Category: Research - IRONSTRIKES

Pornography and Violence (research)

11/14/2018

Abstract:

A meta-analysis was conducted to determine whether nonexperimental studies revealed an association between men's pornography consumption and their attitudes supporting violence against women. The meta-analysis corrected problems with a previously published meta-analysis and added more recent findings.

In contrast to the earlier meta-analysis, the current results showed an overall significant positive association between pornography use and attitudes supporting violence against women in nonexperimental studies. In addition, such attitudes were found to correlate significantly higher with the use of sexually violent pornography than with the use of nonviolent pornography, although the latter relationship was also found to be significant.

The study resolves what appeared to be a troubling discordance in the literature on pornography and aggressive attitudes by showing that the conclusions from nonexperimental studies in the area are in fact fully consistent with those of their counterpart experimental studies. This finding has important implications for the overall literature on pornography and aggression.

Source:

Martin, H.G., Malamuth, N.M., & Yuen, C. (2010). Pornography and attitudes supporting violence against women: revisiting the relationship in nonexperimental studies. Aggressive Behavior, 36(1), 14-20

Can Pornography Be Addictive? (research)

11/12/2018

Abstract:

Pornography consumption is highly prevalent, particularly among young adult males. For some individuals, problematic pornography use (PPU) is a reason for seeking treatment. Despite the pervasiveness of pornography, PPU appears under-investigated, including with respect to the underlying neural mechanisms. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we examined ventral striatal responses to erotic and monetary stimuli, disentangling cue-related wanting from reward-related liking among 28 heterosexual males seeking treatment for PPU and 24 heterosexual males without PPU. Subjects engaged in an incentive delay task in the scanner, in which they received erotic or monetary rewards preceded by predictive cues. Blood-oxygen-level-dependent responses to erotic and monetary cues were analyzed and examined with respect to self-reported data on sexual activity collected over the 2 preceding months. Men with and without PPU differed in their striatal responses to cues predicting erotic pictures but not in their responses to erotic pictures.

PPU subjects when compared with control subjects showed increased activation of ventral striatum specifically for cues predicting erotic pictures but not for cues predicting monetary gains. Relative sensitivity to cues predicting erotic pictures vs monetary gains was significantly related to the increased behavioral motivation to view erotic images (suggestive of higher wanting), severity of PPU, amount of pornography use per week, and number of weekly masturbations.

Our findings suggest that, similar to what is observed in substance and gambling addictions, the neural and behavioral mechanisms associated with the anticipatory processing of cues specifically predicting erotic rewards relate importantly to clinically relevant features of PPU.

These findings suggest that PPU may represent a behavioral addiction and that interventions helpful in targeting behavioral and substance addictions warrant consideration for adaptation and use in helping men with PPU.

Source:

Gola, M., Wordecha, M, Sescousse, G., Lew-Starowicz, M., Kossowski, B., Wypych, M., Makeig, S., Potenza, M.N., & Marchewka, A. (2017). Can Pornography be Addictive? An fMRI Study of Men Seeking Treatment for Problematic Pornography Use. Neuropsychopharmacology, 42(10), 2021-20131

Research: Mental Well-Being in the Religious and Non-Religious

10/17/2018

Abstract: Previous studies demonstrating a positive relationship between religiosity and mental health have sampled from a highly religious general population with little differentiation between weak religiosity and non-religiosity. Church members are typically compared with non-religious unaffiliated individuals, thus confounding belief with group effects (e.g. social support). The present study examined mental well-being, utilising the full range of certainty of belief or non-belief in God. In the first study, we compared church and secular group members on measures of life satisfaction and emotional stability. The second study used a large survey of the non-religious. A curvilinear relationship was found such that those with higher belief certainty (both confidently religious and atheists) have greater well-being relative to those with low certainty (unsure and agnostics). Multiple regressions controlling for social and demographic variables reduced, but did not eliminate this curvilinear relationship. Mechanisms of well-being may involve a confident worldview rather than religious beliefs themselves.

Galen, L.W. & Kloet, J.D. (2010). Mental well-being in the religious and the non-religious: evidence for a curvilinear relationship, Mental Health, Religion & Culture, 14(7), 673-689.

Research: Are Atheists Implicit Theists?

10/16/2018

Abstract: The Cognitive Science of Religion commonly advances the view that religious beliefs emerge naturally via specific cognitive biases without cultural influence. From this perspective comes the claim that self-proclaimed atheists harbor traces of supernatural thinking. By exploring the potential influence of the cultural learning mechanism Credibility Enhancing Displays (CREDs), which affirms beliefs, current disparities between studies involved in priming the implicit theism of atheists, might be reconciled.

