How do Jewish teachings relate to beliefs about depression in the strictly orthodox Jewish community?

The aim of this study was to explore whether and, if so, how Jewish teachings influence strictly orthodox Jewish beliefs about depression. The rabbinic literature was searched for Jewish teachings relevant to depression. Ten consenting strictly orthodox Jews were purposively selected and interviewed using a semi-structured interview schedule focussing on their beliefs about causes of and treatments for depression. Thematic analysis was used to analyse transcribed interviews and explore relationships between community beliefs and the Jewish teachings identified in the review. The key themes in both the rabbinic literature and the community included the overriding importance in Judaism of preserving life, using appropriate, acceptable means to do so, and obligations to help others. Contrasts between rabbinic teachings and community beliefs included community concerns about stigma, generally lacking in the rabbinic literature, and greater rabbinic emphasis on spiritual exertion in dealing with depression. Findings could prove useful to those managing depressed, orthodox Jews.     

How do my students think about ME as an English-language teacher?

The concepts of student-centered classrooms, empowering students with communicative competences to be able to voice their ideas in the surrounding community, powerless and marginalized strata, are conspicuous and prevalent in recent research articles. Teachers are well-acquainted with pertinent underpinnings and theories of teaching methodologies; and some research is also conducted to see how those learned theories in pre-service and in-service programs are implemented in their real-life classrooms. But, the teachers’ reflection on implementation of their teaching practices in classrooms is still a venue which needs further investigation within an international scope. Here, my own teaching practice within a period of two semesters is reflected through the 61 male and female students’ sharp and meticulous eyes, which is reflected in their written responses to the posed question at the end of their final exams, and some of my notes from their comments in each of their classes. The Constant Comparative method was then used to unearth students’ comments and feedback on both my personality as an English-language teacher, and my teaching practice respectively.     

How should utilitarians think about the future?

Abstract

Utilitarians must think collectively about the future because many contemporary moral issues require collective responses to avoid possible future harms. But current rule utilitarianism does not accommodate the distant future. Drawing on my recent books Future People and Ethics for a Broken World, I defend a new utilitarianism whose central ethical question is: What moral code should we teach the next generation? This new theory honours utilitarianism’s past and provides the flexibility to adapt to the full range of credible futures – from futures broken by climate change to the digital, virtual and predictable futures produced by various possible technologies.     

Is pluralism about truth inherently unstable?

Although it??s sometimes thought that pluralism about truth is unstable??or, worse, just a non-starter??it??s surprisingly difficult to locate collapsing arguments that conclusively demonstrate either its instability or its inability to get started. This paper exemplifies the point by examining three recent arguments to that effect. However, it ends with a cautionary tale; for pluralism may not be any better off than other traditional theories that face various technical objections, and may be worse off in facing them all.     

Should pluralists be pluralists about pluralism?

Synthese - How many correct logics are there? Monists endorse that there is one, pluralists argue for many, and nihilists claim that there are none. Reasoning about these views requires a logic....     

What do people think about when answering questionnaires to assess unrealistic optimism about skin cancer? A think aloud study

There is little information concerning what people think about when completing questionnaires that assess perceptions of risk, and even less for questionnaires assessing unrealistic optimism. The thoughts of 40 participants who displayed unrealistic optimism about risks of skin cancer were elicited using think aloud methods, when completing both direct and indirect ratings of unrealistic optimism. The most common thoughts overall concerned exposure to the sun, and features such as skin colouring. Thoughts concerning prevalence, reasons for risky behaviour and admissions of ignorance were more common for indirect measures of unrealistic optimism than for direct measures. The direct unrealistic optimism measures yielded more optimistic ratings for those participants who did not mention symptoms or signs of skin damage, and those who mentioned thoughts about prevalence. Participants seem to be drawing upon different sources of information when completing superficially similar direct and indirect measures of unrealistic optimism, which may explain why these measures are usually only modestly associated. People do not seem to think about numerical probabilities when estimating risk, but instead appear to focus on issues such as exposure to risk, and concrete bodily symptoms and signs. This may at least partially explain why attempts to influence behaviour by providing probabilistic information are generally unsuccessful.     

What do you think I think you think?: Strategic reasoning in matrix games

In reasoning about strategic interpersonal situations, such as in playing games, an individual's representation of the situation often includes not only information about the goals and rules of the game, but also a mental model of other minds. Often such mental models involve a hierarchy of reflexive reasoning commonly employed in social situations ("What do you think I think you think..."), and may be related to the developmental notion of 'theory of mind'. In two experiments, the authors formally investigate such interpersonal recursive reasoning in college-age adults within the context of matrix games. Participants are asked to predict the moves of another player (experimenter's confederate) in a two-choice, sequential-move game that may terminate at various stages with different payoffs for each player. Participants are also asked to decide optimally on their own moves based on the prediction made. Errors concerning the prediction, or translation of those predictions into decisions about one's action, were recorded. Results demonstrate the existence of a "default" mental model about the other player in the game context that is dynamically modified as new evidence is accumulated. Predictions about this other player's behavior are, in general, used consistently in decision-making, though the opponent tends to be modeled, by default, to behave in a myopic fashion not anticipating the participant's own action.     

