James Huchingson's Constructive Theology

James Huchingson's book, Pandemonium Tremendum: Chaos and Mystery in the Life of God , is an artistic improvisation on recurrent themes in the dialogue between religion and science. Around the cantus firmus of the Pandemonium Tremendum Huchingson composes a grand metaphysical composition that is glorious in its detail, magnificent in its overarching themes, and careful in its attention to context. Much like a suspended chord between two different harmonies, Huchingson's theological composition dangles the reader in the tensions of religion and science, modernity and postmodernity, particulars and universals, God and the world. Although this book is surely a cutting-edge development in the ongoing corpus of religion and science, I am most excited about its constructive theological provocations. This is a work in progress, a composition in the making.     

亲子沟通的三层次模型:理论、工具及在小学生中的应用

目前的亲子沟通研究存在测量工具缺乏理论依据、测量层次和内容混乱等问题.本研究在系统论思想的指导下提出亲子沟通的三层次模型,从元素、关系和系统三个层面考察亲子沟通状况,并以此模型为基础编制了相应测量工具.经过文献梳理、理论建构、工具编制等环节,逐步完善了模型和相应测量工具.以371名小学五、六年级儿童为被试,检验了亲子沟通量表的可靠性和有效性,并考察亲子沟通基本状况.结果表明,(1)亲子沟通量表的信、效度指标达到了心理测量学要求,能够用于相关实证研究中;(2)被试家庭中,父母的沟通能力优于儿童,母子沟通质量优于父子沟通,母亲的沟通地位比父亲高;(3)父母的倾听能力能有效预测亲子沟通质量,提高父子沟通质量是让父子和母子两种沟通更协调的主要途径.     

论传播伦理学的理论建设

传播的基本属性决定了传播的道德属性 ,传播在其过程中深受社会道德的制约 ,因而 ,从理论上探讨传播伦理的性质特点及其与社会道德的关系 ,论述了传播伦理学的内涵、研究对象和任务及学科属性 ,在当今尤显重要。     

Listening to the Sound of Silence: Gender Roles and Communication about Sex in Puerto Rico

Puerto Rican women are at high risk for the heterosexual transmission of HIV. I examined social and interpersonal aspects of communication about sex in regard to safer sex practices within a specific cultural context. Participants in this study were 42 heterosexual Puerto Rican adults living in Puerto Rico, who ranged in age from 18 to 56 years. Participants were interviewed regarding their sexual communication, sexual practices, and their perceptions regarding the roles of culture and gender in the practice of safer sex. Inductive qualitative analysis showed that three factors limit meaningful communication about sex in Puerto Rico: (1) machismo, (2) the changing role of virginity, and (3) the silencing of both men and women. Implications for theory-based inventions informed by an interpersonal communication perspective are discussed.This research was supported by the Northeastern University Provost’s Research and Development Fund.     

Chaotic attractors in the therapeutic system 1

Because little research had been done on the presence and role of latent communication in the context of team‐conducted family therapy, the writers set out to monitor unconscious responses generated under these conditions. Specifically, they investigated an ongoing family treatment situation conducted according to the “reflecting team model.” One team of therapists handles the actual treatment session, while the other observes from behind a one‐way mirror. During the course of a session, the second team makes suggestions to the treatment team either by telephone or by calling the therapists out of the treatment room.

As the project developed, the writers found that the unconscious responses of both family and treatment teams indicated a process at work beyond the conscious intentions of the participants. That is, the therapeutic enterprise was functioning as a dynamical system, whose increasing complexity suggested a self organizing principle at work. This paper traces the development of the system's movement toward greater complexity, identifies the specific interventions that indicate this process, describes how all participants demonstrated a high degree of resonance and synchronization with this overarching‐self organizing pattern. This paper serves to alert therapists to the role of unconscious communication within the therapeutic system and postulates that the generation of form within psychotherapy follows many of the same self organizing processes found in other human and non human systems.     

Effectiveness in top management group meetings: The role of goal clarity,focused communication,and learning behavior

Bang, H., Fuglesang, S. L., Ovesen, M. R. & Eilertsen, D. E. (2010). Effectiveness in top management group meetings: The role of goal clarity, focused communication, and learning behavior. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, 51, 253–261. To explore the relationship between goal clarity, focused communication, learning behavior, and team effectiveness (i.e., task performance, relationship quality, and member satisfaction), self‐report and observer data from eight top management groups that processed 56 agenda items during meetings were analyzed. We found that goal clarity and focused communication was positively related to team effectiveness. The effect of goal clarity on team effectiveness was partially mediated by focused communication. Speaking up when a goal was unclear increased focused communication, task performance and relationship quality. Speaking up when the discussion was off track was not related to task performance and member satisfaction, and was negatively related to relationship quality. These findings have implications for how to conduct an effective management meeting.     