Eighty-eight university students were randomly assigned to either a religious or control prime condition. A dictator game was completed to obtain an indication of pro-social behavior (PSB).

Lifetime theists reported significantly higher religious CREDs exposure levels than lifetime atheists, though not convert atheists. Conversely, lifetime atheists reported significantly lower CREDs exposure scores than convert atheists. Convert atheists in the prime condition were significantly more pro-social than lifetime atheists. Additionally, higher scores on the CREDs exposure measure equated to higher PSB in the religious condition than the control condition.

The results are consistent with the view that supernatural belief formation is an interactive process between both context and content biases, and that in order to accurately test for implicit theism, past personal differences in exposure to religious CREDs should be considered.

Hitzeman, C. & Wastell, C. (2017). Are Atheists Implicit Theists? Journal of Cognition and Culture, 17(1-2), 27-50

Research: Six Types of Non-Belief

10/15/2018

Abstract: Extensive research has been conducted in exploration of the American religious landscape;
however, only recently has social science research started to explore nonbelief in any detail. Research on nonbelief has been limited as most research focuses on the popularity of the
religious “nones” or the complexities of alternative faith expressions such as spirituality.

Through two studies, one qualitative and one quantitative, this research explored how nonbelievers’ self-identify. Study 1 (the qualitative study) discovered that individuals have shared definitional agreement but use different words to describe different types of nonbelief. Through thematic coding, a typology of six different types of nonbelief was observed. Those are Academic Atheists, Activist Atheist/Agnostics, Seeker Agnostics, Antitheists, Non-Theists, and the Ritual Atheists. Study 2 explored the empirical aspects of these types related to the Big Five Domain, Ryff Psychological Well-Being, Narcissistic Personality Inventory, Multidimensional Anger Inventory, Rokeach Dogmatism Scale, and intersections related to religious and spiritual ontology

Discussion: Overall these exploratory correlates of the typology suggest that personality measures have little correlation with varieties of nonbelief. Only the autonomy subscale of the Ryff measure differentiates between various groups in the typology but none of the other subscales reached our accepted level of significance. Likewise, the NEO subdomains offer little in ways of differentiating types with the exception of openness.

More negative measures of personality such as Narcissistic Personality Inventory offers an exception where Anti-Theists (AT) appear to be more narcissistic than others, a finding that may suggest psychological issues involved in strong denial of theism associated with some of the “new atheism”. Other forms of nonbelief may not involve such strong personality involvement that tends towards the negative, a finding consistent with the fact that this group also scores higher on the Dogmatism Scale than any other group in our typology, as well as differing from the Intellectual Atheist/Agnostics (IAA) on the Multidimensional Anger Inventory. Thus, these correlational data are consistent with other empirical studies indicating little power for personality measures to predict either religion or personality.

However, this is not to say that among one type, the Anti-Theists (AT), personality measures suggestive of closed-mindedness as a defense against anger might not be fruitful avenues to explore. However, it is also true that these negative characteristics are not characteristic of the variety of atheists in our typology and remain in this limited sense, an exception.

Just as many scholars have stated that there is no such thing as “religion” in general we put forth that there is also no such thing as “atheism” or “nonreligion” in general – nonreligiosity varies because secular identity and activity is quite multidimensional. More specifically, nonbelieving peoples show great psychological variation in their makeup. Researchers can no longer operate as though a unified psychological profile of “atheists” exist. Past psychological profiles that treat “atheism” as a single entity should be revisited in light of the data presented here.

Silvera, C.F., Thomas J. Coleman III, T.J., Hood, R.W. & Holcombec, J.M. (2014). The six types of nonbelief: a qualitative and quantitative study of type and narrative. Mental Health, Religion & Culture, 17(10), 990–1000

Will robots replace prostitutes?

8/29/2017

What if you have sex with an inanimate object, like a robot? A robot that's programmed to respond to your touch, talk to you and to appear to be human? Would that be acceptable behavior to a loving, holy, just God?

Research states that the technology is almost there. Two researchers from New Zealand claim that they will be revolutionizing the sex industry. The article reports that "Part of their research involved the hypothetical creation of an Amsterdam sex club called “Yub-Yum,” where robot women create a land rife with “sexual gods and goddesses of different ethnicities, body shapes, ages, languages and sexual features.” Douglas Hines, the founder of the world's first sex robot company states, "One of the benefits of sex robots is that they remove exploitation of women from the equation, and the sex trade of underage [partners],” Hines added. “Underage women are exploited to meet the desires of others, whereas with the robots, there is no exploitation of anyone.”

What are the implications of such an invention? Is this the "safe" alternative for men? Since this is not "real" sex, would God approve of such? Let's think about this a bit...

