Managed Care and Pastoral Counseling: An Opportunity for Spiritual Growth

Managed care has forced changes on pastoral care. Among these changes are increased demand for and volume of clients. An appropriate response to this demand is for pastoral counselors to adopt a more short-term oriented treatment approach. While this approach has historically been at odds with the pastoral counseling movement, the authors argue that a combination of the therapies of Albert Adler and Albert Ellis provides a framework for addressing the needs of clients. Social Work at the     

Variable-interval schedule performance in open and closed economies

In two experiments, pigeons obtained food according to variable-interval schedules. In the first experiment, equivalent variable-interval schedules with average interreinforcer intervals ranging between 10 and 80 s in different conditions were studied in both open and closed economies. Response rates increased as reinforcement frequency decreased in the closed economy. By contrast, in the open economy response rates decreased for 1 bird and were variable for the other as reinforcement frequency decreased. The second experiment showed that the differences in the functions between responding and reinforcement frequency in the two types of economies were not due to changes in deprivation level. These results suggest that open and closed economies yield different behavioral effects. This conclusion is supported further by a reconsideration of previous findings that appear counter to the conclusion.     

Crisis as opportunity for spiritual growth

Life-history data from two hundred crisis families and two hundred non-crisis families are examined to specify the influence of crisis conditions on spiritual growth. Members of crisis families making spiritual values their basis for life-orientation appear to live more productively and experience more life-satisfaction than members of crisis families or non-crisis families making no conscious effort to examine values or life-orientation.These findings invite further substantiation of crisis as opportunity for spiritual growth. A clinical implication is that research on optimal functioning, recovery, and spiritual growth is perhaps more needed at present than continued research on pathology and dysfunction.     

Personal Constructs of Students with Eating Disorders: Implications for Counselling

Members of two self-help groupsfor university andpolytechnic students with eating disorders were asked to generale personal constructs. The analysis of the subsequent grids showed that the students were concerned with similar emotional issues. Il also produceda significant difference between ratings of'self and 'ideal self, butfailed to produce evidence of' tight' construing. Discussion ofthe grids made a positive contribution to the self-help process.     

Subliminal repetition primes help detection of phonemes in a picture: Evidence for a phonological level of the priming effects

In this research, we combine a cross-form word–picture visual masked priming procedure with an internal phoneme monitoring task to examine repetition priming effects. In this paradigm, participants have to respond to pictures whose names begin with a prespecified target phoneme. This task unambiguously requires retrieving the word-form of the target picture's name and implicitly orients participants' attention towards a phonological level of representation. The experiments were conducted within Spanish, whose highly transparent orthography presumably promotes fast and automatic phonological recoding of subliminal, masked visual word primes. Experiments 1 and 2 show that repetition primes speed up internal phoneme monitoring in the target, compared to primes beginning with a different phoneme from the target, or sharing only their first phoneme with the target. This suggests that repetition primes preactivate the phonological code of the entire target picture's name, hereby speeding up internal monitoring, which is necessarily based on such a code. To further qualify the nature of the phonological code underlying internal phoneme monitoring, a concurrent articulation task was used in Experiment 3. This task did not affect the repetition priming effect. We propose that internal phoneme monitoring is based on an abstract phonological code, prior to its translation into articulation.     

Animal groups and social ontology: an argument from the phenomenology of behavior

Through a critical engagement with Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of the concepts of nature, life, and behavior, and with contemporary accounts of animal groups, this article argues that animal groups exhibit sociality and that sociality is a fundamental ontological condition. I situate my account in relation to the superorganism and selfish individual accounts of animal groups in recent biology and zoology. I argue that both accounts are inadequate. I propose an alternative account of animal groups and animal sociality through a Merleau-Pontian inspired definition of behavior. I criticize Merleau-Ponty’s individualistic prejudice, but show that his philosophy contains the resources necessary to overcome this bias. I define behavior as a holistic, ongoing, meaningful and Umwelt-oriented intrinsically configured expression of living forms of existence. By looking at cases of animal groups drawn from contemporary studies in zoology and behavioral ecology, I show that animal groups, in the fact that they behave, manifest themselves to be a fundamental form of existence, namely, the social form of existence.     

Evaluating and Improving Probability Assessment in an Ambiguous,Sequential Environment

The current study explores the validity of verbal probability assessments in a sequential and highly ambiguous task, that is, one in which it is virtually impossible to know or learn about the true probabilities of possible outcomes. Participants observed the pre-defined motion of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), such that the participant’s success depended on the UAV reaching a target sector without being spotted by an opponent UAV. At several points in each trajectory, participants’ task was to evaluate the likelihood of reaching the target successfully. The study utilized a 2?×?2 independent-groups factorial design to examine the effect of probability incentivization (Brier vs none), in which participants receive payment based on the nearness of their predictions to actual outcomes, and informational reviews (present vs absent), in which participants engage in detailed discussion with the experimenter, regarding their assessments in seven previous trials before continuing, on probability assessment. A statistically significant main effect of Brier scoring was found, such that Brier based incentivization improved assessment accuracy. The effect of informational review and the interaction effect were not significant. All groups performed significantly better than random and uninformed performance. Outcomes from this study improve our understanding of the validity of online judgments made by operators of unmanned vehicles in strategic settings. It is concluded that non-expert probability assessments carry important information value even in ambiguous settings and even without incentives, and importantly, are further amenable to incentives and training.