Children's relationships with nonparental adults: Sex-specific connections to early school success

This report asks, Do the social networks of six-year-old girls and boys differ? It then extends previously reported findings by asking, Do different groups of nonparental adults affect the early school success of boys vs girls? Data were collected from the mothers of 162 six-year-olds, using a standard procedure. The networks of boys and girls in one-parent and two-parent households are contrasted throughout the presentation of results. The composition of networks was quite similar for boys and girls, except that each group had more same-sex than opposite-sex peers. In analyses predicting early school success, the number of adult male relatives who took the child on outings away from home was positively related to the child's report card score. This effect, however, was restricted to the subgroup of one-parent (mother-only) boys. This had been predicted, based on knowledge that single-parent boys are the most at-risk subgroup in the sample, the effect of social network resources are known to be accentuated by environmental press, and male adults represent the most salient models for young boys.     

Religious propositional attitudes and underdetermination of public representation: Commentary on Ara Norenzayan's Big Gods

The commentary addresses a specific aspect of Norenzayan's work: the use of the notion of credible display as developed by J. Henrich (“The Evolution of Costly Displays, Cooperation and Religion: Credibility Enhancing Displays and their Implications for Cultural Evolution,” Evolution and Human Behavior 30 [4] 2009: 244–260) to make sense of typical (extravagant) religious behaviors. Norenzayan ascribes an essential role to those displays in the diffusion of religious beliefs. The authors maintain that to use the concept of CRED is not appropriate given the typical natures of religious beliefs and behaviors. Contrary to Norenzayan's essential claim in Big Gods, they defend the hypothesis that audiences have no indubitable way of inferring from religious actions the religious beliefs of performing agents. It is essentially explained by the fact that there does not exist any necessary link between proclaimed religious beliefs and observable religious behaviors. Religious behaviors are public representations, generally more or less rigidly stipulated, hence they typically have more to do with social coordination than with genuine expression of performers' religious propositional attitudes, that is, they do not require genuine religious beliefs. Furthermore, as there is no guarantee or necessity that the religious behavior be systematically associated to true beliefs, such behaviors are eminently recruitable for individual aims and ends (social gains, status enhancement), which might partly explain why they get maintained in various cultural traditions.     

Dichotic listening in children: age-related changes in direction and magnitude of ear advantage

Children between the ages of 5 and 12 years were tested with dichotic listening tests utilizing single syllable words and random presentations of digits. They produced a higher prevalence of left ear dominance than expected, especially among right-handed children when tested with words. Whether more children demonstrate the LEA because of right hemisphere dominance for language or because there is less stability in ear advantage direction at younger ages cannot be fully resolved by this study. When ear advantages were measured by subtracting each child's lower score from the higher score without regard to right or left direction, an age-related trend toward lower measures of ear advantage was evident. This trend was greater for dichotic words than for dichotic digits. Structural factors that may be related to these results and possible influences of attention and verbal workload on the two kinds of dichotic stimuli are discussed.