) or living with an older child (p?<?0.01). Moreover, low-to-mild drinking frequencies fell among females living with a child under 1, compared with females either not living with children under 1 year (adjusted odds ratio (AOR)?=?0.56; 95% CI [0.40, 0.80] for at least once a month and AOR?=?0.40; 95% CI [0.27, 0.58] for less than once a month) or living with an older child (AOR?=?0.52; 95% CI [0.36, 0.75] for at least once a month and AOR?=?0.66, 95% CI [0.46, 0.94] for less than a month). No significant difference was found for males. Our study suggests that childbirth, as opposed to motherhood per se, reduces several (though not all) dimensions of alcohol consumption in females, but not in males.     

Sexual Permissiveness: A Mozambique–France Comparison

The present study compared sexual permissiveness between African adults and European adults. The 301 participants (154 males, 147 females) living in the area of Maputo, Mozambique, and the 309 participants (157 males, 152 females) living in the area of Toulouse, France, were presented with the Portuguese and French versions of 7 permissiveness items taken from the Sexual Attitudes Scale devised by Hendrick & Hendrick (1987 ). Permissiveness scores were shown to be lower among Mozambican participants than among French participants. A clear effect of religious involvement on permissiveness was also demonstrated, and this effect was of the same magnitude in both samples.     

Apologies,Repentance, and Forgiveness: A Muslim–Christian Comparison

Forgivingness (dispositional forgiveness) was assessed in three different samples: Lebanese Muslims (N = 119), Lebanese Christians (N = 121), and French Christians (N = 151). Two different forgivingness structures were evidenced, one that corresponded to the three-factor Western European model (Lasting Resentment, Sensitivity to Circumstances, and Unconditional Forgiveness), which fit the data from the Christian samples, and one that gave a special status to repentance and apologies, which fit the data from the Lebanese Muslim sample. In this alternative model, the meaning of the Sensitivity to Circumstances factor was reduced to circumstances that did not imply the offender's behavior or the victim's mood, and the meaning of the third factor was that the presence of apologizing behavior from the offender was a necessary condition for the resentment to weaken, for the mood to improve, and for a first step toward forgiveness to be taken. The Lebanese Muslims' unconditional forgiveness score was lower than the corresponding Lebanese Christians' and French Christians' scores. This difference was not attributable to possible differential acquiescence effects.     

Forgivingness: Similarities and Differences Between Buddhists and Christians Living in China

Mourners often rely on faith following loss, but not all find spirituality comforting. Some grievers engage in negative religious coping (NRC), signaled by behaviors and thoughts such as anger toward God or their faith community, feeling spiritually abandoned, or questioning God's power. Our longitudinal study of 46 African American homicide survivors explored the relation of both positive religious coping (PRC) and NRC to complicated grief (CG) and investigated whether religious coping more strongly predicted psychological distress or vice versa. Results indicated that NRC was associated with CG, whereas PRC was substantially unrelated to bereavement outcome. Significantly, CG prospectively predicted high levels of spiritual struggle 6 months later, both in terms of CG and NRC composite scores and at the individual-item level. Clinical implications regarding spiritually sensitive interventions are noted.     

Conceptualizations of Forgiveness and Forgivingness Among Hindus

The conceptualizations about forgiveness of Indians from the Hindu community were explored using the Conceptualizations of Forgiveness Questionnaire. As expected, the four-factor structure of conceptualizations found among Western Europeans from Christian backgrounds (Encourages Repentance, Immoral Behavior, Broad Process, and Change of Heart) fit the data collected among the Hindus. Hindus' propensity to forgive was also explored using the Forgivingness Questionnaire. As expected, the three-factor structure of forgivingness found among Europeans (Lasting Resentment, Sensitivity to Circumstances, and Unconditional Forgiveness) fit the data collected among the Hindus. Finally, it was shown that, among Hindus, the relationships between conceptualizations about forgiveness and propensity to forgive were basically the same as the ones found among Western Europeans.     

Reid, Kant and the Philosophy of Mind

I suggest a possible rehabilitation of Reid's philosophy of mind by a constructive use of Kant's criticisms of the common sense tradition. Kant offers two criticisms, explicitly claiming that common sense philosophy is ill directed methodologically, and implicitly rejecting Reid's view that there is direct epistemological access by introspection to the ontology of mind. Putting the two views together reveals a tension between epistemology and ontology, but the problem which Kant finds in Reid also infects his own system, as his weaker ontological claims are undermined to such an extent by the necessary reintroduction of self-consciousness that the justification he seeks for reason fails to be reached epistemologically. Plausible solutions to these parallel tensions imply that both Reid and Kant have a pre-systematic concept of mind, and may lead to the conclusion that Reid's method is more economical in the elaboration of an ontology for the philosophy of mind.     

Les nouveaux «Gastarbeiter»? Les réfugiés sur le marché du travail suisse

With about 28,000 asylum requests a year since 1990, Switzerland is one of the western countries with the highest inflow of refugees. The aim of this article is to answer two questions: What is the role of refugees in the Swiss economy? and what are the factors influencing their incorporation into the labour market? The research is based on the multivariate analysis of an individual database of 110,000 asylum seekers and refugees, in-depth interviews and 174 questionnaires to refugees and employers.     

Reading action word affects the visual perception of biological motion

In the present study, we investigate whether reading an action-word can influence subsequent visual perception of biological motion. The participant's task was to perceptually judge whether a human action identifiable in the biological motion of a point-light display embedded in a high density mask was present or not in the visual sequence, which lasted for 633 ms on average. Prior to the judgement task, participants were exposed to an abstract verb or an action verb for 500 ms, which was related to the human action according to a congruent or incongruent semantic relation. Data analysis showed that correct judgements were not affected by action verbs, whereas a facilitation effect on response time (49 ms on average) was observed when a congruent action verb primed the judgement of biological movements. In relation with the existing literature, this finding suggests that the perception, the planning and the linguistic coding of motor action are subtended by common motor representations.