Is It Still a Movement?

In this address from 1971, the second general secretary of the World Council of Churches (WCC), Eugene Carson Blake, sets out the challenges facing the WCC at the beginning of the 1970s, identifying three key changes within the ecumenical movement: a shift in power and decision making away from the Protestant churches of North America and Western Europe; an organization more representative of churches in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, and of Orthodox churches; and the ecumenical involvement of the Roman Catholic Church. It goes on to set out how the WCC, particularly since its conference on Church and Society held in Geneva in 1966, has been attempting to make Christian faith and morals relevant to a world experiencing rapid social, economic, and political change.     

Is that a “No”? The Interpretation of Responses to Unwanted Sexual Attention

In this study, we used an interactive perspective to address the issue of responses to sexual harassment. We examined the effect of the consistency across time, consistency across types of advances, and assertiveness of a rejecting response on its perceived effectiveness. Participants were presented with scenarios that described responses to unwanted sexual attention and were required to rate the effectiveness of the responses for their clarity, content, and estimated effect on the future behavior of the perpetrator. The results show significant effects of consistency across time, consistency across types of advances, and assertiveness on perceived effectiveness of the response. As expected, an assertive response that was consistent across time and types of advances was perceived to be the most effective. This effect was found to be stronger for women than for men.     

Is It Me or Is It Mine? Body-self Integration as a Function of Self-esteem,Body-esteem,and Mortality Salience

This research was designed to explore the extent to which the physical body is integrated into individuals' conceptualizations of self. We hypothesized that body-self integration would vary as a function of level of general self-esteem, specific self-evaluations for the body, and also mortality salience due to existential implications of the physical body's certainty of eventual death. In a neutral condition (no mortality reminder), individuals with high self-esteem were found to hold conceptualizations of the self that include the body to the extent that they had high body self-esteem, whereas individuals low in self-esteem did not exhibit these self-serving body-self representations. In addition, mortality salience led to a distancing of the self from the body, but only for people lacking the protection provided by high general or body-specific self-esteem. Our discussion focused on individual difference in low and high self-esteem and implications of bodily threats to conceptualizations for self.     

How Obvious Is It? The Content of Child Sexual Exploitation Websites

Those who distribute child sexual exploitation (CE) material in the public Internet potentially face greater risks of detection. While public distribution is prevalent, little is known about the structure of these websites. We investigate whether websites take steps to hide their purpose, and, if so, what steps are taken? We analyze 634 websites directly or indirectly, via hyperlinks, connected to websites hosting known CE material, and compare our findings to an automated examination of the same websites. We determine whether the initial visual representation is congruent with the underlying structure and content identified in the automated data collection. Implications for understanding cybercriminal processes are discussed.     

Students’ Perceptions of Sexual Harassment: Is It Harassment Only If the Offender Is a Man and the Victim Is a Woman?

The present study investigated 3 potential sources of variability in university students' perceptions of sexual harassment in hypothetical professor-student scenarios: raters'gender, gender of the professor and student, and rater' own sexual harassment. Participants were most likely to identify the interactions as harassment when they involved a male offender and a female victim. They were less likely to label the behaviors as harassment when they occurred between members of the same gender or between a female professor and a male student. Women were more open to viewing the scenarios as harassment and men were unlikely to view the interactions between a female professor and a male student as harassment. Personal history of sexual harassment did not influence participants' perceptions.     

Is Seasonal Stress a Career Choice of Professional Accountants?

Workload compression during the first quarter of each year (January-March) is hypothesized to involve additional job demands on auditors and tax professionals causing job strain (occupational stress). Using canonical correlation analysis to analyze the survey data, this study found that the strongest stressor-strain relationship was for the group surveyed in January, indicating that workload compression contributes to seasonal occupational stress. Seasonal stress will remain a very strong barrier to qualified individuals in making an accounting career their vocational choice and will put additional demands on Employee Assistance Program (EAP) counseling for accounting practitioners.     

Is Memory for Head Orientation Based on a Left-Looking Schema?

Research has shown that people misremember right-looking heads on coins as facing to the left, suggesting a general memory schema that favors left-lookers. This hypothesis was investigated in a study of 241 subjects in three experiments who were shown photographs of faces looking to the left, to the right, or at the observer and were later asked to identify whether each one had subsequently been left-right reversed. Also, in Experiments 2 and 3, respectively, initial judgments of liking and of orientation were obtained. Unexpectedly, orientation memory accuracy was lower after a 5-s exposure than after a 1-s exposure, and after initial judgments of lateral orientation than after judgments of liking. Although the difference between left- and right-lookers was significant in only 2 of 14 comparisons, aggregated data showed that identification accuracy was generally higher for left-lookers, with a mean effect size of 0.16. Although small, this difference is consistent with the hypothesis of a left-looking schema for heads.     

How Valuable Is It?

The Journal of Value Inquiry -     

Why Is It Now?

Adolf Grünbaum, following J.J.C. Smart, has argued that the A-Theory of time is untenable due to its inability to answer the question, uniquely attending the A-theory, as to why it is now 2000. I argue, however, that Grünbaum's explication of the question's meaning makes the question a triviality. But there may be lurking here a somewhat different question, which is meaningful on a A-Theory of time, the answer to which may have surprising implications concerning the past infinitude of time.     

Is There Such a Thing as Relative Analyticity?

Fine bases his influential conception of essence on a particular account of definitions. And he complements it with a specific account of analyticity. I will argue that Fine's conception of relative analyticity confuses the idea of a sentence's being true in virtue of a term's definition with the idea of a sentence's being true in virtue of a term's meaning. His idea that correct definitions specify essential properties of meanings is mistaken. The correctness of definitions can only be assessed by reference to the actual usage of the terms involved. The resulting conception of definitions leads to a deflationary interpretation of claims about essences.     

