Cognitive complexity of social images revealed by Jewish Israeli adolescents relating to drawings of Jews and Arabs

The present study examined age‐related differences among Israeli youth regarding the complexity of their mental images of Jews and Arabs, two groups that are adversaries in the Middle East conflict. The participants, 494 Jewish children and adolescents ranging from 8–16 years old each, drew two human figures, one Jewish and one Arab, and then attributed a forename and a profession to each drawn image. Four complexity variables were scored as follows: image complexity (number of items included in the figure), embellishments (number of items added to the drawing and in the space around the figure), image name, and image profession. Overall, participants depicted members of their in‐group as more complex. However, early adolescence was found to be a critical age at which differences emerged. The findings suggest that introducing complexity to social representations in early adolescence may facilitate prevention of negative associations related to outgroups and enhance intervention to reduce stereotypes, prejudice, and racism.     

The Humanizing Brain: An Introduction

The rediscovery of the sacred needs to take into account the neural underpinnings of faith and meaning and also draw on the insights of the emerging discipline of complexity studies, which explore a tendency toward adaptive self-organization that seemingly is inherent in the universe. Both neuroscience and complexity studies contribute to our understanding of the brain's activity as it transforms raw stimuli into recognizable patterns, and thus "humanizes" all our perceptions and understandings. The brain is our physical anchor in the natural environment— and its human capacities orbit us into the emerging world of culture (including religion), which provides a template for the brain's function of making sense of an ambiguous reality. The humanizing brain holds together scientific causality and religious meaning, working both bottom-up (linking the physical and the experiential) and top-down (beginning with the whole of things, or God). These processes we know as "mind" (experienced as intentionality, subjective consciousness, empathy, imagination, memory, adaptability). We maintain that such processes are not only subjective but built into "the way things really are." Thus, they carry the most privileged information about the nature of reality to which we human beings have access. For not only are we humans observers and logicians, but we are embedded in the larger reality; and as we strive to make sense of it all, we become both Homo sapiens and Homo religiosus .     

Reinventing the University: From Institutions to Communities of Higher Education

This article responds to three questions: What if the primary mission of the university is to (i) nourish the intellect, (ii) commit to the sacredness of all life, and (iii) foster spirituality? Responses examine multiple forms of literacy, instruction that is ecologically valid and thus oriented toward the unity of knowledge, and teaching as a moral activity. The suggestion here is that meaningful reform will emphasize education of the whole person in relation to the physical, symbolic, and social environments. Curricula focused on forms of representation, modes of treatment, and syntactic structure, adaptive understandings, constructed meanings, critical thinking, real problems, connected knowing, creativity, inspiration, service learning, and the development of declarative procedural and poetic knowledge are discussed.     

Case Demonstration of Environmental Cuing and Brief Supervision Monitoring as Performance Management Interventions with Educational Care Providers

Abstract

The present study evaluated two interventions to improve task completion-data recording by two classroom instructors at a school for children and youth with neurodevelopmental disorders. Compared to a baseline phase, intervention through environmental cuing (strategic task scheduling) was ineffective. The addition of brief supervision monitoring (task preview and review) increased task completion-data recording to high levels and the improved performance of the classroom instructors and was sustained one month following the study in the absence of intervention. Social validity assessment documented high approval of and satisfaction with brief supervision monitoring. We discuss these findings with reference to practical and efficient methods of performance management that can be implemented with care providers in educational services settings.     

Multi‐Criteria Evaluation for Collaborative Circulating Farming with Collective Operations Between Arable and Cattle Farmers

Tokachi sub‐prefecture in Hokkaido is one of the most famous dairy and crop farming regions in Japan. It is known that Tokachi is faced with various difficult problems such as soil degradation, water contamination and unpleasant odours because of the excessive use of chemical fertilizers and inappropriate treatment of livestock excretion. In this paper, we focus on Shihoro town where agricultural outputs are relatively large in Tokachi, and propose collaborative circulating farming with collective operations between arable and cattle farmers. Under the assumption that the decision‐maker in this problem is a representative of a farming organization who hopes for sustainable agricultural development and values the intentions of local residents including arable and cattle farmers in this region, we employ multi‐attribute utility theory in order to evaluate multiple alternatives of the farming management problem. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Time perspective and environmental engagement: A meta-analysis

Environmental issues entail both a social conflict (private vs. public interests) and a temporal conflict (short- vs. long-term interests). This paper focuses on the role temporal concerns play in influencing environmental engagement by quantitatively integrating results of studies that assessed the associations between time perspective and proenvironmental attitudes and behaviors. The meta-analysis included a total of 19 independent samples and 6,301 participants from seven countries (Australia, Brazil, Germany, Mexico, New Zealand, Norway, and the United States). Results showed that the associations between time perspective and proenvironmental behaviors were higher than those for proenvironmental attitudes. Supporting predictions, the associations between future time perspective and proenvironmental behaviors were strong and nontrivial compared to those for the combined past-present time perspective. The findings indicate that future time perspective seems to play an important role in influencing individuals' attitudes and behaviors towards the environment. Implications of the findings for theory and practice are discussed.     

Does Complex or Simple Rhetoric Win Elections? An Integrative Complexity Analysis of U.S. Presidential Campaigns

Research suggests that the integrative complexity of political rhetoric tends to drop during election season, but little research to date directly addresses if this drop in complexity serves to increase or decrease electoral success. The two present studies help fill this gap. Study 1 demonstrates that, during the Democratic Party primary debates in 2003–2004, the eventual winners of the party nomination showed a steeper drop in integrative complexity as the election season progressed than nonwinning candidates. Study 2 presents laboratory evidence from the most recent presidential campaign demonstrating that, while the complexity of Obama's rhetoric had little impact on college students' subsequent intentions to vote for him, the complexity of McCain's rhetoric was significantly positively correlated with their likelihood of voting for him. Taken together, this research is inconsistent with an unqualified simple is effective view of the complexity‐success relationship. Rather, it is more consistent with a compensatory view: Effective use of complexity (or simplicity) may compensate for perceived weaknesses. Thus, appropriately timed shifts in complexity levels, and/or violations of negative expectations relevant to complexity, may be an effective means of winning elections. Surprisingly, mere simplicity as such seems largely ineffective.