A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Ethics Board: Studying the Meaning of Farm Life for Farm Children

What can one expect to unfold when they choose to do a face-to-face study of children on the farm and their use of space in rural southwestern Ontario? The process of getting the research off the ground from an ethics point of view was one where it was anything but normative, and to a large extent, a grueling process. This article situates the researcher’s dilemma and lays out the unfolding of the research process with reference to the Tri-Council Policy Statement on Ethical Conduct for Research Involving Humans and the major components found to trouble a research ethics board on a university campus. Last, academic freedom and the rights of researchers are considered in the context of undertaking the proposed research agenda.     

DNA Fingerprinting and the Offertory Prayer: A Sermon

This Christian sermon uses a DNA lab experience as a basis for theological reflection on ourselves and our offering. Who are we to God? What determines the self that we offer? Can the alphabet of DNA shed light for us on the Word of God in our lives? This first attempt to introduce the language and laboratory environment of genetic testing (represented by DNA fingerprinting) within a parish preaching context juxtaposes liturgical, scientific, and biblical language and settings for fresh insights.     

Witnessing to Hope in the Christian Community Through Irony

The concept of witnessing to hope reminds us that nurturing hope is fundamentally a communal endeavor. In the Christian tradition, this witnessing takes a particular form. It involves the use of the ironic imagination: Death leads to new life, the poor are considered blessed, and the faithful boast in their suffering. It is argued that a central pastoral task is stimulating the ironic imagination. While this can take place in a number of settings, the focus here is on public worship. Practical examples of how this task might be executed are offered.

意义程度不同的对偶材料迁移效果的实验研究

通过两个对偶学习实验探讨了对偶材料的意义性对两种类型的迁移效果的影响 ,即刺激相同、反应不同的迁移类型和刺激不同、反应相同的迁移类型。从广州华南师范大学低年级随机选出 5 6名大学生 ,采取组内设计 ,自变量分无意义词对、抽象词对、具体词对三种水平 ;要求每名被试依次完成三种水平全部学习。依据前后学习成绩之差 ,考察三种水平下迁移效果的变化。结果表明 :当对偶材料意义性逐渐增大时 ,在刺激相同、反应不同的条件下 ,产生负迁移的程度逐渐增大 ;在刺激不同、反应相同的条件下 ,产生迁移的效果不受影响。     

信仰现状的心理学研究

信仰在满足个体精神需要、维护社会秩序、促进社会安定及完善道德规范体系等方面起着极其重要的作用。本文试图从心理学角度以“中国民众精神信仰与社会安定意识”的实证性研究为依据,揭示我国工人、农民、知识分子、个体户和大学生五个群体的信仰现状,并分析信仰弱化的根源及其教育对策。     

想象对大学生内隐刻板印象的影响研究

通过对大学生在三种想象条件下性别-职业刻板印象的IAT的结果的对比进行实验。研究表明:反刻板印象想象策略的干预效果明显,刻板印象的内隐效应在明显地减弱;即使是大学生,在性别-职业刻板印象上也存在内隐效应,而且没有性别差异;内隐刻板印象具有一定的适应性,在内隐的和无意识的水平上反刻板印象想象无法完全消除刻板印象。     

A randomized controlled pilot study evaluating Worry Less,Live More: The Mindful Way Through Anxiety Workbook

ABSTRACT

Effective interventions for generalized anxiety exist, but barriers to treatment prevent their broad dissemination. Commercially available self-help materials may help bridge this gap, but few have been empirically evaluated. This study compared self-reported change in generalized anxiety symptomology and associated problems between community members with excessive worry who were randomly assigned to receive the Worry Less, Live More: The Mindful Way through Anxiety Workbook (n = 35) and those in a delayed condition (n = 29). Participants in the workbook condition reported significantly greater reductions between baseline and 11-week follow-up in self-reported worry (η ² =.15), general anxiety/tension (η ² =.13), and anxiety (η ² =.24) than those in the delayed condition, although no statistically significant differences across condition on changes in depression, functional impairment or acceptance were detected. This pilot study provides support for continued research examining the efficacy of acceptance-based behavioral therapy delivered in a self-help format.     

