REPRODUCTIVE TECHNOLOGY: A CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF THEOLOGICAL RESPONSES IN CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM

Reproductive medical technology has revolutionized the natural order of human procreation. Accordingly, some have celebrated its advent as a new and liberating determinant of kinship at the global level and advocate it as a right to reproductive health while others have frowned upon it as a vehicle for “guiltless exchange of sexual fluid” and commodification of human gametes. Religious voices from both Christianity and Islam range from unthinking adoption to restrictive use. While utilizing this technology to enable the married couple to have children through the use of their own sexual material is welcome, the use of third party, surrogacy, and reproductive cloning are not in keeping with the sacrosanct principles of kinship, procreation through licit sexual intercourse, and social cohesiveness for building a cohesive family as uphold by both Christianity and Islam. To examine such larger issues emanating from these new ways of human procreation, beyond the question of legality, is a point which legal scholars in both Christianity and Islam, when issuing religious decrees, have not anticipated sufficiently. The article proposes to be an attempt to that end through a qualitative critical content analysis of selected literature written on the subject.     

Do young adults show conceptual knowledge of previous distractors?

Using implicit tests, older adults have been found to retain conceptual knowledge of previously seen task-irrelevant information. While younger adults typically do not show the same effect, evidence from one study [Gopie, N., Craik, F. I. M., & Hasher, L. (2011). A double dissociation of implicit and explicit memory in younger and older adults. Psychological Science, 22, 634–640. doi:10.1177/0956797611403321] suggests otherwise. In that study, young adults showed greater explicit than implicit memory for previous distractors on a word fragment completion task. This was interpreted as evidence for maintaining access to previous conceptual knowledge of the distractors. Here, we report two failures to replicate that original finding, followed by a third study designed to test directly whether young adults use conceptual-level information that was previously irrelevant. Our findings agree with others that young adults show weak to no evidence of conceptual knowledge of previously irrelevant information.     

Cross‐cultural Generalizability of the Alternative Five‐factor Model Using the Zuckerman–Kuhlman–Aluja Personality Questionnaire

Several personality models are known for being replicable across cultures, such as the Five‐Factor Model (FFM) or Eysenck's Psychoticism–Extraversion–Neuroticism (PEN) model, and are for this reason considered universal. The aim of the current study was to evaluate the cross‐cultural replicability of the recently revised Alternative FFM (AFFM). A total of 15 048 participants from 23 cultures completed the Zuckerman–Kuhlman–Aluja Personality Questionnaire (ZKA‐PQ) aimed at assessing personality according to this revised AFFM. Internal consistencies, gender differences and correlations with age were similar across cultures for all five factors and facet scales. The AFFM structure was very similar across samples and can be considered as highly replicable with total congruence coefficients ranging from .94 to .99. Measurement invariance across cultures was assessed using multi‐group confirmatory factor analyses, and each higher‐order personality factor did reach configural and metric invariance. Scalar invariance was never reached, which implies that culture‐specific norms should be considered. The underlying structure of the ZKA‐PQ replicates well across cultures, suggesting that this questionnaire can be used in a large diversity of cultures and that the AFFM might be as universal as the FFM or the PEN model. This suggests that more research is needed to identify and define an integrative framework underlying these personality models. Copyright © 2016 European Association of Personality Psychology     

Masturbation: Scientific Evidence and Islam’s View

Masturbation is the stimulation of sexual organs usually to the point of orgasm with an essential autoerotic component. Due to the high prevalence of this sexual behavior, it was and still is a matter of debate if masturbation is a normal action without any side effects and even if it is advantageous or it is associated with side effects necessitating public education how to avoid it. In addition, it is a common question if masturbation is religiously lawful or not. In this study, I assess the results of scientific studies about this sexual behavior and also shed some light on the Islam’s view about it.     

Saudi EFL Learners’ Reported Reading Problems and Strategic Processing of Text Types: A Think-aloud Case Study

Research in strategy use needs to provide comprehensive and detailed qualitative discussion of individual cases and their strategic processing of texts to deepen our understanding of the cognitive and metacognitive processes readers resort to when reading different texts for different purposes. Hence, the present paper aims to provide in-depth and rich examination and interpretation of four Saudi EFL students (two good and two poor readers) processing two different texts in structure (a narrative and an expository text) for different reading tasks. This involved a detailed qualitative discussion of the differences and similarities in reading problems and strategy use. Using think-aloud reports and follow-up interviews, the study identified four explicit word-related and six text-related problems reported by the four EFL readers in processing the assigned text types. Moreover, the study revealed how the selected cases varied in their strategic reactions to the reading problems encountered in the two texts. The study findings also demonstrated how the structuring variations of the narrative and expository texts had a considerable effect on the quantity and quality of readers' reported difficulties and reading strategies employed in texts.     

Review article

Vie et Mort des Chrétiens d'Orient. Jean‐Pierre Valognes, 1994. Paris, Fayard. 972 pp., FF250, ISBN 2–213–03064–2     

Cultural differences in distraction processing: influence of context at retrieval

Cultural differences in information processing affect perceptual judgment, attention, and memory. We investigated whether cultural differences in processing patterns, specifically East Asian participants’ tendency to encode holistically, compared to Western tendencies to process analytically, affect performance on an implicit memory test. First, participants completed a 1-back task on pictures with superimposed distracting words. After a delay filled with a computerised Corsi block task, they performed a word fragment task in which some fragments could be completed with the distracting words from the 1-back task. Critically, fragments were presented with the same pictures as previously seen (matched condition), with no pictures (control condition), or with pictures from other trials on the 1-back task (mismatched condition). Non-Asian Canadian participants showed virtually no priming for distraction, independent of the reinstatement of encoding context. East Asian Canadian participants showed superior priming for fragments that had been paired with their original pictures. They did not show evidence of a detriment for the mismatched, relative to control, condition.