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 .     

Confidence in masked orientation judgments is informed by both evidence and visibility

How do human observers determine their degree of belief that they are correct in a decision about a visual stimulus—that is, their confidence? According to prominent theories of confidence, the quality of stimulation should be positively related to confidence in correct decisions, and negatively to confidence in incorrect decisions. However, in a backward-masked orientation task with a varying stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA), we observed that confidence in incorrect decisions also increased with stimulus quality. Model fitting to our decision and confidence data revealed that the best explanation for the present data was the new weighted evidence-and-visibility model, according to which confidence is determined by evidence about the orientation as well as by the general visibility of the stimulus. Signal detection models, postdecisional accumulation models, two-channel models, and decision-time-based models were all unable to explain the pattern of confidence as a function of SOA and decision correctness. We suggest that the metacognitive system combines several cues related to the correctness of a decision about a visual stimulus in order to calculate decision confidence.     

Rearing practices and impulsivity/hyperactivity symptoms in relation to inflated responsibility and obsessive‐compulsive symptoms

Smári, J., Rúrik Martinsson, D., & Einarsson, H. (2010). Rearing practices and impulsivity/hyperactivity symptoms in relation to inflated responsibility and obsessive‐compulsive symptoms. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, 51, 392–397. The aim of the study was to investigate potential precursors of inflated responsibility (responsibility attitudes) and obsessive‐compulsive (OCD) symptoms. It was argued that both parental overprotection and impulsivity, separately and in interaction with each other, contribute to inflated responsibility and OCD symptoms. In a large sample of young adults (N = 570), self‐report measures of OCD symptoms (OCI‐R), responsibility attitudes (RAS), anxiety/depression (HADS), rearing practices (EMBU), present and past impulsivity/hyperactivity symptoms (IMP/HY) were administered. Overprotection as well as IMP/HY were found to predict OCD symptoms as well as inflated responsibility. Finally, a significant interaction was found between IMP/HY and overprotection with regard to both OCD symptoms and inflated responsibility. This effect reflected that IMP/HY was more strongly related to OCD symptoms and responsibility in people who had not been overprotected than in people who had been. Conversely overprotection was related to OCD symptoms and responsibility in people low but not in people high in IMP/HY. The results seem to indicate that the inadequacy between offer and need for parental control may play a role in the development of OCD symptoms.     

Sample size planning for longitudinal models: accuracy in parameter estimation for polynomial change parameters

Longitudinal studies are necessary to examine individual change over time, with group status often being an important variable in explaining some individual differences in change. Although sample size planning for longitudinal studies has focused on statistical power, recent calls for effect sizes and their corresponding confidence intervals underscore the importance of obtaining sufficiently accurate estimates of group differences in change. We derived expressions that allow researchers to plan sample size to achieve the desired confidence interval width for group differences in change for orthogonal polynomial change parameters. The approaches developed provide the expected confidence interval width to be sufficiently narrow, with an extension that allows some specified degree of assurance (e.g., 99%) that the confidence interval will be sufficiently narrow. We make computer routines freely available, so that the methods developed can be used by researchers immediately.     

Kommunikationsstruktur und Gruppenleistung

Zusammenfassung Vierergruppen von Vpn arbeiteten in Kommunikationsnetzen, in denen es infolge des Fehlens einer (direkten oder indirekten) Wechselseitigkeit gewisser Verbindungen einigen Vpn — nämlich denjenigen, die ganz bestimmte (ungünstige) Positionen innerhalb des Netzes einnahmen — verwehrt war, die Lösung eines Problems durch Austausch von Informationen zu finden. Den Vpn-Gruppen wurde diese Eigenschaft der Kommunikationssysteme bei Beginn der Versuche nicht mitgeteilt. In einer derartigen Lage suchen jene Vpn den Grund für den unbefriedigenden Informationsaustausch (zumindest zunächst) nicht in der Struktur des Kommunikationsnetzes, sondern unterstellen den anderen Gruppenmitgliedern mangelnde Loyalität oder/und mangelndes Verständnis. Die Folge sind starke affektive Spannungen, die zur Verschlechterung der Kooperation und zur Verringerung der Gruppenleistung führen. Die kognitive Seite des Erlebens der Vpn wurde u. a. mit Hilfe der Begriffe phänomenale Variabilität und phänomenale Konstanz näher analysiert.     

Sex differences in cognitive performance and style across domains in mosquitofish (Gambusia affinis)

Animal Cognition - Given that the sexes often differ in their ecological and sexual selection pressures, sex differences in cognitive properties are likely. While research on sexually dimorphic...     

Contextual Career Counseling for Transitioning Military Veterans

Military culture is a unique subset of the United States, complete with its own language, writing style, norms, membership, rank structure, values, and laws (Harmon, 2007 ). Using contextual theory for career counseling, counselor educators can assist counselors‐in‐training in understanding the effects of the military environment on clients who are military veterans. This article includes a review of the literature and a call for research.     

Activating effect of various kinds of semantic knowledge

The question if preactivation effects are to be observed during the within-conceptual storage of knowledge, when the prime is a general term or a peripheral term, was tested with the aid of the priming instrument. The primary effect appears only for the peripheral term-relation when the prime is presented for an interval of 1000 ms. During the between-conceptual storage, the central meaning of the predicate for active knowledge could not be confirmed. The predicate as prime led to no significant preactivation when a matched object-case was presented.