SECULARIZING DEMONS: FUNDAMENTALIST NAVIGATIONS IN RELIGION AND SECULARITY

Since the turn of the millennium, theologians and secular scholars of religion have increasingly begun exploring the relationship between transhumanism and religion. However, analyses of anti‐transhumanist apocalypticisms are still rare, and those that exist are situated mainly among broader explorations of religious and secular bioconservatism. This article addresses this lack of specificity by drawing analyses of transhumanism and religion into dialogue with explorations of contemporary demonology through a close study of the beliefs of the evangelical conspiracist Thomas Horn and the anti‐transhumanist milieu around him. Exploring the milieu's multifaceted demonology of the secular world in light of genealogies of religion and secularity, the article situates Horn's demonology as one attempt to negotiate these genealogies, using what Sean McCloud terms a “‘supernatural’ hermeneutics of suspicion” that sees spiritual forces as the structural base of reality. It argues that, while fringe, milieus like Horn's illuminate broader cultural tensions and genealogical relations surrounding the place of religion in a secular(izing) world.     

Eye Movements Reveal Mental Looking Through Time

People often make use of a spatial “mental time line” to represent events in time. We investigated whether the eyes follow such a mental time line during online language comprehension of sentences that refer to the past, present, and future. Participants' eye movements were measured on a blank screen while they listened to these sentences. Saccade direction revealed that the future is mapped higher up in space than the past. Moreover, fewer saccades were made when two events are simultaneously taking place at the present moment compared to two events that are happening in different points in time. This is the first evidence that oculomotor correlates reflect mental looking along an abstract invisible time line during online language comprehension about time. Our results support the idea that observing eye movements is likely to “detect” invisible spatial scaffoldings which are involved in cognitively processing abstract meaning, even when the abstract meaning lacks an explicit spatial correlate. Theoretical implications of these findings are discussed.     

Short-term and long-term relationships between reflection and performance in teams: evidence from a four-wave longitudinal study

Previous theory and research suggest that team reflection is beneficial for team performance. We argue that results remain inconclusive because prior studies have not accounted for the dynamic nature of this relationship. This paper addresses this research gap by examining time-specific relationships among variables and the intra-team variability of changes across time. In a four-wave longitudinal field study with 97 teams (N = 453 team members) performing a business simulation task, short-term (i.e., autoregressive, cross-lagged effects) and long-term (i.e., latent trajectories) relationships between team reflection and performance were explored. We found evidence that reflection had negative autoregressive effects and that there were direct positive short-term relationships between reflection and performance. Reflection trajectories were seen to decline across time and performance trajectories to increase across time. In addition, teams with either low initial reflection or low initial performance showed higher increases in reflection across time, whilst higher increase in reflection was negatively related to change in performance. Findings are discussed with respect to how they extend the previous literature and what directions they suggest for future research.     

“时间贫穷”对跨期决策和前瞻行为的影响及其认知机制

紧张的社会节奏使人们感觉时间正在变少,从而产生时间匮乏的心理感知和思维模式,这一现象概括为"时间贫穷"。"时间贫穷"会对个体认知判断、情绪和行为控制力产生重要影响。通过行为科学和认知神经科学相结合的研究方法,从行为反应-心理机制-神经机制三个层面研究时间贫穷对跨期决策和前瞻行为的影响。研究分为3个部分:(1)时间贫穷对个体认知判断、情绪和行为控制力的影响;(2)时间贫穷对跨期决策的影响;(3)组织中时间贫穷对前瞻行为的影响。通过系列研究,拟解决3个关键问题:(1)时间贫穷如何影响人们的认知判断,导致非理性决策行为?(2)时间贫穷影响认知判断和跨期决策的神经机制究竟是什么?(3)时间贫穷对管理决策带来哪些挑战?对这些问题的深入探讨,不仅对行为决策理论的发展有重要贡献;而且对组织如何进行有效的管理制度设计,避免个体和组织陷入"时间贫穷陷阱",同样有很强的实践意义。     

Stressful life events and predictors of post-traumatic growth among high-risk early emerging adults

Stressful life events (SLEs) may elicit positive psychosocial change among youth, referred to as post-traumatic growth (PTG). We assessed types of SLEs experienced, degree to which participants reported PTG, and variables predicting PTG across 24 months among a sample of high-risk, ethnically diverse, early emerging adults. Participants were recruited from alternative high schools (n = 564; mean age = 16.8; 65% Hispanic). Multi-level regression models were constructed to examine the impact of environmental (SLE quantity, severity) and personal factors (hedonic ability, perceived stress, developmental stage, future time orientation) on a composite score of PTG. The majority of participants reported that positive changes resulted from their most life-altering SLE of the past two years. Predictors of PTG included fewer SLEs, less general stress, having a future time perspective, and greater identification with the developmental stage of emerging adulthood. Findings suggest intervention targets to foster positive adaptation among early emerging adults who experience frequent SLEs.     