不同适应水平小学生情绪体验评价比较--关于小学生自我调节机制的一项研究

本研究选取发展良好与适应不良的三－－五年级小学生为被试,用问卷形式向他们呈现各种情景,要求被试评价自己对情景的情绪体验。通过比较分析两组被试的情绪评价得分,揭示被试的主观意义特征。被试的反应显示,两组被试之间存在着内部强化机制差异和交往价值取向差异,适应不良学生表现出对负性意义敏感和表达的淡化。     

Circumstances of Death and Complicated Grief: Indirect Associations Through Meaning Made of Loss

Losses by violent means and the loss of primary attachment figures may increase the likelihood of developing a chronic and severe grief response (referred to as complicated grief, or CG). Path analysis was used to examine the relationships between these risk factors and CG symptoms. College student participants filled out online questionnaires relating to their bereavement. Analyses provided support for statistical models whereby meaning made of the loss fully mediated the association between cause of death and CG symptoms and partially mediated the association between relationship to the deceased and CG symptoms. Although based on cross-sectional data, these findings provide additional support for meaning-oriented understandings of adaptation to loss.     

Calling a Thing What It Is: A Lutheran Approach to Whiteness

The July 2013 acquittal of George Zimmerman in killing of African American teenager Trayvon Martin and the aftermath demonstrated that America is not yet cured from “the cancer of whiteness” that infects the heart of American Christianity. This article interrogates “whiteness” as a pressing American and religious issue. It looks to Martin Luther's theology of the cross as a way to both expose the sinfulness of whiteness and to offer a framework for dislodging it.     

A serious misunderstanding: synchronicity and the generation of meaning

Abstract: This paper points to the problem caused by the fact that numerous academic ‘Jung studies’ are conducted on the basis of the English translation of Jung's works without any knowledge of his original texts and illustrates it with the misconstrual that Jung's concept of synchronicity suffered in the studies of many recent authors, as exemplified by two articles in the September 2011 issue of the JAP. The translation of ‘sinngemäße Koinzidenz’ as ‘meaningful coincidence’ seduced those writers to take synchronistic ‘meaning’ as meaning the meaningfulness of life or even as ‘transcendent meaning’, which is incompatible with Jung's synchronicity concept, and to replace Jung's strictly intellectual project of establishing an explanatory principle for synchronistic events (in addition to the principle of causality for all other events) by the fundamentally different project of focusing on the impact that such events may have for the experiencing subjective mind, on ‘human meaning‐making’, and, with a decidedly anti‐intellectual bias, of hoping for ‘shifts into non‐rational states of mind’.     

The Atomistic Self versus the Holistic Self in Structural Relation to the Other

I argue that meaning or significanceper se, along with the capacity to be conscious thereof, and the values, motives and aspirations, etc. central to the constitution of our intrinsic personal identities, arise, as indeed do our extrinsic social identities, and our very self-consciousness as such, from socio-cultural structures and relations to others. However, so far from our identities and behavior therefore being determined, I argue that the capacity for critical reflection and evaluation emerge from these same structural relations, the more complex and quintessentially human aspects of our behavior being explained not in terms of responses to stimuli but as choices reflecting our evaluation of meaningful or significant alternatives. Finally I provide theoretical grounds for accepting the existence of other subjects and give a holistic, as opposed to a dialectical, account of the way individuals may challenge and change the very socio-cultural ways of relating to and interacting with others so central to constituting their capacities and identities.     

认知复杂性与意识水平:Zelazo理论述评

Zelazo等人提出的认知复杂性和控制理论、意识水平模型认为可在问题解决框架内理解执行功能,且执行功能的变化可根据儿童形成和使用的最大规则复杂性的变化来描述,而规则复杂性的变化可根据儿童意识水平的变化来解释。Zelazo的理论提出后受到不少研究者的关注,但也存在一些问题和不足。     

Near-Death Experience,Consciousness, and the Brain: A New Concept about the Continuity of Our Consciousness Based on Recent Scientific Research on Near-Death Experience in Survivors of Cardiac Arrest

In this article first some general aspects of near-death experience will be discussed, followed by questions about consciousness and its relation to brain function. Details will be described from our prospective study on near-death experience in survivors of cardiac arrest in the Netherlands, which was published in the Lancet in 2001. In this study it could not be shown that physiological, psychological, or pharmacological factors caused these experiences after cardiac arrest. Neurophysiology in cardiac arrest and in a normal functioning brain will be explained. Finally, implications for consciousness studies will be discussed, and how it could be possible to explain the continuity of our consciousness. Scientific study of NDE pushes us to the limits of our medical and neurophysiologic ideas about the range of human consciousness and mind–brain relation.     

