Orando et laborando 2012/2013

A Debreceni Református Hittudományi Egyetem évkönyve a jubileumi 475. tanévről, 2012/2013

Adolescents' trust and reciprocity toward friends, unknown peers, and community members

Using a newly developed version of the Trust Game among 196 adolescents aged 11–20 years, this study examined whether adolescents distinguish between trust and reciprocity to unknown peers, friends, and community members. We also tested for effects of age, gender, and individual differences in attending to others' emotions, emotional support to friends, societal contributions, and institutional and interpersonal trust beliefs. Results indicated that adolescents showed the least trust and reciprocity to unknown peers, more to a community member, and most to friends. Reciprocity increased with age, and individual differences in societal contributions and interpersonal trust were positively related to trust and reciprocity. This study was the first to show that community members are a specific target in adolescents' social world.</p

FGCUScholars: Using Undergraduate Research as a Tool to Enhance Student Writing, Critical Thinking, and Information Literacy

This presentation will overview FGCUScholars, a university-wide program at Florida Gulf Coast University that integrates undergraduate research across the university as a means of teaching and assessing writing, critical thinking, and information literacy. We will overview the development and learning outcomes of FGCUScholars and the implementation across the campus, highlighting examples of curricular changes in engineering that engage students throughout their career at FGCU, the role of problem/project-based learning (PBL) in business classes, the development of research assignments that use digital media in literature courses, and the creation of disciplinary-specific sections of Composition II

Temporal discounting for self and friends in adolescence:A fMRI study

Adolescence is characterized by impulsivity but also by increased importance of friendships. This study took the novel perspective of testing temporal discounting in a fMRI task where choices could affect outcomes for 96 adolescents (aged 10–20-years) themselves and their best friend. Decisions either benefitted themselves (i.e., the Self Immediate – Self Delay’ condition) or their friend (i.e., ‘Friend Immediate – Friend Delay’ condition); or juxtaposed rewards for themselves and their friends (i.e., the ‘Self Immediate – Friend Delay’ or ‘Friend Immediate – Self Delay’ conditions). We observed that younger adolescents were more impulsive; and all participants were more impulsive when this was associated with an immediate benefit for friends. Individual differences analyses revealed increased activity in the subgenual anterior cingulate cortex extending in the ventral striatum for immediate relative to delayed reward choices for self. Temporal choices were associated with activity in the prefrontal cortex, parietal cortex, insula, and ventral striatum, but only activity in the right inferior parietal lobe was associated with age. Finally, temporal delay choices for friends relative to self were associated with increased activity in the temporo-parietal junction and precuneus. Overall, this study shows a unique role of the social context in adolescents’ temporal decision making.</p

Neural Mechanisms Underlying Trust to Friends, Community Members, and Unknown Peers in Adolescence

Trust plays an important role during adolescence for developing social relations. Although prior developmental studies give us insight into adolescents' development of differentiation between close (e.g., friends) and unknown (e.g., unknown peers) targets in trust choices, less is known about the development of trust to societal targets (e.g., members of a community organization) and its underlying neural mechanisms. Using a modified version of the Trust Game, our preregistered fMRI study examined the underlying neural mechanisms of trust to close (friend), societal (community member), and unknown others (unknown peer) during adolescence in 106 participants (aged 12-23 years). Adolescents showed most trust to friends, less trust to community members, and the least trust to unknown peers. Neural results show that target differentiation in adolescents' trust behavior is associated with activity in social brain regions implicated during mentalizing, reward processing, and cognitive control. Recruitment of the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and OFC was higher for closer targets (i.e., friend and community member). For the mPFC, this effect was most pronounced during no trust choices. Trust to friends was additionally associated with increased activity in the precuneus and bilateral temporal parietal junction. In contrast, bilateral dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and anterior cingulate cortex were most active for trust to unknown peers. The mPFC showed increased activity with age and consistent relations with individual differences in feeling needed/useful.</p

Baade's red sheet resolved into stars with HST in the Blue Compact Dwarf Galaxy VII Zw 403

HST WFPC2 observations of the nearby Blue Compact Dwarf Galaxy VII~Zw~403 (= UGC 6456) resolve single stars down to M$_I$$\approx$-2.5, deep enough to identify red giants. This population has a more uniform spatial distribution than the young main-sequence stars and supergiants, forming the structure known as "Baade's red sheet". We conclude that VII~Zw~403 is not a primeval galaxy.Comment: submitted to: ApJ Letter

Persistence and Quiescence of Seismicity on Fault Systems

We study the statistics of simulated earthquakes in a quasistatic model of two parallel heterogeneous faults within a slowly driven elastic tectonic plate. The probability that one fault remains dormant while the other is active for a time Dt following the previous activity shift is proportional to the inverse of Dt to the power 1+x, a result that is robust in the presence of annealed noise and strength weakening. A mean field theory accounts for the observed dependence of the persistence exponent x as a function of heterogeneity and distance between faults. These results continue to hold if the number of competing faults is increased. This is related to the persistence phenomenon discovered in a large variety of systems, which specifies how long a relaxing dynamical system remains in a neighborhood of its initial configuration. Our persistence exponent is found to vary as a function of heterogeneity and distance between faults, thus defining a novel universality class.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures, Revte