Discerning the Signs of the Times

This article offers a close reading of the six reports from the 4th Assembly of the WCC in Uppsala 1968. The assembly was keenly in tune with the worldwide upheavals of the year. It indeed sought to discern the signs of the time and produced a number of creative suggestions, for example by emphasizing the aspect of inclusiveness in catholicity, by stressing the multilateral dimension of mission, and not least by highlighting the churches' inherent responsibility to be agents of justice and peace in a fractured world. Uppsala 1968 proved to name in a prophetic way crucial issues that remain on the agenda for worldwide Christianity: class, economy, isolationism, racism, the arms race. But today the churches are also confronted with new and renewed issues such as post‐colonialism, migration, ecology, gender, and a theological grounding of the church‐s existence in the world. The article concludes by proposing table fellowship as a possibility for such theological grounding.     

Signs and demonstration in Aristotle

In this paper, I explore the contrast drawn by Aristotle in two parallel passages of the Posterior Analytics (I.6, 75a28–37 and II.17, 99a1–4) between ‘signs’ and ‘demonstration’. I argue that while at APo. I.6 Aristotle contrasts demonstration proper with a deductively valid sign-syllogism (the tekmērion of APr. II.27), at APo. II.17 the contrast is rather between a demonstration proper and a deductively invalid sign-syllogism (the sēmeion in the strict sense of APr. II.27).     

Suicide Signs on the Rorschach

This paper reviews the literature concerning the assessment of suicide using the Rorschach and updates the important developments since Goldfried, Stricker, and Weiner's comprehensive review of the literature in 1971. Special attention is given to those indicators which show the most support in the literature and are most efficient to use. The presence or absence of any of these signs in a patient's record should not be taken to signify the presence or absence of suicidal ideation. However, the presence of even one of these indicators does provide a warning to the clinician, indicating that further exploration in this area may be warranted. Knowledge of the many suicidal indicators on projective tests places the clinician in a better position to predict such destructive behavior and intervene appropriately.     

Further Evidence for Nonspecificity of Theory of Mind in Preschoolers: Training and Transferability in the Understanding of False Beliefs and False Signs

In a training study, the authors addressed whether or not preschoolers' difficulty with false belief is due to a domain-specific problem with mental states. Following Slaughter's (1998 Slaughter , V. ( 1998 ). Children's understanding of pictorial and mental representations . Child Development , 69 , 321 – 332 .[Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) design, 57 children who failed a false-belief (FB) pretest received two sessions of training on either an FB, false sign (FS), or control task. All children were then posttested on theory-of-mind, FS, and control tasks. Results showed the FB and FS tasks were not only empirically tested as equivalent but also potentially transferable (i.e., FB training enhanced FS posttest performance, and FS training contributed to the understanding of one's own false belief), suggesting that understanding of false beliefs is an ability of representational understanding that is not restricted to mental states.     

Signs of Socioeconomic Status: A Thin-Slicing Approach

ABSTRACT— Socioeconomic status (SES) is a primary determinant of health vulnerabilities and social affiliations. To ascertain if SES is signaled in brief patterns of nonverbal behavior, we had participants of varying SES backgrounds engage in a brief interaction with a stranger. Videos of 60-s slices of these interactions were coded for nonverbal cues of disengagement and engagement, and estimates of participants' SES were provided by naive observers who viewed these videos. As predicted by analyses of resource dependence and power, upper-SES participants displayed more disengagement cues (e.g., doodling) and fewer engagement cues (e.g., head nods, laughs) than did lower-SES participants. Results were also consistent with the thin-slicing literature, in that observers' estimates of SES were reliable with each other and accurately predicted targets' family income, maternal education, and subjective SES. Finally, nonverbal displays of disengagement and engagement predicted observers' estimates of SES, which suggests that these cues are systematic signs of SES. These results have implications for understanding the effect of SES on social interactions and patterns of disengagement and engagement in other realms.     

Generalizing everyday memory: Signs and handedness

Memory for frequently encountered road signs was investigated. In Experiment 1, the average level of recall of road sign features was found to be only 47%. In Experiment 2, more left-handed than righthanded people recalled that a walking figure faces right on one sign, whereas more right-handed than left-handed people recalled that a digging figure faces left on another sign. Performance thus reflected not a difference in level of mnemonic ability between left-handed and right-handed groups but instead the compatibility between group and task. In Experiment 3, participants were asked to draw any figure walking and any figure digging, with a pattern of results similar to that of Experiment 2. It is suggested that handedness effects in recall are mediated by motor imagery.