Race and the gift of lament

A close look at historical narratives can help us understand how intractable racial injustice is, both in society and in the church. Progress toward racial equity requires us to recognize ourselves as actors in history, and also as those influenced by and acted upon by the forces of history. In addition, lament can help us move toward the theological work of repentance. This article is adapted from The Gift of Lament: Moving from Diversity to Racial Equity in the ELCA, 2018 MDiv Thesis, Wartburg Theological Seminary. Portions of this article were also presented at the June 2019 Convocation of Teaching Theologians.     

Parallels between depression and lament

This article compares the experiences portrayed by the psalmists in Psalm 31 and Psalm 102, both psalms of lament, with the current concept of major depression. It concludes by exploring how the insights of the psalms may be applied in pastoral care directed toward those who suffer from depression.     

死亡意识的恐惧管理和悲伤管理

基于悲伤情绪的功能及效应,提出死亡意识的“悲伤管理假设”。实验1采用电生理、微表情、主观报告等方法探索死亡意识伴随的情绪变化;实验2和实验3对比死亡意识的“悲伤管理”和“恐惧管理”,并探索情绪的中介作用。结果发现：死亡意识诱发悲伤和恐惧(尤其是悲伤),且死亡反思诱发更多的悲伤;恐惧在死亡意识与外在人生目标间起中介作用;悲伤(而非恐惧)背景音乐下,死亡意识使个体更重视内在人生目标。上述结果为死亡意识的“悲伤管理”提供了实证依据,表明在悲伤的情绪中加工死亡意识可能促进个体的内在成长,这对疫情等社会灾难时期的心理救援具有启示意义。     

When parting is such sweet sorrow: The comprehension and appreciation of oxymora

Three experiments examined the comprehension and appreciation of figurative phrases known as oxymora (e.g.,intense apathy, loyal opposition). Experiment 1 showed that adjective-noun pairs in which the noun term is the hyponym of the adjective terms' antonym were judged by readers as the most poetic. Experiment 2 found that these same types of phrases were the easiest to understand. Experiment 3 demonstrated that interpreting oxymora requires more than the simple combination of the adjective and noun terms' semantic components. These findings provide additional evidence on the influence of conceptual knowledge for both theories of complex conceptual combinations and for theories of figurative language understanding.     

The anatomy of sorrow: a spiritual,phenomenological, and neurological perspective

There is considerable controversy, both within and outside the field of psychiatry, regarding the boundaries of normal sadness and clinical depression. Furthermore, while there are frequent calls for a "pluralistic", comprehensive approach to understanding depression, few writers have tried to integrate insights from the spiritual, philosophical, and neurobiological literature. The author proposes that such a synthesis is possible, and that our understanding of ordinary sorrow and clinical depression is enriched by drawing from these disparate sources. In particular, a phenomenological analysis of sorrow and depression reveals two overlapping but distinct "lifeworlds". These differ in the relational, temporal, dialectical, and intentional realms. Recent brain imaging studies are also beginning to reveal the neurobiological correlates of sorrow and depression. As we come to understand the neurobiology of these states, we may be able to correlate specific alterations in "neurocircuitry" with their phenomenological expressions.     

On the relative preponderance of empathic sorrow and its relation to commonsense morality

Empathy is a nominally neutral term: in principle, the affective tone of empathic concern may be either negative (insofar as the relevant experience is that of apprehending and sharing in another's aversive state) or positive (i.e., apprehending and sharing in another's joy). Yet, we propose (Section 1) that, contrary to this standard conception of empathy as a potentially bivalent, generalized disposition towards emotional perspective-taking, in actuality, negative empathic responses, as a rule, (a) are more common, (b) are more differentiated, and (c) span a broader range of human relationships than their positive counterparts. Furthermore, we suggest that, barring certain types of privileged relationships, a failure to be empathetically aroused by another's good fortune is subject to far less severe (if any) social disapproval than the failure to share in another's aversive state. In Section 2, we posit that the negativity bias evident in the nature of our empathic concern may well be at the base of the negative–positive asymmetry found in the structure of commonsense morality, particularly as it expresses itself in the view that the furtherance of another's good has a greater moral claim on us in its negative form (e.g., the relief of suffering) than in its positive form (the promotion of “enjoyment”). We conclude by asking whether this moral (and the underlying empathic) asymmetry warrants our normative concern and we suggest that there are at least two reasons to think otherwise.     

Chronic sorrow: A content analysis of parental differences

Sixty-eight mothers and 64 fathers of children with a neural tube defect responded to a questionnaire about chronic sorrow. Mothers reported a mood state change in very intense category from more pessimistic at time of diagnosis to more optimistic at current time. Fathers, although indicating a mood change in the very intense category to more optimistic, also had more pessimistic responses. Parental similarities and differences were also reported in both times and events that triggered the sorrow response. Categories across times and events were primarily related to health care, school/development concerns and social significance. Clinical and research implications of these findings are discussed.     

Sweet sorrow: the color-shading response in an adult cystic fibrosis population

Research on the color-shading response on the Rorschach has been limited previously to its use as a predictor of suicide. The theoretical understanding of this response was addressed by some of the major Rorschach authors. Adult cystic fibrosis patients were administered a battery of psychological tests, including the Rorschach. While these patients face a premature death, none of these patients were suicidal. A higher than usual incidence of color-shading responses occurred. Rapaport's hypothesis that the color-shading response is an expression of a simultaneously conflicting emotion, or similar to "sweet sorrow," was suggested as a possible hypothesis.     

The power of transformation

Conclusion The answer to the question, how is man empowered to change? can be given in this form: We are empowered to change when we experience trust and acceptance coming to us from another person or group. Change occurs when our power of being is affirmed by other centers of power. This affirmation of our power of being overcomes the anxiety of nonbeing implied in every change. It supplies us with the courage to accept our acceptance and to exist in spite of threats to our existence. The content of trust in our experiencing that has taken the place of the prior anxiety in our experiencing reduces the disturbances that distorted our perception of reality. This enables us to receive reality more accurately and to symbolize it more exactly. Change then is an internal metamorphosis that is the result of a courage educed in us by external forces. The transformation of our internal experiencing is the prior condition and ground for the transformation of our symbolizations.He is a Fellow of the American Association of Pastoral Counselors and a member of the Academy.     

The coding and transformation of spatial information

The present paper examines the mental processes involved in inferring perspective changes that result either from the rotation of a spatial array or from the rotation of the viewer of that array. Piaget has shown that viewer-rotation problems are difficult when children must choose among pictures or models of an array from differing perspectives. We showed earlier that, with parallel tasks, array-rotation problems are much easier than viewer-rotation problems. We proposed that in solving these problems, subjects interpret the instructions literally, recoding the position of the viewer vis-à-vis the array for viewer-rotation problems and recoding the array with respect to its spatial framework for arrayrotation problems. At that time, we proposed a second principle to explain why Piagetian perspective problems are so difficult; namely, that children have special difficulty in recoding viewer position (egocentrism). The present experiments show that, when subjects are asked a different sort of question on such tasks, viewer-rotation problems become easy and array-rotation problems become difficult. The results show that the difficulty of the Piagetian perspective task is not due to egocentrism; i.e., to difficulty recoding viewer position. The results of all these rotational-transformation tasks can be explained if we add a different second principle to the principle of literalness of problem interpretation. This new second principle posits that the array is fixed vis-à-vis the spatial context rather than that the viewer is fixed vis-à-vis the array.