Christian missionary views of Islam in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries

Protestant Christian mission to Muslims began in earnest in the nineteenth century with the rise of the evangelical movement. In this, the ‘great century’ of missionary outreach, theologians generally denied the hope of salvation to anyone outside of the Christian faith. Missionary treatises dealing with Islam were written mainly for the purposes of helping foster the work of conversion, of proving the superiority of Christianity in comparison with Islam, and of criticizing the Oriental churches. A few were forerunners of the more tolerant attitude that would characterize much of the more recent missionary reflection on Islam. The twentieth century has seen a change from early predictions of the imminent demise of Islam to a generally greater appreciation for Islam and even for the role of the Prophet Muhammad, although the main theme of evangelical literature is still hope for the ultimate conversion of all Muslims to Christianity. Recent missionary literature on Islam has exhibited a clear tension between the approaches of dialogue and of witness.     

The role of mental illness in the European witch hunts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries

Historians of psychiatry have propagated the view that the witch hunts of sixteenth and seventeenth-century Europe were primarily a persecution of the mentally ill and that demonological concepts of possession and witchcraft impeded psychiatric progress for centuries. The author reviews the evidence marshaled by these historians and examines additional historical material bearing on the psychopathological view. He concludes that the role of mental disorder in the witch hunts has been overinflated by authors with an interest in promulgating the medical model of abnormal behavior. Furthermore, the psychopathological paradigm is based on an outmoded philosophy of science, which results in historical distortion and paradoxes, and on restriction and selectivity in the choice of evidence.     

Chinese child-rearing beliefs: Key dimensions and contributions to the development of culture-appropriate assessment

Socio-cultural perspectives explain inconsistency in Chinese child-rearing research when imported methods and concepts are applied. We sought to elucidate child-rearing belief constructs relevant to Chinese contexts. Exploratory factor analysis identified items representing child-rearing concepts both imported and indigenous to Chinese culture and forming four dimensions: Training, Shame, Authoritative, and Autonomy. Data from parents of preschool-aged children in Hong Kong ( N  = 228) and Taiwan ( N  = 213) were subject to confirmatory factor and scale internal consistency analyses. Results support the conceptual and psychometric coherence of each subscale. Discussion of findings focuses on the benefits of culturally responsive methodology and the potential utility of the scales in child-rearing research with Chinese and other Confucian cultural populations.     

In the last analysis: archetypal themes in the analysis of an elderly patient with early disintegrative trauma

Aspects of the analysis of an elderly patient with early disintegrative experiences are described: separation anxiety, an internalized attack upon vitality, and the fear of dependency were prominent features of the transference/countertransference relationship, while the search for meaning as death drew nearer continued to be the central theme. The patient's many dreams reveal a wealth of images whose complex interlinkings provided evidence of a heightened and energized individuation process aiming at the integrity of personality.     

Intermale fighting and predatory behavior in house mice: An analysis of behavioral content

Two forms of aggression, intermale and predatory, wwere compared on the basis of behavioral content. Male wild mice were presented with opponents of two types, nonaggressive male mice and crickets, and the amounts of time spent in each of 18 behaviors were recorded. Results from analyses of variance and principal components analyses indicated that the structure of behavioral content differs greatly for intermale fighting and predatory behavior. It was, therefore, concluded that the integrated patterns of beahvior were controlled by separate mechanisms for predatory versus intermale aggression.     

A brief history of primary prevention in the twentieth century: 1908 to 1980

While primary prevention is a much talked about and debated topic in contemporary psychology, it has a considerable history. This paper critically traces primary prevention, philosophy and practice, in the 20th century. Beginning with the mental hygiene movement (1908-1960), the paper progresses to examine the child guidance movement (1920-1955), the eugenics movement (1860-1955), the initial era of federal involvement (1930s, 1940s) as well as significant research, events, and legislation in the decades between 1950 and 1980. The paper concludes with a synopsis of the major themes revealed by the review and suggestions for future efforts in prevention.     

Adolescents' Political Socialization in Changing Contexts: An International Study in the Spirit of Nevitt Sanford

The recently completed IEA Civic Education Study collected data from 140,000 adolescent students in a total of 29 countries. A recent examination of the work of Nevitt Sanford shows that many aspects of the IEA Civic Education Study are parallel to methods and conclusions of his research from the 1950s through the 1970s and partake in the spirit of his work as well as extending it. These parallels include the use of a contextualized approach in the study of adolescents' socialization and the value of studying groups with extreme response patterns.     

