Using the academic and journalistic coverage of Richard Nixon’s religious life as a case study, this thesis argues that social scientists and commentators pay insufficient attention to religion, even when it is an important factor. In a sample of biographies of Nixon and specialist studies of Nixon’s life and career, nearly all the authors minimized the influence of Nixon’s religious upbringing on his political life, regardless of the author’s own views on Nixon. In stark contrast to this body of work, this paper finds that Nixon’s birth into the Religious Society of Friends (or “Quakers”) shaped his political career. Nixon’s evangelical brand of Quakerism allowed him to make contacts among powerful Quakers like Herbert Hoover and well-placed non-Quaker Protestants like Billy Graham. Quakerism also served Nixon as an emotional support in times of political crisis—a necessity for Nixon, who reacted poorly to stress—and when he suffered a crisis of faith in 1962, his political tactics became noticeably more amoral and vindictive. On a policy level, the Quaker tradition of altruism influenced Nixon’s racial policies for the better. Despite his own racist views and those of his political allies, Nixon was a relatively strong advocate of civil rights at home and abroad. Although this paper acknowledges alternative explanations for this discrepancy, such as political biases and the unavailability of primary sources, these explanations were found to be insufficient. This conclusion raises troubling questions about academic impartiality. Do academics intentionally avoid discussing religion? If so, is this due to anti-Christian or anti-religious feeling, as some studies suggest? And if not, what drives academic avoidance of religion?

The current study examined the association of hostile attributional bias (HAB) with the functions (proactive and reactive) and subtypes (reactive relational and reactive overt) of aggression as well as with perceived provocateur motivation (proactive or reactive) in a high school sample (mean age = 16.51; 50% male; 31% Caucasian). Revisions to a measure of HAB were made both in administration (adding animations/narration) and content (adding perceived provocateur motivation questions). Results indicated that the animation/narration measure showed comparable internal consistency reliability to the written and displayed an increased ability to predict total aggression. However, a unique relationship between HAB and reactive aggression was not found, nor was HAB for specific provocation scenarios (i.e., relational or overt) uniquely associated with the reactive subtypes of aggression. Proactive motives, when controlling for reactive ones, were correlated with HAB, anger to provocation, and aggression. The opposite was not found. Theoretical and clinical implications are discussed.

Magister Artium - MA / Rae and her sister, Alina, are young women who have travelled from Australia to visit their aunt, Trudy, in Ireland. Rae’s suspicions that something is amiss with the arrangement are confirmed when they discover that their parents have been arrested for settling in Australia without the appropriate visas. The two young women, who are half Irish, must remain in Ireland until their parents are able to join them. Rae enrols at a university to continue her studies, and Alina finds a job that requires her to move out. Rae is upset with Alina for leaving, and drops out of contact for a while, but then when she does reach out, her messages aren’t returned. Eventually she goes in search of her sister and finds that Alina has left Dublin without saying where she went. Months pass in fruitless searching. Rae settles down at Trinity College, makes friends, and also befriends Joe, a rough sleeper on the Dublin streets. When she discovers that her sister might be in Galway, Rae travels there, accompanied by two friends. Joe offers to aid them. While there, they encounter someone who claims to know Alina, but demands payment before revealing anything. Rae asks Joe – who is familiar with the backstreets – to deliver the cash. Joe is never seen again, and Rae, after some time, finally admits she has been betrayed. One of her two friends decides to explore the clubs and stumbles on Alina who is working there. When Rae approaches her sister, there is a confrontation with the possessive employer, Murphy, who strikes Alina, putting her in hospital. Alina returns to Dublin, and life resumes where it left off, but then Murphy attempts to take Alina back. Rae hurries home and finds Trudy blocking the door to the house with a shotgun which she fires at Murphy’s knee. The demonstration of protectiveness shows Rae how badly she misjudged her aunt. She then discovers that she misjudged Davin, whom she admired from the beginning but incorrectly assumed he was interested in her sister. The novella ends with a recognition of her flawed perceptions which stands in juxtaposition to her confident judgements of people in the opening chapter.

Study on how fair and balanced the three cable news networks were in their coverage of the 2012 presidential election.

The current research project aimed to investigate how various degrees of psychosis and autism traits were associated with different styles of reasoning. Therefore, a series of five studies were conducted that recruited participants who were considered to reside along different points of the psychosis and autism continua. Measures of intuitive and deliberative reasoning style were employed and were used to ascertain whether differing degrees of psychosis and autism reflected different profiles of reasoning style. In addition, a composite score was devised using the raw scores of measures of psychosis and autism traits to test Crespi and Badcocks (2008) diametric disorders hypothesis and to further explore the relationship between the two measures. Overall, the results revealed some evidence that psychosis traits were associated with a more intuitive relative to deliberative style of reasoning, whereas autism traits were reflective of the reverse profile. The findings were also able to shed further light on the intricate relationship between autism and psychotic spectrum disorders.