How do High School Youths’ Educational Experiences Relate to Well-Being? Towards a Trans-Disciplinary Conceptualization

Educational research and practice could benefit from and contribute to multi-disciplinary study of well-being. In particular, research on the well-being of youth within and beyond school may benefit students, educators, administrators, and the community. This review provides a conceptual framework that (a) integrates research on well-being from economics, sociology, psychology and the health sciences, (b) organises this literature within seven domains of inquiry: Having, Being, Relating, Thinking, Feeling, Functioning, and Striving, and (c) highlights research pertinent to senior high school level educational experiences. This framework provides an important foundation from which further research on well-being can be developed.     

How do people influence in jury deliberation? a social psychological view

Research in small-group decision making suggests two means by which discussion shifts the responses of individual members—Nonmative influence and informational influence. The former is based on pressure to conform to the normative positions of group members, and the latter involves changes due to the informational content of persuasively or passively shared facts. Which influence mode is used depends on the group decision rule, whether the response is public or private, the perceived nature of the task, and the nature of the issue. Specifically, normative influence is likely to prevail in public judgments, under group cohesion sets, and with value-laden issues, while informational influence will emerge when responses are private, the group is oriented toward the immediate task, and the issue is intellective. Suggestions are made regarding strategy and tactics for anticipating, harnessing, and shaping the form of influence that will take place during deliberation.     

How well do elderly people cope with uncertainty in a learning task?

The relation between age, task complexity and learning performance in a Multiple Cue Probability Learning task was studied by systematically varying the level of uncertainty present in the task, keeping constant the direction of relationships. Four age groups were constituted: young adults (mean age = 21), middle-aged adults (45), elderly people (69) and very elderly people (81). Five uncertainty levels were considered: predictability = 0.96, 0.80, 0.64, 0.48, and 0.32. All relationships involved were direct ones. A strong effect of uncertainty on 'control', a measure of the subject's consistency with respect to a linear model, was found. This effect was essentially a linear one. To each decrement in predictability of the task corresponded an equal decrement in participants' level of control. This level of decrement was the same, regardless of the age of the participant. It can be concluded that elderly people cope with uncertainty in probability learning tasks as well as young adults.     

What do people think about changes in health behaviors? Differential perceptions of consequences of increases and decreases in health behaviors

Most health decision-making models posit that cost-benefit analyses underlie decisions to make changes in health-related behavioral practices. In a series of studies, participants imagined either increasing or decreasing the frequency of a variety of health behaviors and estimated the consequences of those changes. In Studies 1 and 2, individuals consistently estimated that increasing a health behavior produced greater consequences than did decreasing the behavior by an equivalent amount. The results of Study 3 demonstrated that this effect is due to differences in how individuals judge the impact of health behavior changes which involve not engaging in the behavior at all versus other types of changes. Taken together, these findings suggest that perceptions of the outcomes afforded by health behavior changes depend on both the behavioral frequency and direction of changes in behavior an individual is considering. This asymmetry has the potential to help explain patterns of behavior in a range of important health domains and may impact the effectiveness of behavior change interventions.     

How do children coordinate information about mental states with social norms?

We investigated how 3-7-year-olds weigh and coordinate information about specific mental states with social norms in the domain of contextually conventional rules. With increasing age, participants increasingly took into account an actor's mental state to predict that actor's behavior. In a criticism judgment task, 7-year-olds could assign criticism conditional on mental state, with response patterns similar to those of adults; 5-year-olds assigned criticism regardless of the actor's mental state. Three-year-olds tended not to assign criticism at all, irrespective of the actor's mental state. Results indicated that the ability to weigh and coordinate information about mental states with understanding of norms depends on age and on the particular type of judgment being made. To some extent, our results may also reflect the influence of culture and parenting.     

How do group meetings make a community Therapeutic?

Summary Following an abrupt shift from a therapeutic community with emphasis on group meetings to a hierarchical medical model on a mental hospital floor, disturbed patients required extensive individual nursing care. This increased work load for the nursing staff resulted in admissions having to be limited to the rare cases who needed little or no nursing care. As patients were discharged, the vacancy rate went up to approximately 20% for a week and remained high for another two weeks. Nursing staff-patient relations deteriorated.Subsequently, it was possible to resume the emphasis on the groups of a therapeutic community and to observe the contrast. The experience showed how groups can effect and support a therapeutic community. It clarified some of the mechanisms by which groups positively affected disturbed patients. Some mechanisms by which the staff, community, and group meetings favorably influenced the nursing staff-patient relationship and intrastaff communications became clear also.     

How do we convert a number into a finger trajectory?

