Selfless giving

In four studies, we show that people who anticipate more personal change over time give more to others. We measure and manipulate participants’ beliefs in the persistence of the defining psychological features of a person (e.g., his or her beliefs, values, and life goals) and measure generosity, finding support for the hypothesis in three studies using incentive-compatible charitable donation decisions and one involving hypothetical choices about sharing with loved ones.     

Acceptance of Evolution and Support for Teaching Creationism in Public Schools: The Conditional Impact of Educational Attainment

Public acceptance of evolution remains low in the United States relative to other Western countries. Although advocates for the scientific community often highlight the need for improved education to change public opinion, analyses of data from a national sample of American adults indicate that the effects of educational attainment on attitudes toward evolution and creationism are uneven and contingent upon religious identity. Consequently, higher education will only shift public attitudes toward evolution and away from support for teaching creationism in public schools for those who take non‐“literalist” interpretive stances on the Bible, or to the extent that it leads to fewer people with literalist religious identities.     

Civil Religion and the Cultural Politics of National Identity in Obama's America

American civil religion (ACR) burst on to the scholarly scene in 1967, and has been periodically revived as a source of analytic insight and normative hope since that time. It posited a universalist, prophetic, nonsectarian faith, referenced on the nation, that served as both a source of unity for the American people and a discursive resource for political leaders and protest movements. Using recent political events as illustrative cases, I argue that ACR is not only a universalist, prophetic creed, it is also an expression of tribal identity that ascribes a particular character and purpose to the American people. In particular, this “tribal” civil religion has an often‐unstated assumption about the inseparability of religion, race, and national identity—that is, white, Christian, and American. Recent events have disrupted those implicit connections, leading to a vociferous reemphasis of their centrality to the national story. I maintain that neither ACR, nor recent politics involving immigration and Barack Obama's presidency, can be understood fully without considering the religion‐race‐national identity nexus.     

Maternal Depressed Mood and Perceptions of Child Temperament

Research has suggested that women who experience postpartum depression are subsequently more likely to perceive their preschool-aged children as temperamentally difficult and maladjusted. However, previous studies have not controlled for the effects of concurrent depression levels on maternal ratings of child temperament or evaluated the accuracy of maternal reports. In the present study we assessed maternal and paternal ratings of child temperament 2 years after subjects had participated in a study of postpartum depression. The findings indicate that correlations between postpartum depression and subsequent child temperament ratings were accounted for statistically by concurrent levels of depression. Although fathers' ratings corroborated some aspects of maternal perceptions, levels of parental agreement were only moderately high. Moreover, discrepancies between the parents' reports were significantly associated with maternal depression, indicating that parental disagreement is more likely when the wife is dysphoric.     

A Developmental Analysis of Performance Ratings

In this study, we examined the performance appraisal process from a developmental perspective. Components of cognitive structure, measured in terms of differentiation and hierarchic integration, were obtained from 45 American students representing three different academic levels at three times during a 15-week semester. These students' performance evaluations (ratings) of their psychology instructors were collected during the first and final sessions. The results indicated that although both differentiation and hierarchic integration seemed to change systematically, even over a short period of time, there was no corresponding change in the halo inherent in the raters' ratings. We present possible explanations for the failure of developmental changes in cognitive structure to be reflected in the halo inherent in the performance ratings, as would be predicted by Schneier's (1977) cognitive compatibility hypothesis. Increased emphasis on developmental aspects of the performance appraisal process is recommended.     

A social identity approach to explaining children's aggressive intentions

This study explored the effects of group norms, intra-group position, and age on the direct and indirect aggressive intentions of 247 children (aged 5.50 to 11.83 years). Participants were assigned to a team, with team norms (aggression vs. helping) and the child's position within the team (prototypical vs. peripheral–prototypical vs. peripheral) manipulated. Results showed that children in the aggressive norm condition reported greater aggressive intentions than those in the helping norm condition, although, when age was considered, this effect remained evident for younger, but not older, children. Similarly, intra-group position influenced the aggressive intentions of younger children only. For these children, when group norms supported aggression, prototypical members and peripheral members who anticipated a future prototypical position reported greater aggressive intentions than peripheral members who were given no information about their future position. The implications of these findings for understanding childhood aggression, and for intervention, are discussed.     

Tribal morality and civilization

The present paper attempts to clarify the cognitive conditions which make it possible to define so‐called reality from five individual criteria and a confrontation to the paradigms of the community. Reality unfolds from potentially infinite reiteration, but can actually be caught only through finite operations. Our access to discoveries and increased knowledge depends upon abduction which enables us to probe the viability of unlikely hypotheses. Man becomes autonomous through using abduction; that is to say through interacting within the family and the constraints of social ecosystems which built his identity, and his conflictual access to the construction of reality.     

Measuring the speed of recognising facially expressed emotions

Faces provide identity- and emotion-related information—basic cues for mastering social interactions. Traditional models of face recognition suggest that following a very first initial stage the processing streams for facial identity and expression depart. In the present study we extended our previous multivariate investigations of face identity processing abilities to the speed of recognising facially expressed emotions. Analyses are based on a sample of N=151 young adults. First, we established a measurement model with a higher order factor for the speed of recognising facially expressed emotions (SRE). This model has acceptable fit without specifying emotion-specific relations between indicators. Next, we assessed whether SRE can be reliably distinguished from the speed of recognising facial identity (SRI) and found latent factors for SRE and SRI to be perfectly correlated. In contrast, SRE and SRI were both only moderately related to a latent factor for the speed of recognising non-face stimuli (SRNF). We conclude that the processing of facial stimuli—and not the processing of facially expressed basic emotions—is the critical component of SRE. These findings are at variance with suggestions of separate routes for processing facial identity and emotional facial expressions and suggest much more communality between these streams as far as the aspect of processing speed is concerned.     

Between Midlife and Old Age:

This article is based on taped interviews with 56 women, individually and in groups, between the ages of 60 and 70, as well as my own experience as a woman past 65. Discussions with my friends and colleagues in this age group also contributed to my thinking. My sense is that the seventh decade is one of numerous transitions in the lives of women, and that these transitions require extensive, varied, and often painful opportunities for learning. Furthermore, the proximity to life's ending also acts as a strong motivator for engaging in activities that had previously been put off; these include a variety of self-selected and often pleasurable learning experiences. The learning that takes place at this age is rarely acknowledged; it is more likely to be overshadowed by the ageist assumption that old people lost their ability to learn or even to comprehend new information, and by the sexist assumption that women are incapable of making intelligent and practical decisions. These interviews and informal discussion contradict such stereotypical misinformation about old women, showing instead a high level of personal and interpersonal learning, as well as the development of extensive and creative new coping strategies.