Maintenance rehearsal: the key to the role attention plays in storage and forgetting

Research with the maintenance-rehearsal paradigm, in which word pairs are rehearsed as distractor material during a series of digit recall trials, has previously indicated that low frequency and new word pairs capture attention to a greater degree than high frequency and old word pairs. This impacts delayed recognition of the pairs and interferes with immediate digit recall. The effect on immediate digit recall may provide the missing converging evidence for the role of attention in memory. In the current study, 3 experiments were conducted to further investigate the role of attention capture and novelty in storage and forgetting. In addition to the previously established effects, the novelty of switching rehearsal between 2 pairs was found to impair both digit recall and memory for the first pair. The attentional effects we obtained were dependent upon participant expectation, and forgetting appears to be due to interference with consolidation rather than decay or traditional associative interference. Finally, the attentional effects we observed in associative recognition were primarily reflected in a lowering of the false alarm rate with increases in the strength of the parent pairs. Although dual-process models can accommodate this finding on the assumption that recollection is invoked at test alongside familiarity, we showed that the level of recall in this paradigm is so small that recollection can be ruled out. Accordingly, our results are challenging for the existing models of associative recognition to accommodate.     

Emotion Socialization in the Context of Family Risks: Links to Child Emotion Regulation

The current study expands upon the extant literature by examining the influence of contextual risk factors (e.g., parental psychological distress, household income, educational attainment) on parental responses to children’s emotional experiences. Participants included 97 ethnically and demographically diverse mother–child dyads with children ranging in age from 7 to 12. Mothers reported indicators of supportive and unsupportive emotion socialization practices, and measures of child emotion regulation and emotion dysregulation. Higher scores on the familial risk index were positively related to increased emotion dysregulation and negatively related to decreased emotion regulation through mediated effects of mothers’ unsupportive reactions to children’s negative emotional expressions. These findings suggest the importance of considering contextual influences on the emotion socialization process and offer potential avenues to foster adaptive emotional development in the context of high risk.     

Exploring the role of the Amazon effect on customer expectations: An analysis of user-generated content in consumer electronics retailing

While Amazon's disruption of the retail market has been associated with significant changes in consumer behavior, empirical studies on how interacting with Amazon has changed customers' expectations toward other offline/online retailers remain scarce. Such Amazon-driven perceptions of service attributes are sometimes referred to as the ‘Amazon effect’. After clarifying the meaning of the Amazon effect and reviewing the studies on consumer complaints online, this paper aims to identify key triggers for the Amazon effect from consumer comments on social media. Based on natural language processing techniques, a content and sentiment analysis of users' comments drawn from the Facebook pages of three leading consumer electronics retailers in Italy over a two-year span (2016–2018) was used to evaluate the dissatisfaction toward these retailers associated to Amazon-related service attributes. The findings show that there is a wide diffusion of consumer comments and service complaints related to the Amazon effect on consumer electronics retailers, especially regarding price, customer service, in-store staff, and post-purchase support. Compared with corresponding evaluations on the Italian Amazon website, the negative sentiments revealed in consumers' comments on Facebook suggest that the Amazon's service standards have raised consumer expectations and have made consumers less satisfied when they interact with other retailers. We argue the need for further research to better clarify Amazonification in terms of customer impatience and dissatisfaction in general, also going beyond price and logistics issues, which are usually considered as the main constitutive factors.     

Six in one hand,half a dozen in the other: An ontological content analysis of radical Islam and the Christian right

The purpose of this paper is to examine the logics of justification embedded in the discourse of radical Islam and fundamentalist Christianity. Proponents of either side mostly suggest that their ideological system stands in opposition to the other. But such opposition holds only for the substantive content of these religious ideologies, not necessarily their underlying logics. That is, they indeed worship different deities, practice different customs and rituals, and in many respects, see the world in very different ways. However, our analysis examines the logical construction of their respective ideological discursive justifications, finding that differences in content are nonetheless underpinned by a remarkably similar system of logic. Previous comment on underlying similarities between these religions has been based on a sense of their affective tenor, observations of their similar rhetoric and methods of activism and otherwise random fragments of coincidence. We instead apply an ontological schema to paradigmatic discursive examples of each, thereby illustrating that their core logics are fundamentally the same.