Alterity,Intimacy, and the Cultural Turn in Religious Ethics

This essay responds to four critics of Friends and Other Strangers: Studies in Religion, Ethics and Culture: Diana Fritz Cates, Eric Gregory, Ross Moret, and Atalia Omer. Focusing on the book’s organizing concepts of intimacy and alterity, engagement with empirical sources, discussion of Augustine’s thought, and attention to moral psychology and political morality, these interlocutors take up various strands in the book’s argument and extend them into metaethical, normative, and metadisciplinary domains. The author organizes his response under three rubrics: Metaethics and Personal Relationships; Political Morality; and Multidisciplinary Horizons.     

Inter-individual differences in sport refereeing: A review of theory and practice

Most studies on sport officials ignore the variance of the data in terms of individual differences. Here we highlight the need to focus on these differences in refereeing as the main point and goal of the current review. We argue that the study of individual differences is important for referee selection, development and performance evaluation. We present the available research on differences related to referee communication styles, types of interactions, and game management. We regard expertise and experience level as a key contributor to individual differences. Given the gap in research around the in-group variance, we discuss new directions for research and further recommendations for the field. We suggest that the areas in which more research and practice will inform our selection, training, and evaluation processes are communication and personal communication style, while having more flexibility in applying different refereeing styles to facilitate performance in different contexts.     

Dynamic awareness of age-related losses predict concurrent and subsequent changes in daily inductive reasoning performance

To address gaps in previous research, we examined daily within-person associations between awareness of age-related change (AARC) and cognitive performance in older adults. One hundred twelve adults aged 60–90 participated in an online daily diary study for nine consecutive days. On Day 1, they reported demographic information. On Days 2–9, they reported daily AARC, subjective age, and stressors and completed three tasks that gauged memory (word recall), perceptual speed (number comparison), and reasoning (letter series), respectively, once per day. Unconditional multilevel models revealed significant within-person fluctuations in daily cognitive performance and daily AARC. Controlling for age, education, health, and daily stressors, daily awareness of age-related losses was negatively associated with letter series scores of the same day and changes from one day to the next. The effects held over and above AARC gains and subjective age. Dynamic, naturally occurring perceptions of ageing may influence within-person concurrent and subsequent changes in reasoning performance on a daily basis and point to a promising avenue of intervention.     

Developing spirituality – an equal right of every child?

ABSTRACT

Children’s spiritual development is influenced by those with whom they interact and by the world around them. An important context for young children is the kindergarten, which has a high level of responsibility for their (spiritual) education. At kindergarten children encounter people with different religious and spiritual attitudes, which may be fundamental to the development of their own spirituality. Research results regarding how two kindergartens in Austria deal with this diversity and how children address it are summarized. One result of this qualitative ethnographic research project is that, depending on their religion, children have different opportunities to develop their spiritual communication and spirituality based on religious traditions and rituals. Developing kindergartens in line with the metaphor of safe spaces where diversity is recognized and discussed can contribute to the creation of equal opportunities for children’s spiritual development.     

Culture variation in the average identity extraction: The role of global vs. local processing orientation

ABSTRACT

Research has shown that observers often spontaneously extract a mean representation from multiple faces/objects in a scene even when this is not required by the task. This phenomenon, now known as ensemble coding, has so far mainly been based on data from Western populations. This study compared East Asian and Western participants in an implicit ensemble-coding task, where the explicit task was to judge whether a test face was present in a briefly exposed set of faces. Although both groups showed a tendency to mistake an average of the presented faces as target, thus confirming the universality of ensemble coding, East Asian participants displayed a higher averaging tendency relative to the Westerners. To further examine how a cultural default can be adapted to global or local processing demand, our second experiment tested the effects of priming global or local processing orientation on ensemble coding via a Navon task procedure. Results revealed a reduced tendency for ensemble coding following the priming of local processing orientation. Together, these results suggest that culture can influence the proneness to ensemble coding, and the default cultural mode is malleable to a temporary processing demand.     

Ridwan’s conversion: kandoeri giving,moral personhood,and the re-imagining of communal difference in Indonesia

ABSTRACT

This article brings religious conversion and religious giving under one analytic lens in examining how ‘Ridwan’, a Chinese–Indonesian convert to Islam from the Indonesian province of Aceh, describes the process through which he became a Muslim. Ridwan frames his account of conversion in terms of religious giving, with special reference to Acehnese ritual feasts known as kandoeri. He draws attention to the way kandoeri giving constitutes a mode of relationality, in which careful attention to difference is the basis for reciprocity. His approach rests on what the anthropological theorist of The Gift, Marcel Mauss, identified as ‘moral persons’, a category that contrasts with liberal ideas of the self and identity. It reflects an awareness of the dual nature of exchange partners, who are always potentially both enemy and friend. This subtly challenges prevailing Indonesian understandings of intercommunal, especially interreligious, relations as well as common perceptions of Chinese–Indonesian religiosity and belonging.     

The effects of gender differences on the usability of automotive on-board navigation systems – A comparison of 2D and 3D display

This study integrated gender with the user interface of automotive on-board navigation systems to analyze whether gender differences or 2D (2 dimensional) vs. 3D (3 dimensional) display affect the interface usability of an on-board car navigation system (CNS). An experimental design was adopted for collecting data from three tasks – locating points, planning routes, and searching polygons – each emphasizing a different aspect of way-finding. The participants reported their subjective usability via the System Usability Scale after each trial. Study results show that gender, the CNS interface the subject used, and a combination of both predict the usability of an on-board CNS. This study’s results provide a clearer understanding of whether manufacturers should develop interfaces that fit a CNS 2D or 3D display based on gender.