1. Sex with a robot will train the sexual response to someone other than one's spouse.

2. This product will not remove exploitation of women. Sex for hire is hollow. However, it is not as hollow as having sex with a soulless object. One will eventually tire of robotic sex in favor of human sex.

3. To have sex with a robot fashioned after one's desires will reinforce some perversions. For example, if a man is attracted to children, he can have children robots. Eventually, this will become unsatisfactory and the man will want to have sex with an actual child.

4. Jesus, the revolutionary, taught a principle over 2000 years ago that speaks to this. Jesus said that if you lust, you have committed adultery. Jesus made it clear that sin, especially sexual sin, needs to be taken care of at the heart level not the behavior level. Sexual sin starts in the heart.

5. Paul, the author of a good deal of the New Testament, states that joining yourself with a prostitute is the same as uniting Christ with a prostitute. The same principle applies for having sex with a robot. You would be uniting Christ with a robot.

5. Sexual behavior with inanimate objects is not sex. Sex is a loving, passionate, committed physical, emotional and spiritual connection between a man and woman who are married to each other.

Whaddyathink? Sex with a robot? Not me. It's too robotic. I want the real thing. A loving, committed marriage fashioned according to God's design is much more pleasurable. And it's good for you. Research shows that's the best sex.

Will robots replace counselors?

8/28/2017

Using social media can be a little like a free—albeit not very effective—therapy session. People share life events, complain about their problems and offer each another advice, along with lots of FOMO, rants, and vaguebooking.

So Woebot—a chatbot engaging in therapy-like services via Facebook Messenger—seems intriguing. The idea is to help you understand and monitor your moods using a combination of natural language processing and therapeutic expertise. Sounds good, right? Using A.I. via social media to significantly reduce psychological problems like anxiety and depression would be quite a breakthrough. But there are some major hurdles to overcome.

Like the rest of the health care sector all across the world, mental health treatment is in crisis. Therapy and counseling are incredibly labor-intensive, requiring multiple sessions with one expert per client over long periods of time to achieve even modest results. As such, this is an area ripe for Silicon Valley-style disruption—using technology to scale a competitor service to a bigger audience at a lower cost. In the past year, we’ve seen ample evidence of this happening. Ever since Facebook opened its Messenger platform to developers, there’s been an explosion of chatbots, and several of them are explicitly marketed as mental health tools.

Woebot, built by a Stanford team, is one of the first to be scrutinized under empirical research and peer review, and the results were published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research (Mental Health) on June 6. From a flyer posted online, researchers were able to recruit a convenience sample of about 70 participants, mostly white women. While it would be easy to criticize such a lopsided sample, it’s more important to note that at baseline, more than 75 percent scored in the severe range for anxiety symptoms. These people are vulnerable and in need of care and protection.

Participants were randomly assigned to either interacting with the bot (test condition) or were directed to self-help resources (control condition). Before beginning the treatment, Woebot first introduced participants in the test condition to the concepts of cognitive behavioral therapy, which is a type of psychotherapy that encourages clients to restructure their thinking patterns to try to improve their moods. Then Woebot gathered mood data by asking general questions and replied with appropriate empathetic responses. For example, if a participant expressed loneliness, Woebot would reply with something like, “I’m so sorry you’re feeling lonely. I guess we all feel a little lonely sometimes.” (Here’s an example of a Woebot interaction.) Its conversational style also included CBT techniques such as goal-setting and reflecting participants’ mood trends back to them. If a participant reported clinical-level problems like suicide or self-harm, he or she was directed to emergency helplines.

After about two weeks, participants once again completed measures of depressive/anxious symptoms, and positive/negative mood. The study’s lead author said that she was “blown away” by the data, but compared with baseline, no significant between-group differences were observed in terms of anxiety, positive mood, or negative mood. Only on reported depressive symptoms were any significant results achieved. In other words, being assigned to Woebot instead of self-help material made no difference to participants’ mood or anxiety levels.
To be frank, these results aren’t much to write home about. But at the same time, in these times of extraordinarily dysfunction in health care provision, any work that tries to alleviate mental health suffering should be welcomed, if cautiously. While Woebot might not be a cure-all right now, as the authors of the study say, for the 10 million U.S. college students suffering from anxiety and depression, it has the potential to become a useful mental health resource.
However, there’s another wrinkle here, one the study authors don’t mention in their write-up. Because Woebot is built on Messenger, participants’ data is shared not only with the Woebot operators, but with Facebook, too.

Facebook came under fire earlier this year when it was accused of helping advertisers target teenagers by their emotional state—an accusation it strenuously denied. In comment to Slate, Facebook confirmed that it does not offer tools to target ads to people based on their emotional state. Moreover, Facebook also said that it does not target any type of advertising based on the content of Messenger conversations. So, if you use Woebot, you should not receive targeted ads based on the deeply sensitive data you share with it, and hence Facebook. So far, so good.