Connecting theory to fat talk: Body dissatisfaction mediates the relationships between weight discrepancy,upward comparison,body surveillance,and fat talk

The fat talk literature is meager in terms of offering theoretical explanations for women's self-disparaging communication. The research presented here sought to establish a relationship between three prominent body image theories – self-discrepancy theory, social comparison theory, and objectification theory – and fat talk by proposing body dissatisfaction as a potential mediating mechanism. Young adult women (N = 201) completed an online questionnaire. As predicted, results revealed that body dissatisfaction significantly mediated the relationships between weight discrepancy, upward comparison, body surveillance and fat talk. Effect size estimates indicated that the size of each indirect effect was medium in magnitude.     

The Challenger Disaster And The Revival Of Rhetoric In Organizational Life

Explanations of the cause of the Challenger disaster by the Presidential Commission and by communication scholars are flawed. These explanations are characterized by a common tendency to emphasize the technical and procedural aspects of organizational life at the expense of the cognitive and ethical. Rightly construed, the Challenger disaster illustrates both the need for a revived art of rhetoric and the importance of putting in place the political and social conditions that make this art efficacious in furthering cognitive understanding and ethical conduct.     

公共决策中的框架效应：理论解释及影响因素

公共决策中的框架效应是指在公共决策情境中, 人们的决策行为受媒体或领导人对同一问题的框架表述形式的影响而表现出不同决策偏好的现象。目前, 研究者对这一现象的解释主要有预期理论、查询理论和模糊痕迹理论。公共决策中框架效应的影响因素主要包括价值取向、知识水平、人际沟通、情绪以及框架的特征等。未来的研究需要从公共决策中框架效应的理论解释及神经机制、跨文化研究以及研究方式和应对策略等方面进一步探讨。     

Chaos and God's Abundance: An Ontology of Variety in the Divine Life

The primordial chaos of Genesis 1 may be understood as the Pandemonium Tremendum (or PT), the infinite field of variety or abundance within God. The concept of variety is taken from Claude Shannon's theory of communication. Especially significant is Shannon's notion that communication is the limitation of variety through decision processes. In one model of the divine life suggested by the theory, the PT is the boundless source of potential reaped by an agential God in the act of creation as a communication process. Other models for creation include the PT in a biased mode and creatures themselves as decision agents.     

性别刻板印象的人际传播特点研究——基于社会认同理论或社会支配理论?

为探讨性别刻板印象的传播更符合社会认同理论还是社会支配理论的假设,采用单一复述故事法来研究不同性别的传播者、故事主人公和听众在传播一致性性别刻板印象信息和不一致性别刻板印象信息的过程中所表现出的特点。结果发现:男性更少地传播不利于维持阶层差异的不一致性刻板印象,女性更多地传播打破现有阶层划分的男性不一致刻板印象。这些传播特点都较为支持社会支配理论的假设。。     

名人广告效果的影响因素及其理论探讨

名人广告是通过将产品品牌与名人形象或声誉相联系而期望提升产品附加值的广告,这是现代广告中最为常见的诉求方式之一。现有研究发现,名人广告的传播效果明显受到来自名人自身的特点、产品与广告特点、受众状态、及广告播放环境等诸多因素的影响。学者们利用参照群体模型、联想学习理论、4“Fs”模型等对名人广告效应进行理论解释。但现有研究也依然存在一些问题,如影响来源有待扩展、研究方法有待创新、生态效度偏低等。     

Dialogue games: Conventions of human interaction

Natural dialogue does not proceed haphazardly; it has an easily recognized episodic structure and coherence which conform to a well developed set of conventions. This paper represents these conventions formally in terms related to speech act theory and to a theory of action.The major formal unit, the dialogue game, specifies aspects of the communication of both participants in a dialogue. We define the formal notion of dialogue games, and describe some of the important games of English. Dialogue games are conventions of interactive goal pursuit. Using them, each participant pursues his own goals in a way which sometimes serves the goals of the other. The idea of dialogue games can thus be seen as a part of a broader theoretical perspective which characterizes virtually all communication as goal pursuit activity.We also define and exemplify the property of Motivational Coherence of dialogues. Motivational Coherence can be used as an interpretive principle in explaining language comprehension.Actual dialogue games have a kind of causal connectedness which is not a consequence of their formal properties. This is explained in terms of a theory of action, which is also seen to explain a similar attribute of speech acts.     

