The Centrality of Religiosity Scale (CRS) is a measure of the centrality, importance or salience of religious meanings in personality that has been applied yet in more than 100 studies in sociology of religion, psychology of religion and religious studies in 25 countries with in total more than 100,000 participants. It measures the general intensities of five theoretical defined core dimensions of religiosity. The dimensions of public practice, private practice, religious experience, ideology and the intellectual dimensions can together be considered as representative for the total of religious live. From a psychological perspective, the five core-dimensions can be seen as channels or modes in which personal religious constructs are shaped and activated. The activation of religious constructs in personality can be regarded as a valid measure of the degree of religiosity of an individual. The CRS thus derives from the five dimensional measures a combined measure of the centrality of religiosity which is suitable also for interreligious studies. The paper presents the theoretical basis and rationale of its construction with different versions of the CRS in 20 languages with norm values for 21 countries. Furthermore, the paper presents versions of different extension and describes specific modifications that were developed for studies with Buddhists, Hindus and Muslims.

It is generally thought that individuals with Asperger's syndrome and high-functioning autism (AS/HFA) have deficits in theory of mind. These deficits have been previously linked to problems with social cognition. However, we reasoned that AS/HFA individuals' Theory of Mind deficits also might lead to problems with emotion regulation. To assess emotional functioning in AS/HFA, 27 AS/HFA adults (16 women) and 27 age-, gender-, and education-matched typically developing (TD) participants completed a battery of measures of emotion experience, labeling, and regulation. With respect to emotion experience, individuals with AS/HFA reported higher levels of negative emotions, but similar levels of positive emotions, compared with TD individuals. With respect to emotion labeling, individuals with AS/HFA had greater difficulties identifying and describing their emotions, with approximately two-thirds exceeding the cutoff for alexithymia. With respect to emotion regulation, individuals with AS/HFA used reappraisal less frequently than TD individuals and reported lower levels of reappraisal self-efficacy. Although AS/HFA individuals used suppression more frequently than TD individuals, no difference in suppression self-efficacy was found. It is important to note that these differences in emotion regulation were evident even when controlling for emotion experience and labeling. Implications of these deficits are discussed, and future research directions are proposed.

This study investigated the neuronal basis of evaluative judgment. Judgments can be defined as the assessment of an external or internal stimulus on an internal scale and they are fundamental for decisionmaking and other cognitive processes. Evaluative judgments (I like George W. Bush: yes/no) are a special type of judgment, in which the internal scale is related to the person's value system (preferences, norms, aesthetic values, etc.). We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to examine brain activation during the performance of evaluative judgments as opposed to episodic and semantic memory retrieval. Evaluative judgment produced significant activation in the anterior frontomedian cortex (BA 10/9), the inferior precuneus (BA 23/31), and the left inferior prefrontal cortex (BA 45/47). The results show a functional dissociation between the activations in the anterior frontomedian cortex and in the inferior precuneus. The latter was mainly activated by episodic retrieval processes, supporting its function as a multimodal association area that integrates the different aspects of retrieved and newly presented information. In contrast, the anterior frontomedian cortex was mainly involved in evaluative judgments, supporting its role in self-referential processes and in the self-initiation of cognitive processes.

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When faces are turned upside down, recognition is known to be severely disrupted. This effect is thought to be due to disruption of configural processing. Recently, Leder and Bruce (2000, Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology A 53 513-536) argued that configural information in face processing consists at least partly of locally processed relations between facial elements. In three experiments we investigated whether a local relational feature (the interocular distance) is processed differently in upside-down versus upright faces. In experiment 1 participants decided in which of two sequentially presented photographic faces the interocular distance was larger. The decision was more difficult in upside-down presentation. Three different conditions were used in experiment 2 to investigate whether this deficit depends upon parts of the face beyond the eyes themselves; displays showed the eye region alone, the eyes and nose, or the eyes and nose and mouth. The availability of additional features did not interact with the inversion effect which was observed strongly even when the eyes were shown in isolation. In experiment 3 all eyes were turned upside down in the inverted face condition as in the Thatcher illusion (Thompson, 1980 Perception 9 483-484). In this case no inversion effect was found. These results are in accordance with an explanation of the face-inversion effect in which the disruption of configural facial information plays the critical role in memory for faces, and in which configural information corresponds to spatial information that is processed in a way which is sensitive to local properties of the facial features involved.