Mental representations can be consciously experienced in mental imagery format, and verbal-linguistic format. Mental imagery representations of emotional information can evoke more powerful emotional responses than verbal-linguistic representations of the same information. Biases in mental imagery-based cognition are postulated to play a role in the maintenance of emotional disturbance in depression. Despite growing research, two questions remain: 1) is dysphoria (mild to moderate depression symptoms) associated with mood-congruent bias in the frequency of mental imagery generation; and 2) are such biases related to state emotional experience and emotional response to emotional information in dysphoria? To examine question one, participants varying in levels of dysphoria reported the occurrence of mental imagery in real time under task contexts that were emotional (negative and positive verbal cues) and unemotional (neutral verbal cues). Mental imagery generation was assessed under two task conditions: a) when participants were instructed to generate mental imagery in response to verbal cues (Study 1 & 2); and b) when participants were not instructed to generate mental imagery (or verbal-linguistic representations) during exposure to similar verbal cues (Study 2, 3, & 4). Results from all studies, across both instruction types, showed that dysphoria was associated with a loss of positive bias in mental representation generation, driven by reduced positive representation generation (Study 1, 2 & 4), but also by elevated negative representation generation (Study 1, 2 & 3). Interestingly, evidence of a loss of positive bias was most consistently observed when given neutral verbal cues, but also when given positive verbal cues. However, such dysphoria-linked effects were not disproportionately evident for mental imagery relative to verbal-linguistic representations, when both were allowed to naturally occur in Study 2, 3, & 4. Unexpectedly, dysphoria was associated with reduced tendency to generate negative imagery relative to negative verbal-linguistic representations in Study 2, though this finding was not replicated in Study 3 or Study 4. To examine question two, participants provided state mood ratings in addition to reporting mental representation occurrence during exposure to auditory emotional information (Study 3: verbal cues; Study 4: news stories). Dysphoria and mental representation generation was found to be unrelated to emotional response on negative trials (Study 3 & 4). However, greater occurrence of mental imagery, but not verbal-linguistic representation generation was related to greater positive emotional response on positive trials for individuals with dysphoria (Study 3), and all participants (Study 4). Study 5 analysed existing clinical trial data and found that the vividness of positive future event imagery is related to optimism in depression, such that those able to envision a brighter future are relatively more optimistic, and regain optimism more quickly, than those less able to do so, even when currently depressed. In summary, dysphoria was associated with loss of positive bias in mental representation generation, though such effects were not unique to imagery. Importantly, greater occurrence of mental imagery-based, but not purely verbal-linguistic, representations were associated with greater positive emotional response to positive information, and may hold value as a target for future translational research.

Science thrives when there is a continuous flow of new ideas and diverse generations of scholars contributing to the field. Although academic institutions aim to encourage diverse viewpoints, a culture of atheism among university faculties may unwittingly be contributing to an anti-religious atmosphere. The main focus of this dissertation is to investigate people’s attitudes toward religious individuals, and how these attitudes affect the religious believers’ mental health and academic performance. Study 1 (N = 899) found that people tend to explicitly report that religious believers have lower intelligence, but to implicitly associate them with higher intelligence. Although this is the case, faculty members, particularly those from secular institutions, did not have this implicit association and had the strongest congruity between their explicit and implicit intelligence preferences. Studies 2-3 showed that religious believers of diverse backgrounds reported experiencing overt and covert forms of religious bias, including biases related to their academic ability. Religious believers reported that they encountered more incidences of overt and covert forms of religious bias inside of higher education than outside of academia. Experiences of religious microaggressions significantly predicted higher rates of depression in Study 2 (N = 383) and marginally in Study 3 (N = 129). Finally, Study 4 (N = 169) found that compared to other religious groups, Christians were stereotyped to lack science competency. Study 5 (N = 237) demonstrated that these stereotypes applied to Christian college students and was at a comparable rate to how women are stereotyped to lack scientific competency and interest. Study 6 (N = 93) demonstrated that these negative stereotypes cause Christian college students to become less interested in and identify less with sciences. They also caused Christian college students to underperform on science-relevant tasks, especially those students with a stronger religious identity (Study 7; N = 90). These studies reveal that stereotypes play a key role in pushing religious believers out of science. Implications and future directions in the representation of religious believers in academia and science fields are discussed. This dissertation includes previously published and unpublished co-authored material. / 2021-01-11