Parents‐in‐law's topic avoidance: Understanding the role of interaction goals and relational characteristics

Utilizing dual logic from a multiple goals and relational turbulence theory, this study examined parents‐in‐law's interaction goals for topic avoidance with their children‐in‐law. Data from 159 parents‐in‐law revealed that multiple and conflicting goals were associated with parents‐in‐law's topic avoidance. Furthermore, relational parameters (i.e., relational uncertainty and partner influence) were associated with the goals in‐laws pursued. Results augment theorizing on a multiple goals perspective, relational turbulence, and topic avoidance, as well as theoretically ground the study of in‐law communication.     

Efficient Communication in Written and Performed Music

Since its inception, Shannon's information theory has attracted interest for the study of language and music. Recently, a wide range of converging studies have shown how efficient communication pervades language, from phonetics to syntax. Efficient principles imply that more resources should be assigned to highly informative items. For instance, average information content was shown to be a better predictor of word length than frequency, revisiting the famous Zipf's law. However, in spite of the success of the efficient communication framework in the study of language and speech, very little work has investigated its relevance in the analysis of music. Here, we examine the organization of harmonic information in two large corpora of Western music, one made of MIDI files directly sequenced from scores, and the other made of MIDI recordings of live performances of highly skilled piano players. We show that there is a clear positive relationship between (contextual) information content of harmonic sequences and two essential musical properties, namely duration and loudness: the more unexpected a harmonic event is, the longer and the louder it is.     

Grounding as a facilitator in Anglo-Canadian and Mainland Chinese conversations

This study examined whether a short training in grounding strategies could improve intercultural communication. Forty intercultural dyads (Anglo-Canadians and Mainland Chinese) were randomly assigned to experimental and control groups. Prior to their conversations the experimental groups received 10–15 min training on grounding while the control groups received no training. The trained dyads performed significantly better than the untrained dyads in grounding, speaker presentation and listener recall, thus documenting that the 10–15 min training on grounding was fruitful in improving intercultural communication. Grounding training may open a new avenue for reducing intercultural miscommunication, thus improving information transmission.     

贬损型幽默:笑声能化解敌意吗?

贬损型幽默指包含贬损意味同时令人发笑的信息。释放论、优越论、失谐?解决理论与良性进犯理论尝试解释了其心理机制。贬损不一定好笑,群体身份和态度、接收者与贬损对象的心理距离以及人格、文化差异等均会影响幽默效果。贬损型幽默可以起到释放偏见与表达社会支配倾向的作用,对人际交往的作用则不一致。贬损型幽默的整合性过程模型串联描述了贬损型幽默的机制、前因和后效,可作为未来研究的框架。未来亦可继续探讨贬损型幽默的消极影响,以及其对群际关系和社会公平的潜在积极作用,并关注到中国社会文化背景下的贬损型幽默。     

亲子交流与儿童心理理论的获得和发展：文化的视角

已有研究表明个体心理理论的获得和发展既有文化普遍性, 又表现出文化特异性。为了探讨儿童心理理论发展的影响因素, 越来越多的研究者开始关注社会交流的作用。亲子交流是儿童早期社会交流中很重要的组成部分, 与儿童心理理论的获得和发展密切相关。文章分别比较了抚养者的亲子谈话和儿童情景记忆的中西文化差异, 以及它们与心理理论发展的关系来理解中国儿童心理理论获得与发展的特异性, 最后提出了一些未来研究需要进一步探讨的关键问题。     

Organizational Support,Job Resources,Soldiers’ Motivational Profiles,Work Engagement,and Affect

The authors examined the relationships between soldiers’ motivational profiles and work correlates. Results showed that the profiles differentially related to perceived organizational support and work engagement in both samples, as well as to communication, supervisor support, and positive and negative affect in Sample 2. Specifically, soldiers with the highest autonomous motivation scores displayed the highest levels of perceived organizational support and work engagement. Moreover, the highest levels of autonomous motivation were associated with the highest levels of communication, supervisor support, and positive affect. Finally, soldiers with low to moderate levels of autonomous motivation reported higher levels of negative affect than those characterized by high autonomous motivation scores. Theoretical and practical implications of the findings are discussed.