The death and resurrection of the American religious marketplace

This article expands upon existing academic literature examining both the decline and fragmentation of the American Christian Right. Specifically, it explores the impact of a fragmented evangelical body from a religious market perspective. It asserts that recent declines in evangelical church membership are largely due to the over-generality of its message, which in and of itself is a by-product of the broadcast age. Predictably, this over-generality has failed to cater to the diverse theological and spiritual needs of American churchgoers. However, with the rapid proliferation of Internet technologies, new religious frontiers are being explored and, as a result, many Christians are going elsewhere to tend to their spiritual needs. This process further reinforces the fragmentation of the evangelical body. This article similarly considers how with the growth of new and divergent religious movements, such as creation care and the emerging church, new religious leaders are finding their voice and preaching a message that diverges significantly from the old evangelical vanguard. While some might be tempted to view these developments in purely theological terms, the cultural fragmentation of the American evangelical community is not just a religious issue. A vibrant religious marketplace threatens the religious monopoly of the Christian Right, and by extension, the articulation of social conservatism and Republican politics. As new religious movements grow, so too do new conceptualisations and understandings of what it means to be a Christian and to hold Christian values. In facilitating the breakdown of the religious monologue of the Christian Right, the Internet is unsettling long-established political coalitions and giving rise to new political realities. To support these claims, this article relies on the combination of previous academic works, the reporting of recent religious and political developments, as well as personal interviews. The aim of this article is to provide a rich textual account of the state of evangelical Christianity as it is lived and experienced in a new media saturated environment.     

Asymmetries for the visual expression and perception of speech

This study explored asymmetries for movement, expression and perception of visual speech. Sixteen dextral models were videoed as they articulated: 'bat,' 'cat,' 'fat,' and 'sat.' Measurements revealed that the right side of the mouth was opened wider and for a longer period than the left. The asymmetry was accentuated at the beginning and ends of the vocalization and was attenuated for words where the lips did not articulate the first consonant. To measure asymmetries in expressivity, 20 dextral observers watched silent videos and reported what was said. The model's mouth was covered so that the left, right or both sides were visible. Fewer errors were made when the right mouth was visible compared to the left--suggesting that the right side is more visually expressive of speech. Investigation of asymmetries in perception using mirror-reversed clips revealed that participants did not preferentially attend to one side of the speaker's face. A correlational analysis revealed an association between movement and expressivity whereby a more motile right mouth led to stronger visual expressivity of the right mouth. The asymmetries are most likely driven by left hemisphere specialization for language, which causes a rightward motoric bias.     

Right hemispheric dominance in processing of unconscious negative emotion

Right hemispheric dominance in unconscious emotional processing has been suggested, but remains controversial. This issue was investigated using the subliminal affective priming paradigm combined with unilateral visual presentation in 40 normal subjects. In either left or right visual fields, angry facial expressions, happy facial expressions, or plain gray images were briefly presented as negative, positive, and control primes, followed by a mosaic mask. Then nonsense target ideographs were presented, and the subjects evaluated their partiality toward the targets. When the stimuli were presented in the left, but not the right, visual fields, the negative primes reduced the subjects' liking for the targets, relative to the case of the positive or control primes. These results provided behavioral evidence supporting the hypothesis that the right hemisphere is dominant for unconscious negative emotional processing.     

The relationship between prosody and breathing in spontaneous discourse

This article is concerned with the role of prosody in discourse. Three experiments explored the relationship between inspiration, declination, and syntactic boundaries in normal and RHD participants. Fundamental frequency and intensity were measured at the beginning and end of breath units excised from conversational samples. The results revealed evidence of declination of intensity in all samples measured. However, resetting of fundamental frequency was observed only in the samples of normal participants and then only when a breath coincided with the beginning of a sentence. The results suggest that resetting and declination play separate roles in discourse parsing.     

Time course of brain activation during graphemic/phonologic processing in reading: an ERP study

The present study sought to investigate the time course of brain activation during grapheme-to-phoneme conversion and phonologic processing of legal Italian syllables. To this goal, we monitored a group of right-handed native Italian volunteers performing a phonologic decision task (same/different judgments). ERPs were recorded from 28 scalp sites during silent reading. Analysis of ERP latency showed faster responses to same syllables than to different ones as early as 105 ms at left temporal electrode site and 160 ms at frontal sites. The first effect of phonologic/graphemic incongruity on the amplitude of ERPs was observed at lateral occipital/posterior temporal sites (N185), where physiologic responses were enhanced to incongruous syllables.     

Effects of Right- and Left-Hemisphere Damage on Understanding Conversational Implicatures

Processing of implicatures was examined in 27 right-brain-damaged (RBD) and 31 left-brain-damaged (LBD) stroke patients with focal lesions using a new implicatures battery (IB) as part of an exploration of the neural basis and modularity of natural language pragmatics. Following Grice, we sampled implicatures of Quantity, Quality, Relation, and Manner. Verbal implicatures consisted of two-sentence conversational vignettes which are literally problematic. Nonverbal implicatures consisted mostly of famous paintings that are literally problematic (e.g., Magritte's "Le Domain d'Arnheim"). The patient has to identify and solve the problem. To compare with performance on the IB, patients also received a Hebrew adaptation of Gardner and Brownell's Right Hemisphere Communication Battery, a new test of basic speech acts (verbal and nonverbal assertions, questions, requests, and commands), a Hebrew version of the Western Aphasia Battery, and standardized neuropsychological tests. Both LBD and RBD patients were significantly impaired in implicature processing relative to age-matched normal controls. In general, both patient groups showed weak correlations of implicatures with extents of lesions in left perisylvian language area or its right-hemisphere (RH) homolog. However, performance of LBD and RBD patients on the IB revealed different patterns of correlations with other pragmatic, language, and nonlanguage tests. In LBD patients, there was a greater association between performance on verbal and nonverbal implicatures and between performance on implicatures and basic speech acts than in RBD patients. Given the different modes in which right-and left-hemisphere (LH) damage affect the processing of conversational implicatures, it remains to be discovered how the two hemispheres interact to process natural language pragmatics in the normal brain in real time.     