Previous research has demonstrated that intuitive judgments of timeloss are often biased: overestimated when a high speed is slowed down and underestimated when a low speed is decreased further. Yet, no findings provide cognitive explanations of the bias. The present study (a) collected numerical judgments of time-loss by assigning participants to seven speed matching problems, and (b) collected verbal protocols of participants judgment processes. To identify different decision rules on the individual level, a spectral analysis of judgments was used. The findings show that the ratio rule was most frequently used and similar to the well researched time-saving bias, a ratio heuristic and a difference heuristic could model a majority of the timeloss bias. The validity of the method is supported by a significant correspondence between the spectral analysis measure and the qualitative analysis for consistent participants. By including affect as a third variable, future research could get a closer understanding of the bias effect in real life and consequently develop strategies that can improve road safety.

The usage of automated decision making-systems by public institutions letting the system decide on the approval, determination or denial of individuals benefits as an example, is an effective measure in making more amount of work done in a shorter time period and to a lower cost than if it would have been done by humans. But still, although the technology has developed into being able to help us in this way, so has also the potential problems that these systems can cause while they are operating. The ones primarily affected here will be the individuals that are denied their benefits, health care, or pensions. The systems can maintain hidden, historical stigmatizations and prejudices, disproportionally affecting members of a certain historically marginalized group in a negative way through its decisions, simply because the systems have learned to do so. There is also a risk that the actual programmer includes her or his own bias, as well as incorrect translation of applicable legislations or policies causing the finalized system to make decisions on unknown bases, demanding more, less or completely other things than those requirements that are set up by the public and written laws. The language in which these systems works are in mathematical algorithms, which most ordinary individuals, public employees or courts will not understand. If suspecting that you could have been discriminated against by an automated decision, the requirements for successfully claim a violation of discrimination in US-, Canadian- and Swedish courts, ECtHR and ECJ demands you to show on which of your characteristics you were discriminated, and in comparison to which other group, a group that instead has been advantaged. Still, without any reasons or explanations to why the decision has been taken available for you as an applicant or for the court responsible, the inability to identify such comparator can lead to several cases of actual indirect discriminations being denied. A solution to this could be to follow the advice of Sophia Moreau’s theory, focusing on the actual harm that the individual claim to have suffered instead of on categorizing her or him due to certain traits, or on finding a suitable comparator. This is similar to a ruling of the Swedish Court of Appeal, where a comparator was not necessary in order to establish that the applicant had been indirectly discriminated by a public institution. Instead, the biggest focus in this case was on the harm that the applicant claimed to have suffered, and then on investigating whether this difference in treatment could be objectively justified. In order for Swedish and European legislation to be able to meet the challenges that can arise through the usage of automated decision making-systems, this model of the Swedish Court of Appeal could be a better suited model to help individuals being affected by an automated decision of a public institution, being potentially indirectly discriminative.

Numeric estimates are influenced by a variety of factors including a person's knowledge and the presence of numeric anchors. In general, greater knowledge leads to more accurate estimates and the presence of anchors decreases accuracy. This dissertation is focused on the relationship between these two factors. At an intuitive level, it seems that increased knowledge should lead to a decrease in anchoring effects. Unfortunately, the research on knowledge and anchoring is quite mixed. This dissertation describes four studies--the first three were experimental and the last was correlational--that addressed two primary questions: 1) Does knowledge level moderate anchoring effects such that greater knowledge in a domain is associated with smaller anchoring effects? 2) Does this relationship depend on the type of knowledge one has? Studies 1 and 2 provided an answer to the first question. In Study 1, participants who studied a list of country populations--i.e., high knowledge participants--were less influenced by anchors than participants who learned irrelevant information. In Study 2, those participants who studied a list of new car prices were less influenced by anchors than participants who learned irrelevant information. In Study 3, participants learned information designed to influence different types of knowledge. The results of Study 3 supported the prediction that only those participants in conditions that increased metric knowledge--and not mapping knowledge--would exhibit reduced anchoring effects. Finally, in Study 4, participants' knowledge was measured and compared to their anchoring effects. Contrary to expectations, none of the knowledge measures were related to the participants' anchoring effects. Theoretical and practical implications, as well as reasons why the last study was not consistent with the first three, are discussed. Taken together, these studies indicate that both the amount and type of knowledge one has are important in determining one's susceptibility to anchoring effects.