不同适应水平小学生情境投射反应比较--小学生自我调节机制的一项研究

本研究选取发展良好与适应不良的三—-五年级小学生为被试,用完成句子的形式进行投射测验,以比较分析被试对于句子呈现情境的主观意义感受特征。结果表明,两组被试在学习任务完成后的体验、集体的地位感和人际交往的亲和性与支持感等方面主观意义感受存在明显的差异。数项结果分析显示,适应不良的被试可能存在着两种类型的反应。     

Crossan on the Couch, Along with the Rest of Us: Part Two: Six Proposals Toward a New Paradigm for a Psychologically Realistic Approach to the Search for the Historical Jesus as Suggested by the Work of Hal Childs

Building on the theoretical basis spelled out in my first article on Hal Childs' The Myth of the Historical Jesus and the Evolution of Consciousness, the present article engages in dialogue with Crossan's 2000 autobiography, A Long Way From Tipperary. The dialogue focuses on six proposals emerging from Childs' work that advocate the inclusion of psychological realism in rethinking the task, practice, and outcome of historical Jesus research. The six proposals are as follows: first, that psychological realism is an essential part of historical realism; second, that unconscious factors are to be considered at work in the viewer as well as in the viewed in historical Jesus research; third, that every reconstruction of the historical Jesus is mythic; fourth, that the preunderstanding that the Jesus scholar brings to historical Jesus research is generated within a hermeneutical circle constituted by a vast web of relationships, purposes, and meanings that include every aspect of the scholar's life; fifth, that the final goal of historical Jesus research is not the facts about the historic Jesus, but the meaning of these facts as archetypal images for self-understanding, world-understanding, and the evolution of consciousness; and sixth, that the purpose of the Gospel is to evoke new archetypal projections in the reader that can lead to new incarnations of the archetypal Self awakened and informed by the story of Jesus, often as recovered by the Jesus historian.     

文章结构清晰度对修改的影响研究

研究了文章结构清晰度对文章修改的影响。高低水平的作者各分别修改结构清晰度不同的材料。实验结果表明,文章修改质量的水平差异显著;文章结构清晰有助于修改者在修改过程中建构文章的整体模式,从而促进意义错误的修改。文章结构清晰度对修改的影响主要是通过影响工作记忆资源的分配而实现的。     

任务图式对文章修改的影响研究

本研究探讨任务图式对文章修改的影响。高低水平的作者先完成一个写作任务,再修改文章的初稿。修改时,实验组学生先接受关于正确修改的任务图式指导,控制组学生则直接进行修改。实验结果表明,任务图式指导有明显的主效应,高低水平作者均提高了对字面错误与意义错误的正确修改,而水平间的差异主要表现在意义错误的修改上。本研究还分析了任务图式指导对修改的字数(包括改变意义与保留意义的字数)、修改的句法水平(包括字、词和句子)以及修改的方式(包括插入、替换、删除和移动句子)的影响。     

Cognitive Neuroscience, Temporal Ordering, and the Human Spirit

Understanding purpose and intent requires attention to our experience of time. Cognitive neuroscientific research into the functional and neural substrates of higher cognitive functions have direct bearing on the experience of temporal ordering. Consciousness, located within the short span of working memory, is made cognitively possible and evolutionarily valuable by biological constraints in time. These constraints, including our longevity, make thought about more extended events both possible and useful. Such cognitive processes, rooted in the neurophysiology of cortical function, are a sine qua non for the construction of meaning, relationship, morality, and purposes that may extend beyond our mortality. Research in the cognitive neurosciences is overviewed, and implications are discussed for questions of mortality, design and intention, the reconstruction of meaning, and the experience of eternity.     

儒学和之道的诠释与反思

“和”是儒学之道的最高点。作为核心议题,和贯穿于儒家学术讨论的各个层面。“和”在字源上与音乐相关,其主旨有别于“同”,与德行修养、政治教化、生活实践相关联。儒家多在天人关系的语境中阐述“和”,认为天人在根本上是和谐而非对立的。依据对天的不同理解,儒家天人和谐思想呈现为两大主张:人与主宰之天合一、人与自然之天协同。同时,儒家关于和的论述并不仅仅是一种探寻形而上之奥秘的理论尝试。这一理论具有很强的化解冲突、建立秩序的实践性功能。作为一种救治方案,和道在人的领域具有人我、家庭和国家三个向度,追求一种动态的有序。