Crossfostering in mice selectively bred for high and low levels of open-field thigmotaxis

The main purpose of this research was to investigate whether the difference in open-field (OF) thigmotaxis between mice selectively bred for high and low levels of wall-seeking behavior originated from genetic or acquired sources. Unfostered, infostered, and crossfostered mice were compared in two experiments in which the effects of strain, sex, and fostering on ambulation, defecation, exploration, grooming, latency to move, radial latency, rearing, thigmotaxis, and urination were studied. These experiments revealed that OF thigmotaxis was unaffected by the foster condition and thus genetically determined. The selected strains of mice also diverged repeatedly with regard to exploration and rearing. The findings are in line with the previously described existence of an inverse relationship between emotionality and exploration.     

Revisiting Religious Ethics as Field and Discipline

Returning to John P. Reeder's 1978 essay on “Religious Ethics as a Field and Discipline,” this essay explores debates surrounding the original intentions for the Journal of Religious Ethics (JRE) and for the field of religious ethics, as these have played out over the decades among an influential group of scholars involved with the JRE since its inception: Arthur Dyck, Ronald Green, Stanley Hauerwas, and Jeffrey Stout. While the JRE and its founding mission are in need of ongoing critique and transformation, we might well still affirm the journal's ongoing importance as a site for the negotiation of a commons, the identification of possibilities for shared life, imagined beyond exclusion and domination.     

Sharing is caring for developmental psychology

Many of us, especially in the more experimental tradition, are used to doing it all ourselves: we don't know better than to collect our own data for every new study. We invest considerable amounts of time and resources in designing experiments, ethical review applications, participant recruitment, finding and training measuring assistants, and writing data management plans. And after all the hard work we end up with a sample size that hardly ever meets current standards. What if we could skip, or outsource some of these study aspects, allowing us to devote more of our time, energy, expertise, and experience to data analysis, reading, writing, and theory development? We argue that sharing data, expertise, and infrastructure could contribute to improving the credibility of research results, and to practicing more sustainable developmental science. In addition, we discuss several reasons that we believe may (currently) dissuade researchers from considering such sharing.     

Freedom,foreknowledge, and betting

Certain kinds of prediction, foreknowledge, and future-oriented action appear to require settled future truths. But open futurists think that the future is metaphysically unsettled: if it is open whether p is true, then it cannot currently be settled that p is true. So, open futurists—and libertarians who adopt the position—face the objection that their view makes rational action and deliberation impossible. I defuse the epistemic concern: open futurism does not entail obviously counterintuitive epistemic consequences or prevent rational action.     

Three steps to open science for qualitative research in psychology

Principles and applications of open science (also referred to as open research or open scholarship) in psychology have emerged in response to growing concerns about the replicability, transparency, reproducibility, and robustness of psychological research alongside global moves to open science in many fields. Our objective in this paper is to inform ways of collectively constructing open science practices and systems that are appropriate to, and get the best out of, the full range of qualitative and mixed-method approaches used in psychology. We achieve this by describing three areas of open research practice (contributorship, pre-registration, and open data) and explore how and why qualitative researchers might consider engaging with these in ways that are compatible with a qualitative research paradigm. We argue it is crucial that open research practices do not (even inadvertently) exclude qualitative research, and that qualitative researchers reflect on how we can meaningfully engage with open science in psychology.     

Employee psychological wellbeing in the face of pandemic: The role of belief in work priority

Traditionally, individuals who prioritize work over other aspects of life have been lauded as ideal employees. Individuals vary in the extent to which they endorse the beliefs that work should be prioritized over other aspects of life, known as the Belief in Work Priority (BWP). Various lockdown restrictions imposed due to the COVID-19 pandemic have blurred work-family boundary, which consequently made prioritizing work over family responsibilities challenging. A repeated cross-sectional study was conducted to examine the relationship between BWP and employee wellbeing during (vs. before) the pandemic outbreak. We recruited 398 participants who were employed and resided in the U.S. Results revealed that during the pandemic, BWP and employee wellbeing showed a negative relationship through increased work-family conflict. Furthermore, such relationship was particularly strong among married employees and male employees.     

THEOLOGICAL APPROPRIATION OF SCIENTIFIC UNDERSTANDINGS: RESPONSE TO HEFNER, WICKEN, EAVES, AND TIPLER

Abstract. Philip Hefner's focus on contingency and field as the guiding concepts in my thinking and his characterization of my theological enterprise as a Lakatosian research program are appropriate and helpful.
I welcome Jeffrey Wicken's holistic approach to the emergence of life. Theology can appropriate the language of self-organizing systems exploiting the thermodynamic flow of energy degradation for interpreting organic life as a creation of the Spirit of God.
However, I cannot sympathize with Lindon Eaves's equation of "hard science" with a reductionism which raises the double helix to the status of icon; the "meaning" of DNA derives from its place in the total phenomenon of life—not the reverse.
Frank Tipler's cosmology raises the prospect of a rapprochement between physics and theology in the area of eschatology. A Christian cosmology, however, would require at least three modifications: contingency in the history of creation; the uniqueness of Jesus' resurrection; and the relation of these to the problem of evil.     

Response-reinforcer independence and the economic continuum: A preliminary analysis

Three pigeons were exposed to 1-hr and 4-hr sessions during which they earned food under a fixed-ratio 50 schedule of reinforcement while obtaining additional food according to either a variable-interval or a variable-time schedule. Postsession food was provided after the 1-hr sessions. The frequency of the variable-interval and variable-time food presentations was varied under the two session durations. The various combinations of within-session earned and unearned food, as well as the postsession food, defined conditions on the open-to-closed economy continuum. Key pecks tended to increase as the frequency of either variable-interval or variable-time food decreased. An economic-continuum analysis based on an independence quotient as a measure of response-reinforcer independence is presented to account for the effects.     

TO WAIT OR TO RESPOND?

Emitting a certain response and waiting for a specified time without making that response had the same consequence. In Experiment 1, food-deprived pigeons were as likely to wait as to respond only if waiting provided food at a much higher frequency than did pecking. In Experiment 2, the consequence for humans was a brief light flash and tone. People were not biased for responding over waiting. Instead, their choices suggested crude payoff maximization. In Experiment 3, pigeons again obtained food, but they were not food deprived and could eat freely at each opportunity. Their behavior was more like that of the humans of Experiment 2 than that of food-deprived pigeons given small quantities of food at each feeding opportunity. The three experiments together showed that biases for responding over waiting were neither inherent characteristics of species nor inevitable outcomes of particular schedules. Choice between active search and waiting depended on ecological–motivational factors even when species and schedules were held constant.     

Focal attention and the perception of pattern structure in extrafoveal vision

Several studies have shown that visual attention enhances the encoding of the positional relationships between pattern elements, i.e., the perception of pattern structure. This theoretical note discusses the possibility that the inferiority of extrafoveal vision in the perception of pattern structure results, at least partially, from less effective focal attention in the periphery. Hence, there may exist higher level differences between foveal and extrafoveal vision in information processing which cannot be explained by the spatial inhomogeneity of the retino-striate system.