Timing recalibration in childhood Tourette syndrome associated with persistent pimozide treatment

In this study, we have tested the effects of the dopamine D₂ receptor blocker pimozide on timing performance in patients with Tourette syndrome (TS). Nine children with TS were tested off‐medication and following 3 months of daily treatment with pimozide. Subjects completed a time reproduction and a time production task using supra‐second temporal intervals. We show that pimozide improves motor timing performance by reducing the patients' variability in reproducing the duration of visual stimuli. On the other hand, this medication has no effect on the reproduction accuracy and on both variability and accuracy of the performance on the time production task. Our results suggest that pimozide might have improved motor timing variability as a result of its beneficial side effect on endogenous dopamine levels (i.e., normalization).     

Understanding deliberate practice in preschool-aged children

Deliberate practice is essential for skill acquisition and expertise and may be a direct consequence of episodic foresight. However, little is known about how deliberate practice develops in children. We present two experiments testing children's ability to selectively practise a behaviour that was going to be useful in future and to reason about the role of practice in skill formation. Five-year-olds demonstrated an explicit understanding of deliberate practice both in selectively choosing to practise a future-relevant skill and in predicting skill change in others based on their practice. Four-year-olds showed some capacities, but failed to demonstrate consistent understanding of the relationship between practice and skill improvement. Children's understanding of this relationship was significantly related to their understanding of how information leads to knowledge, suggesting that both may draw on similar cognitive developmental changes.     

Do future thoughts reflect personal goals? Current concerns and mental time travel into the past and future

Our overriding hypothesis was that future thinking would be linked with goals to a greater extent than memories; conceptualizing goals as current concerns (i.e., uncompleted personal goals). We also hypothesized that current-concern-related events would differ from non-current-concern-related events on a set of phenomenological characteristics. We report novel data from a study examining involuntary and voluntary mental time travel using an adapted laboratory paradigm. Specifically, after autobiographical memories or future thoughts were elicited (between participants) in an involuntary and voluntary retrieval mode (within participants), participants self-generated five current concerns and decided whether each event was relevant or not to their current concerns. Consistent with our hypothesis, compared with memories, a larger percentage of involuntary and voluntary future thoughts reflected current concerns. Furthermore, events related to current concerns differed from non-concern-related events on a range of cognitive, representational, and affective phenomenological measures. These effects were consistent across temporal direction. In general, our results agree with the proposition that involuntary and voluntary future thinking is important for goal-directed cognition and behaviour.     

Speed of Processing Time Slowing in Eating Disorders

We applied Brinley (1965 Brinley, J. F. (1965). Cognitive sets, speed and accuracy of performance in the elderly. In A. T. Welford, &; J. E. Birren (Eds.), Behavior, aging and the nervous system (pp. 114–129). Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas. [Google Scholar]) plot analysis to the eating disorders field. Across 23 studies and 165 experimental conditions [experienced by a total of 773 eating disorder (ED) participants, including anorexia nervosa (AN), binge eating (BE), bulimia nervosa (BN), and eating disorders not otherwise specified (EDNOS) and 995 controls], the best-fit regression equation was Y (ED) = 1.08 X (CONTROL) – 31. This equation accounted for 98.2% of the variance. Thus, the ED subjects were only 1.08 times slower than the control subjects, suggesting little processing speed slowing in ED. We also examined simple reaction time [SRT; Y (ED) = .91 X (CONTROL) + 63; variance accounted for = 93.6%] and choice reaction time (CRT; Y (ED) = 1.12X (CONTROL) – 43, variance accounted for = 99.7%). These slopes are significantly different. ED subjects are more impacted when the task involves a decision component (CRT) than when it does not (SRT).