Religious diversity, empathy, and God images : perspectives from the psychology of religion shaping a study among adolescents in the UK

Major religious traditions agree in advocating and promoting love of neighbour as well as love of God. Love of neighbour is reflected in altruistic behaviour and empathy stands as a key motivational factor underpinning altruism. This study employs the empathy scale from the Junior Eysenck Impulsiveness Questionnaire to assess the association between empathy and God images among a sample of 5993 religiously diverse adolescents (13–15 years old) attending state maintained schools in England, Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and London. The key psychological theory being tested by these data concerns the linkage between God images and individual differences in empathy. The data demonstrate that religious identity (e.g. Christian, Muslim) and religious attendance are less important than the God images which young people hold. The image of God as a God of mercy is associated with higher empathy scores, while the image of God as a God of justice is associated with lower empathy scores

LCrowdV: Generating Labeled Videos for Simulation-based Crowd Behavior Learning

We present a novel procedural framework to generate an arbitrary number of labeled crowd videos (LCrowdV). The resulting crowd video datasets are used to design accurate algorithms or training models for crowded scene understanding. Our overall approach is composed of two components: a procedural simulation framework for generating crowd movements and behaviors, and a procedural rendering framework to generate different videos or images. Each video or image is automatically labeled based on the environment, number of pedestrians, density, behavior, flow, lighting conditions, viewpoint, noise, etc. Furthermore, we can increase the realism by combining synthetically-generated behaviors with real-world background videos. We demonstrate the benefits of LCrowdV over prior lableled crowd datasets by improving the accuracy of pedestrian detection and crowd behavior classification algorithms. LCrowdV would be released on the WWW

Young people's attitudes to religious diversity : quantitative approaches from social psychology and empirical theology

This essay discusses the design of the quantitative component of the ‘Young People’s Attitudes to Religious Diversity’ project, conceived by Professor Robert Jackson within the Warwick Religions and Education Research Unit, and presents some preliminary findings from the data. The quantitative component followed and built on the qualitative component within a mixed method design. The argument is advanced in seven steps: introducing the major sources of theory on which the quantitative approach builds from the psychology of religion and from empirical theology; locating the empirical traditions of research among young people that have shaped the study; clarifying the notions and levels of measurement employed in the study anticipating the potential for various forms of data analysis; discussing some of the established measures incorporated in the survey; defining the ways in which the sample was structured to reflect the four nations of the UK, and London; illustrating the potential within largely descriptive cross-tabulation forms of analysis; and illustrating the potential within more sophisticated multivariate analytic models

Personality dimensions of people who suffer from visual stress

Personality dimensions of participants who suffer from visual stress were compared with those of normal participants using the Eysenck Personality Inventory. Extraversion-Introversion scores showed no significant differences between the participants who suffered visual stress and those who were classified as normal. By contrast, significant differences were found between the normal participants and those with visual stress in respect of Neuroticism-Stability. These differences accord with Eysenck's personality theory which states that those who score highly on the neuroticism scale do so because they have a neurological system with a low threshold such that their neurological system is easily activated by external stimuli. The findings also relate directly to the theory of visual stress proposed by Wilkins which postulates that visual stress results from an excess of neural activity. The data may indicate that the excess activity is likely to be localised at particular neurological regions or neural processes

Factors shaping prayer frequency among 9- to 11-year-olds

This paper begins by reviewing the evidence from international research concerning the personal and social correlates of prayer frequency during childhood and adolescence. Overall these data continue to support the view that young people who pray not only report higher levels of personal wellbeing but also report higher levels of pro-social attitudes. These findings raise a research question of particular relevance within church schools regarding the factors that predict higher levels of prayer activity among students. The Student Voice Project offers data that can illuminate this research question. Among the 3,101 9- to 11-year old students who participated in the project 11% prayed daily, 9% at least once a week, 32% sometimes, 11% once or twice a year, and 37% never. The present paper tests the power of four sets of predictor variables to account for individual differences in prayer frequency among these students: personal factors (age and sex), psychological factors (using the three dimensional model of personality proposed by Eysenck), church attendance (self, mother, and father), and family discussion about prayer (mother, father, and grandparents). Multiple regression analyses identified the discussion of prayer with the mother as the single most important predictor. These findings locate the development of the practice of prayer within the home, even more than within the church

Conscious monitoring and control (reinvestment) in surgical performance under pressure.