How do we understand two-digit numbers such as 42? Models of multi-digit number comprehension differ widely. Some postulate that the decades and units digits are processed separately and possibly serially. Others hypothesize a holistic process which maps the entire 2-digit string onto a magnitude, represented as a position on a number line. In educated adults, the number line is thought to be linear, but the “number sense” hypothesis proposes that a logarithmic scale underlies our intuitions of number size, and that this compressive representation may still be dormant in the adult brain. We investigated these issues by asking adults to point to the location of two-digit numbers on a number line while their finger location was continuously monitored. Finger trajectories revealed a linear scale, yet with a transient logarithmic effect suggesting the activation of a compressive and holistic quantity representation. Units and decades digits were processed in parallel, without any difference in left-to-right vs. right-to-left readers. The late part of the trajectory was influenced by spatial reference points placed at the left end, middle, and right end of the line. Altogether, finger trajectory analysis provides a precise cognitive decomposition of the sequence of stages used in converting a number to a quantity and then a position.     

Who do you think I think I am? Accuracy in perceptions of others’ self-esteem

This study was conducted to assess the accuracy of perceptions of others’ self-esteem and to examine the potential moderating variables of target gender, perceiver gender, and degree of acquaintance. Degree of acquaintance was the only hypothesized moderator reliably related to accuracy. An overall tendency to overestimate targets’ self-esteem was evinced, but was not related to any of the hypothesized moderators. The data suggested that perceivers are influenced by a false consensus effect when estimating others’ level of self-esteem, independent of their degree of acquaintance with targets. Implications of the findings and directions for future investigation are discussed.     

Understanding Sarason��s Concepts of School Cultures and Change: Joining a Community in School Improvement Efforts

This paper describes an evolving transformative partnership between a large comprehensive university, an urban school system and a predominantly African‐American, low‐income neighborhood. The partnership's originating intent was to apply an array of university, civic and local resources to improve the academic performance of a neighborhood's schools and the health, welfare and economic well‐being of its residents. The extent to which that partnership would precipitate transactional (Sameroff and Fiese, Handbook of early childhood intervention, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 119–149 in 1990 ) synergies among the partners was unanticipated; the long‐term implications for each of the partners of such unfamiliar interactional processes remain unclear but are being systematically monitored over time. Evident at this point, however, it that a process has been initiated that has impacted how the university community, the local public school system, city government and the target neighborhood relate to each other, collaborate with each other and are changing each other. The pace of that process has varied over the years and challenged each partners' expectations and assumptions about the nature and consequences of their involvement. With time and perseverance, however, it appears that all are moving toward a sense of mutual learning and trust and toward extending to each other the benefit of the doubt. This paper discusses the evolution of that process and its implications for university‐school‐community collaborations.     

Physical education teachers in Australia: Why do they stay?

Studies related to reasons why teachers stay are far less frequent than those reporting reasons to leave. This study assessed the factors that satisfied PE teachers and the motivators to stay in PE teaching. Physical educator stayers (N?=?139) responded to a ‘PE Teachers’ Career Intentions Questionnaire’, ‘Basic Satisfaction Needs at Work Scale’ and an open-ended question to ascertain retention motivators. Basic needs satisfaction for competence, autonomy and relatedness support, along with satisfaction for ‘professional interaction’, ‘participation in decision-making’, ‘organisation of teaching’, and ‘respect’ predicted retention. PE teachers gain work-related motivation from their expertise, the opportunity to implement ideas collaboratively, but also the sense of efficacy to control their pedagogy and student outcomes of focus. Supportive policy and actions; not just the absence of career-thwarting stimuli, appear vital for teacher self-efficacy, leading to career fulfillment. Quality mentoring programs may serve to enhance PE teacher satisfaction and are worthy of further investigation.     

What is a fourdimensionalist to do about temporally extended properties?

Some properties and relations take time to be instantiated. They are not instantiated at a time, but through a temporal interval. Cognitive properties and relations such as understanding and thinking are like this, but also many biological, chemical, and microphysical properties and relations such as absorbing, freezing, radiating, and decaying. In this paper, I make a case for taking seriously such temporally extended properties (TEPs). I argue that they are ubiquitous and that our current theories of persistence would do well to make room for them in their ontology. The focus here is on fourdimensionalism and different ways it can accommodate TEPs. I explore four different ways of dealing with TEPs within a fourdimensionalist framework. These are: (a) to make the objects that bear apparent TEPs temporally more extended or “chunky,” while giving TEPs a reductive or eliminativist treatment in favor of instantaneous properties (IPs); (b) to make a series of objects the bearer of TEP predicates, while, again, holding only to IPs; (c) to endorse TEPs in their own right and take them to be temporally extended in a literal sense; and (d) to hold on to TEPs as atemporal properties and make the exemplification relation temporally extended. I discuss each of these options and highlight the types of problems that a fourdimensionalist faces in attempting to accommodate TEPs. I conclude that fourdimensionalists do not yet have a satisfactory account of TEPs in their hands.