大脑两半球对McCollough效应敏感性的比较研究

本实验通过对大脑两半球对McCollough效应敏感性的比较研究,探索了心理科学的最新发展之一——大脑两半球不对称性研究的新途径。 实验以正常右利手人为被试。采用单侧视野呈现技术,在控制眼动的情况下,探索了大脑两半球在McCollough效应形成过程中的差异问题及有关问题,并取得了较为可靠的实验材料。实验结果表明:1.大脑两半球对McCollo-ugh效应的敏感性是不同的,大脑右半球对McCollough效应的敏感性高于左半球。2.在双眼适应与单眼适应条件下的比较,被试两侧视野所见的McColl-ough效应彩度值的差值有显著差异。3.男性被试两侧视野所见的McCollou-gh效应彩度值的差值略高于女性被试。4.在同等条件下,女性被试较之于男性被试容易产生更大的McCollough效应。     

视剥夺及视剥夺学习后Jun样蛋白在雏鸡两侧半球中不同表达的研究

该实验利用免疫组化技术,在已有实验的基础上进一步观察比较了左眼视剥夺及单眼学习后,Ｊｕｎ样蛋白在雏鸡两侧半球ＨＶ和ＬＰＯ中表达的差异。实验结果表明：１．视剥夺２、２４、４８、７２小时后观测到Ｊｕｎ样蛋白在左、右半球ＨＶ和ＬＰＯ中的表达逐渐增高,并且于视剥夺４８小时表达到达峰值。同时仅在视剥夺２小时后观测到两半球ＬＰＯ中Ｊｕｎ样蛋白的表达存在差异,在其余各视剥夺时程中两侧半球的ＬＰＯ、ＨＶ中Ｊｕｎ样蛋白的表达均无显著差异。２．视剥夺２小时和２４小时后均在学习后７０分钟组中观测到Ｊｕｎ样蛋白在左、右半球的ＨＶ和ＬＰＯ中表达的显著升高,而在视剥夺２小时学习后１０分钟只观测到左半球ＨＶ和ＬＰＯ中Ｊｕｎ样蛋白表达的显著升高,在视剥夺２４小时学习后１０分钟中仅观测到左半球ＬＰＯ中Ｊｕｎ样蛋白的显著升高。同时也仅在视剥夺２小时学习后１０分钟观测到两侧半球ＨＶ、ＬＰＯ中Ｊｕｎ样蛋白表达的显著性差异。３．无论单纯视剥夺组还是单眼学习组,各组同侧半球中ＬＰＯＪｕｎ样蛋白的表达显著高于ＨＶ的Ｊｕｎ样蛋白的表达现象在视剥夺４８小时后消失。     

Not as Different as We Want to Be: Attitudinally Consistent Trait Desirability Leads to Exaggerated Associations Between Personality and Sociopolitical Attitudes

Research connecting sociopolitical attitudes to personality typically relies exclusively on self‐report measures of personality. A recently discovered mechanism of bias in self‐reports highlights a particular challenge for this approach. Specifically, individuals tend to report exaggerated levels of a trait to the extent that they view that trait as desirable. In a community sample of 443 participants, differences in sociopolitical attitudes were associated with differences in the extent to which individuals provided biased self‐reports for a given trait (relative to trait levels indicated by peer‐report or an objective measure) as well as differences in views of the desirability of that trait. Further, the tendency to misrepresent traits in a manner consistent with one's sociopolitical attitudes was mediated by differences in views of trait desirability. Thus, although meaningful personality differences exist among those with differing sociopolitical attitudes, those differences may not be as large as people with opposing sociopolitical attitudes might like them to be.     

Hemispheric connectivity and the visual–spatial divergent-thinking component of creativity

Background/hypothesis

Divergent thinking is an important measurable component of creativity. This study tested the postulate that divergent thinking depends on large distributed inter- and intra-hemispheric networks. Although preliminary evidence supports increased brain connectivity during divergent thinking, the neural correlates of this characteristic have not been entirely specified. It was predicted that visuospatial divergent thinking would correlate with right hemisphere white matter volume (WMV) and with the size of the corpus callosum (CC).

Methods

Volumetric magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) analyses and the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (TTCT) were completed among 21 normal right-handed adult males.

Results

TTCT scores correlated negatively with the size of the CC and were not correlated with right or, incidentally, left WMV.

Conclusions

Although these results were not predicted, perhaps, as suggested by Bogen and Bogen (1988), decreased callosal connectivity enhances hemispheric specialization, which benefits the incubation of ideas that are critical for the divergent-thinking component of creativity, and it is the momentary inhibition of this hemispheric independence that accounts for the illumination that is part of the innovative stage of creativity. Alternatively, decreased CC size may reflect more selective developmental pruning, thereby facilitating efficient functional connectivity.