The Evolution of Religion: How Cognitive By-Products, Adaptive Learning Heuristics, Ritual Displays, and Group Competition Generate Deep Commitments to Prosocial Religio

Understanding religion requires explaining why supernatural beliefs, devotions, and rituals are both universal and variable across cultures, and why religion is so often associated with both large-scale cooperation and enduring group conflict. Emerging lines of research suggest that these oppositions result from the convergence of three processes. First, the interaction of certain reliably developing cognitive processes, such as our ability to infer the presence of intentional agents, favors—as an evolutionary by-product—the spread of certain kinds of counterintuitive concepts. Second, participation in rituals and devotions involving costly displays exploits various aspects of our evolved psychology to deepen people's commitment to both supernatural agents and religious communities. Third, competition among societies and organizations with different faith-based beliefs and practices has increasingly connected religion with both within-group prosociality and between-group enmity. This connection has strengthened dramatically in recent millennia, as part of the evolution of complex societies, and is important to understanding cooperation and conflict in today's world

Development and validation of the Self-Regulation of Eating Behaviour Questionnaire for adults

Background Eating self-regulatory capacity can help individuals to cope with the obesogenic environment and achieve, as well as maintain, a healthy weight and diet. At present, there is no comprehensive, reliable and valid questionnaire for assessing this capacity and measuring change in response to self-regulation interventions in adults. This paper reports the development of the Self-regulation of Eating Behaviour Questionnaire (SREBQ) for use in UK adults, and presents evidence for its reliability and construct validity. The development of the SREBQ involved generation of an item pool, followed by two pilot studies (Samples 1 and 2) and a test of the questionnaire’s underlying factor structure (Sample 3). The final version of the SREBQ was then assessed for reliability and construct validity (Sample 4). Results Development of the SREBQ resulted in a 5-item questionnaire. The face validity was satisfactory, as assessed by the pilot studies. The factor structure analysis (Sample 3) suggested that it has a single underlying factor, which was confirmed in a second sample (Sample 4). The SREBQ had strong construct validity, showing a positive correlation with general measures of self-regulation. It was also positively correlated with motivation and behavioural automaticity, and negatively correlated with food responsiveness and emotional over-eating (p < 0.001). It showed good discriminant validity, as it was only weakly associated with satiety responsiveness, food fussiness and slowness in eating. Conclusions The SREBQ is a reliable and valid measure for assessment of eating self-regulatory capacity in the general UK adult population

Goal Priming in Dieters: Recent Insights and Applications

What are the psychological mechanisms that make dieting so challenging in our food-rich living environment? Social psychological research on goal priming provides a useful framework for answering this question, as well as implications for how to enhance dieting success. This review presents and discusses recent research which shows that attractive food cues prime the hedonic eating goal in dieters, and thus facilitate overeating. However, external cues priming the goal of weight control can be used to offset these effects and thus to facilitate dieting success, as is demonstrated in both field and laboratory experiments. In addition, recent strategies to prevent hedonic effects of attractive food, such as mindful attention, can facilitate self-regulation. These recent advances in our understanding of dieting behavior have theoretical and practical implications for how successful dieting can be facilitated, both by means of individual strategies, as well as by environmental changes

The transformations of utility theory: a behavioral perspective

The aim of this paper is threefold. First, it reappraises the major transformations which the utilitarian approach to human behavior has undergone in economics in search for a representation by utility functions and later by preference orders. Second, in the light of today’s behavioral and human sciences, an attempt is made to restore some elements of early utilitarianism that were abandoned in these transformations. Third, in line with the interest of the early utilitarians in both explaining behavior and elaborating on its moral assessment, the present paper also discusses some normative implications of the suggested restoration of utilitarian theory.Griffith Business School, Department of Accounting, Finance and EconomicsFull Tex

Task-dependent evaluative processing of moral and emotional content during comprehension: an ERP study

Recently, we showed that when participants passively read about moral transgressions (e.g., adultery) they implicitly engage in the evaluative (good–bad) categorization of incoming information, as indicated by a larger event-related brain potential (ERP) positivity to immoral than moral scenarios (Leuthold, Kunkel, Mackenzie, & Filik, 2015). Behavioral and neuroimaging studies indicated that explicit moral tasks prioritize the semantic-cognitive analysis of incoming information but that implicit tasks, as used in Leuthold et al. (2015), favor their affective processing. Therefore, it is unclear whether an affective categorization process is also involved when participants perform explicit moral judgments. Thus, in two experiments, we used similarly constructed morality and emotion materials for which their moral and emotional content had to be inferred from the context. Target sentences from negative vs. neutral emotional scenarios and from moral vs. immoral scenarios were presented using rapid serial visual presentation. In Experiment 1, participants made moral judgments for moral materials and emotional judgments for emotion materials. Negative compared to neutral emotional scenarios elicited a larger posterior ERP positivity (LPP) about 200 ms after critical word onset, whereas immoral compared to moral scenarios elicited a larger anterior negativity (500-700 ms). In Experiment 2, where the same emotional judgment to both types of materials was required, a larger LPP was triggered for both types of materials. These results accord with the view that morality scenarios trigger a semantic-cognitive analysis when participants explicitly judge the moral content of incoming linguistic information but an affective evaluation when judging their emotional content