Is It Real or Is It Fiction? Children's Bias Toward Reality

Children aged 3 to 8 years old and adults were tested on a reality–fantasy distinction task. They had to judge whether particular entities were real or fantastical, and response times were collected. We further manipulated whether the entity is a specific character or a generic fantastical entity. The results indicate that children, unlike adults, show a tendency to err by judging fantastical entities as real (response bias toward reality). All children were significantly slower when categorizing fantastical stimuli compared with real stimuli. We conclude that the process of classifying items into real versus fantastical categories develops at least until children are 7 to 8 years old.     

A Cross-cultural Perspective on Judgments of Woman-to-woman Sexual Harassment: Does Sexual Orientation Matter?

We investigated perceptions between Brazilian and U.S. college students regarding a hypothetical case involving woman-to-woman sexual harassment in which the sexual orientation of both the target and the alleged harasser was experimentally manipulated. Thus, there were four different scenarios, which were randomly given to 952 college students (89% of whom reported to be White). We found that the scenario that depicted heterosexual woman-to-heterosexual woman sexual harassment was rated as the least likely to be sexual harassment, to need an investigation, and to be punishable than the other scenarios. Generally, Brazilians viewed the case as more likely to be sexual harassment and to need an investigation than did U.S. respondents. In the U.S., women perceived the case as more likely to be sexual harassment, to need an investigation, and to be punishable than men did; however, no such gender differences were found in Brazil. Lastly, hostile sexism and perceptions of woman-to-woman sexual harassment predicted respondents rating the case as sexual harassment and in need of an investigation.     

Is Gender or Gender-Role Orientation a Better Predictor of Empathy in Adolescence?

To assess the relative contribution of genderand gender-role orientation to empathy and itsdevelopment, 8th and 11th grade Israeli adolescentscompleted Davis' empathy scale and Bem's gender-roleorientation inventory, which yields a femininity score anda masculinity score for each participant. Withmasculinity and femininity treated as a within subjectsvariable, masculinity/femininity interacted with grade, such that whereas masculinity in both boys andgirls increased with grade, femininity decreased ingirls and increased in boys. Empathy was unrelated tograde or to masculinity but was related to gender and to femininity. When the contribution ofmasculinity/femininity was covaried, empathy was foundto be unrelated to gender. This pattern was found forthree of the empathy subscales: Perspective Taking, Empathic Concern, and Personal Distress, whichwere positively correlated. On the basis of a mediansplit, participants were then classified as Masculine,Feminine, Undifferentiated, or Androgynous. Androgynous individuals did not differ from Feminineindividuals on any of the empathy subscales. Thefindings were discussed in terms of the socialization ofemotions and gender-role orientation.     

Sexual Morality: Is Consent Enough?

The liberal view that valid consent is sufficient for a sex act to be morally legitimate is challenged by three major philosophies of sex: the Catholic view of sex as ordained for procreation and properly confined to marriage, the romantic view of sex as bound up with love, and the radical feminist analysis of sex in our society as part and parcel of the domination of women by men. I take a critical look at all three, focusing on Mary Geach's recent statement of the procreation view, Roger Scruton's theory of sexual desire as naturally evolving into intimacy and love, and several radical feminist discussions of sex in sexist society which argue that the notion of consent is unhelpful and, indeed, irrelevant. I argue that none of these lines of argument is convincing, and that consent remains the touchstone of morally permissible sex – although, dmittedly, it may not be very helpful in discussing ideals of human sexuality.     

Is Teenage Sexual Behavior Rational?1

We evaluate the applicability of a decision making framework to the teenage contraceptive and sexual behavior of 1032 Philadelphia teenagers. We examine three reasons why the decision making perspective may not apply in this domain: (a) because the decision makers are teenagers, (b) because the decision concerns sexual behavior, and (c) because the costs of contraception and abstinence are immediate and certain, while the benefits are delayed and uncertain. Using multiple regression, we examine the predictors of sexual activity and contraceptive use. We find support for the decision making model in that the variables ordinarily included in decision analyses do significantly predict behavior. But respondents seem to place disproportionate weight on some considerations, such as the discomfort of using birth control, and very little on others, such as the effectiveness of birth control or their attitude toward motherhood.     

Does timeframe adjustment of the Life Orientation Test-Revised assess optimism as a state?

ABSTRACT

Optimism is prospectively associated with superior health outcomes in cardiac patients, making it an attractive target for well-being interventions in this population. However, optimism measured by the Life Orientation Test-Revised (LOT-R) has largely been considered a static, dispositional construct. Among 125 patients with a recent acute coronary syndrome who received a positive psychology intervention, we assessed the properties of a modified LOT-R that changed the timeframe of items from general dispositional statements to queries about ‘right now.’ We aimed to learn whether this modified LOT-R was more dynamic than the original LOT-R via administration of both instruments at three timepoints over the 16-week study period. Contrary to our hypothesis, this modified LOT-R showed no greater change in mean score or intra-individual variance than the original LOT-R over 16 weeks. This suggests that simply changing the timeframe of the LOT-R may not facilitate assessment of more state-like optimism in medical patients.     

Is There a Natural Sexual Inequality of Intellect? A Reply to Kimura

The noted psychologist, Doreen Kimura, has argued that we should not expect to find equal numbers of men and women in various professions because there is a natural sexual inequality of intellect. In rebuttal I argue that each of these mutually supporting theses is insufficiently supported by the evidence to be accepted. The social and ethical dimensions of Kimura's work, and of the scientific study of the nature-nurture controversy in general, are briefly discussed.