However, Facebook could not confirm that it had no plans to do so in the future. Of course, Facebook never comments on future product developments, so this is unsurprising, and it doesn’t necessarily mean anything nefarious is in the works. But at the same time, this policy could change, and certainly Facebook has done so in the past. Note, for example, the $122 million fine thrown at Facebook by the European Commission for combining its data with data from WhatsApp—something that it said it “couldn’t” do when it first purchased WhatsApp.

Fundamentally, the social media industry is largely self-regulated, and as a result, so are therapeutic bots like Woebot. Even if they are minimally effective, the people using them are clearly vulnerable and deserve to have their most sensitive information secured indefinitely. Our mental health crisis is not going any time soon, and government and the tech industry have profound responsibilities here. As therapy and counseling are disrupted, we need to make this emerging field safe and secure for all of us.

Ciarán Mc Mahon of Slate magazine wrote this article. For more information, go to: www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2017/07/18/what_research_says_about_woebot_the_facebook_chatbot_therapist.html

Step-dads: Don't do these three things

8/21/2017

Research from the journal, Families in Society has found three important indicators that are certain to create higher levels of step parenting issues and lower levels of relationship satisfaction.

1) Adults in step families who place top priority on their own biological children

2) Step parents who expect their stepchildren to be obedient to them

3) Step parents who believe that the children interfere with the romantic relationship

Here is the abstract from the journal article:

Stepfamilies face many challenges. Research and clinical work with stepfamilies have tended to use the family systems or developmental perspectives, while overlooking how cognitive processes may influence stepfamily functioning. We fill this gap in the literature by analyzing a sample from the Relationship Evaluation (RELATE) questionnaire database to examine the influence of (step)parenting cognitions on stepparenting issues and relationship satisfaction. Results indicate that individuals who report placing top priority on their own biological children expect their stepchildren to be obedient to them, and those who believe that the children interfere with the new parental relationship report higher levels of stepparenting issues and lower levels of relationship satisfaction. Clinical implications and limitations are discussed.

Jensen, Todd & Shafer, Kevin & Larson, Jeffry. (2014). (Step)Parenting Attitudes and Expectations: Implications for Stepfamily Functioning and Clinical Intervention. Families in society: The Journal of Contemporary Human Services, 95, 213-220.

I guess money can buy happiness

8/7/2017

A recent study from The Proceeding of the National Academy of the Sciences of the United States of America, states that money can buy happiness. Actually, the study says that money can buy time. Spending money on time-saving services promotes greater positive feelings. This study is taken from 6,000 people in four countries.

Here is the abstract of the article:

"Despite rising incomes, people around the world are feeling increasingly pressed for time, undermining well-being. We show that the time famine of modern life can be reduced by using money to buy time. Surveys of large, diverse samples from four countries reveal that spending money on time-saving services is linked to greater life satisfaction. To establish causality, we show that working adults report greater happiness after spending money on a time-saving purchase than on a material purchase. This research reveals a previously unexamined route from wealth to well-being: spending money to buy free time."

To find this abstract along with the complete article, go to: www.pnas.org/content/early/2017/07/18/1706541114.full

Going to church might be good for your health

6/12/2017

According to a recent study by Dr Marino Bruce, a Vanderbilt University professor and the associate director of the school's Center for Research on Men’s Health, people who attend worship services may reduce their mortality risk by 55 percent — especially those between the ages of 40 and 65.

In the study, Bruce collected data on over 5,000 people, tracking their church attendance along with such variables as socioeconomic status and health insurance coverage. Using this data, Bruce and his team came up with a statistical model to predict risk of mortality.

The result? Those who did not attend church at all were twice as likely to die prematurely as those who had attended a worship service in the last year.

While Bruce is a Baptist minister, his research isn't tied to any particular faith. He found the results held true in "any place where groups gather together to worship. It could be a church, it could be a temple, it could be a mosque ... It's not only about a particular faith, it's about any faith."

So in the interest of science, there must be an explanation beyond, um, God-smiting nonbelievers, right? Bruce cites social support, a sense of compassion (which he describes as a "feeling that you're doing good or having empathy for others"), and holiness (which he explains as "being a part of something that's greater than oneself").

All of these likely contribute toward reducing stress, which we already know creates inflammation in the body and heightens the risk for disease.

Sounds like one more reason to say "hallelujah!"

This post was taken from a blog post written by Embry Roberts. You can find the original post here: www.today.com/health/going-church-might-be-good-your-health-says-new-study-t112296