How to set up a counseling program in your church

Pastoral Psychology -     

Taken by surprise: The paradox of the surprise test revisited

A teacher announced to his pupils that on exactly one of the days of the following school week (Monday through Friday) he would give them a test. But it would be a surprise test; on the evening before the test they would not know that the test would take place the next day. One of the brighter students in the class then argued that the teacher could never give them the test. It can't be Friday, she said, since in that case we'll expect it on Thurday evening. But then it can't be Thursday, since having already eliminated Friday we'll know Wednesday evening that it has to be Thursday. And by similar reasoning we can also eliminate Wednesday, Tuesday, and Monday. So there can't be a test!The students were somewhat baffled by the situation. The teacher was well-known to be truthful, so if he said there would be a test, then it was safe to assume that there would be one. On the other hand, he also said that the test would be a surprise. But it seemed that whenever he gave the test, it wouldn't be a surprise.Well, the teacher gave the test on Tuesday, and, sure enough, the students were surprised.     

“风水大师”竟成法院座上客

据5月13日《民主与法制时报》报道,今年元旦过后,深圳中级人民法院办公楼改建,法院专程从香港请来了"风水大师"指点。"大师"看完风水后对法院领导说,有三害影响流年。一是审判主楼东面正对某工     

The argument from surprise

I develop an account of productive surprise as an epistemic virtue of scientific investigations which does not turn on psychology alone. On my account, a scientific investigation is potentially productively surprising when (1) results can conflict with epistemic expectations, (2) those expectations pertain to a wide set of subjects. I argue that there are two sources of such surprise in science. One source, often identified with experiments, involves bringing our theoretical ideas in contact with new empirical observations. Another, often identified with simulations, involves articulating and bringing together different parts of our knowledge. Both experiments and simulations, then, can surprise.     

One surprise after another

The author of this article describes her childhood, career, and some of her main findings as a personality psychologist who studied women's creativity and adult development as she herself constructed her personal and professional identity in a changing environment and developed in a number of ways.     

Making sense of surprise: an investigation of the factors influencing surprise judgments

Surprise is often defined in terms of disconfirmed expectations, whereby the surprisingness of an event is thought to be dependent on the degree to which it contrasts with a more likely, or expected, outcome. The authors investigated the alternative hypothesis that surprise is more accurately modeled as a manifestation of an ongoing sense-making process. In a series of experiments, participants were given a number of scenarios and rated surprise and probability for various hypothetical outcomes that either confirmed or disconfirmed an expectation. Experiment 1 demonstrated that representational specificity influences the relationship that holds between surprise and probability ratings. Experiment 2 demonstrated that the inclusion of an enabling event lowers surprise ratings for disconfirming outcomes. Experiment 3 explored the reason for this effect, revealing that enabling events lower surprise by reducing uncertainty, thus enhancing ease of integration. Experiment 4 evaluated the contrast hypothesis directly, showing that differences in contrast are not correlated with differences in surprise. These results provide converging support for the view that the level of surprise experienced for an event is related to the difficulty of integrating that event with an existing representation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved).     

The melody of surprise: maternal surprise vocalizations during play with her infant

Two groups of mothers and their infants (24 infants, mean age=3.5 months and 24 infants, mean age=5.5 months) were video‐ and audio‐taped in their homes while playing with a Jack‐in‐the‐box. The mean fundamental frequency of spontaneous surprise exclamations of mothers when opening the toy were analysed, and infant and maternal facial expressions of surprise were coded in three regions of the face. A t‐test established that significantly more of the older children in comparison with younger children showed surprise (t=?2.96, df=46, p<0.005, 2‐tailed). Twenty‐nine per cent of the younger infants, in comparison with 67% of the older children showed facial expressions of surprise. A t‐test of maternal pitch height (Hz) indicated that mothers exclaimed in surprise with a higher pitch when the child did not show a surprise facial expression (mean=415.61 Hz) in comparison with the child showing surprise (mean=358.97 Hz; t=2.9, df=46, p=0.006, 2‐tailed). A multiple regression established that infant's expression was a stronger predictor of maternal vocal pitch than was the age of the infant. These results are discussed in terms of maternal use of emotional expressions as ‘social signals’. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

CAI-enhanced exam performance in a research design course

The efficacy of computer-assisted instruction (CAI) for increasing test performance in an experimental design course was tested using two commercially available programs to supplement course material. CAI was used to supplement course content for one of three examinations. Comparisons were also made with performance on the exams from 2 previous years. The results indicate a significant enhancement of performance by CAI.     

More than a surprise: The bivalency effect in task switching

When switching tasks, if stimuli are presented that contain features that cue two of the tasks in the set (i.e., bivalent stimuli), performance slowing is observed on all tasks. This generalized slowing extends to tasks in the set which have no features in common with the bivalent stimulus and is referred to as the bivalency effect. In previous work, the bivalency effect was invoked by presenting occasionally occurring bivalent stimuli; therefore, the possibility that the generalized slowing is simply due to surprise (as opposed to bivalency) has not yet been discounted. This question was addressed in two task switching experiments where the occasionally occurring stimuli were either bivalent (bivalent version) or merely surprising (surprising version). The results confirmed that the generalized slowing was much greater in the bivalent version of both experiments, demonstrating that the magnitude of this effect is greater than can be accounted for by simple surprise. This set of results confirms that slowing task execution when encountering bivalent stimuli may be fundamental for efficient task switching, as adaptive tuning of response style may serve to prepare the cognitive system for possible future high conflict trials.     

How to operationalize a person

The notion of operationally defining a person is absurd, but no more so than other uses of “operationalization”. ‘Persons’ make that absurdity particularly clear because there is no sense in which persons can be directly observed, nor defined in terms of what might be observable, and thereby exposes the emptiness of the idea of operationalization more broadly.On the other hand, persons can be modeled, and their ontology investigated, within frameworks that can address the processes and organizations that actually constitute persons.