Research on intraoperative stressors has focused on external factors without considering individual differences in the ability to cope with stress. One individual difference that is implicated in adverse effects of stress on performance is "reinvestment," the propensity for conscious monitoring and control of movements. The aim of this study was to examine the impact of reinvestment on laparoscopic performance under time pressure

Life events and hemodynamic stress reactivity in the middle-aged and elderly

Recent versions of the reactivity hypothesis, which consider it to be the product of stress exposure and exaggerated haemodynamic reactions to stress that confers cardiovascular disease risk, assume that reactivity is independent of the experience of stressful life events. This assumption was tested in two substantial cohorts, one middle-aged and one elderly. Participants had to indicate from a list of major stressful life events up to six they had experienced in the previous two years. They were also asked to rate how disruptive and stressful they were, at the time of occurrence and now. Blood pressure and pulse rate were measured at rest and in response to acute mental stress. Those who rated the events as highly disruptive at the time of exposure and currently exhibited blunted systolic blood pressure reactions to acute stress. The present results suggest that acute stress reactivity may not be independent of stressful life events experience

Attention and automation: New perspectives on mental underload and performance

There is considerable evidence in the ergonomics literature that automation can significantly reduce operator mental workload. Furthermore, reducing mental workload is not necessarily a good thing, particularly in cases where the level is already manageable. This raises the issue of mental underload, which can be at least as detrimental to performance as overload. However, although it is widely recognized that mental underload is detrimental to performance, there are very few attempts to explain why this may be the case. It is argued in this paper that, until the need for a human operator is completely eliminated, automation has psychological implications relevant in both theoretical and applied domains. The present paper reviews theories of attention, as well as the literature on mental workload and automation, to synthesize a new explanation for the effects of mental underload on performance. Malleable attentional resources theory proposes that attentional capacity shrinks to accommodate reductions in mental workload, and that this shrinkage is responsible for the underload effect. The theory is discussed with respect to the applied implications for ergonomics research

Examining links between anxiety, reinvestment and walking when talking by older adults during adaptive gait

Falls by older adults often result in reduced quality of life and debilitating fear of further falls. Stopping walking when talking (SWWT) is a significant predictor of future falls by older adults and is thought to reflect age-related increases in attentional demands of walking. We examine whether SWWT is associated with use of explicit movement cues during locomotion, and evaluate if conscious control (i.e., movement specific reinvestment) is causally linked to falls-related anxiety during a complex walking task. We observed whether twenty-four older adults stopped walking when talking when asked a question during an adaptive gait task. After certain trials, participants completed a visual-spatial recall task regarding walkway features, or answered questions about their movements during the walk. In a subsequent experimental condition, participants completed the walking task under conditions of raised postural threat. Compared to a control group, participants who SWWT reported higher scores for aspects of reinvestment relating to conscious motor processing but not movement self-consciousness. The higher scores for conscious motor processing were preserved when scores representing cognitive function were included as a covariate. There were no group differences in measures of general cognitive function, visual spatial working memory or balance confidence. However, the SWWT group reported higher scores on a test of external awareness when walking, indicating allocation of attention away from task-relevant environmental features. Under conditions of increased threat, participants self-reported significantly greater state anxiety and reinvestment and displayed more accurate responses about their movements during the task. SWWT is not associated solely with age-related cognitive decline or generic increases in age-related attentional demands of walking. SWWT may be caused by competition for phonological resources of working memory associated with consciously processing motor actions and appears to be causally linked with fall-related anxiety and increased vigilance.This research was supported by The Royal Society (IE131576) and British Academy (SG132820)

Culture and personality revisited: Behavioral profiles and within‐person stability in interdependent (vs. independent) social orientation and holistic (vs. analytic) cognitive style

ObjectiveWe test the proposition that both social orientation and cognitive style are constructs consisting of loosely related attributes. Thus, measures of each construct should weakly correlate among themselves, forming intraindividually stable profiles across measures over time.MethodStudy 1 tested diverse samples of Americans (N = 233) and Japanese (N = 433) with a wide range of measures of social orientation and cognitive style to explore correlations among these measures in a cross‐cultural context, using demographically heterogeneous samples. Study 2 recruited a new sample of 485 Americans and Canadians and examined their profiles on measures of social orientation and cognitive style twice, one month apart, to assess the stability of individual profiles using these variables.ResultsDespite finding typical cross‐cultural differences, Study 1 demonstrated negligible correlations both among measures of social orientation and among measures of cognitive style. Study 2 demonstrated stable intraindividual behavioral profiles across measures capturing idiosyncratic patters of social orientation and cognitive style, despite negligible correlations among the same measures.ConclusionThe results provide support for the behavioral profile approach to conceptualizing social orientation and cognitive style, highlighting the need to assess intraindividual stability of psychological constructs in cross‐cultural research.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/162694/2/jopy12536_am.pdfhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/162694/1/jopy12536.pd