The Bible, Knowledge of God and Dei Verbum

How may an inquiring person fittingly look upon the Bible? In what manner can a person's attention to the Bible assist them to knowledge? For a Catholic Christian analysis, what ideas are suitable about the place of the Bible in relations between God and humans, and in appropriation by a person today of whatever divine disclosure or revelation is at hand? This article outlines reflections on these matters. Links are apparent with key points in Vatican II’s Dei Verbum. The first of four sections concerns a fundamentalist outlook. Section II has to do with certain limited but significant ways in which a person may look on the Bible: ways similar to ways in which a person may look on other texts. Section III pauses on inquiries into ‘deep, inner’ matters of life where the person inquiring does not proceed from a perspective of Catholic Christian faith. Section IV surveys a broad range of thoughts that may aptly be endorsed from within a perspective of Catholic Christian faith. The thoughts concern the nature of the situation by which a Catholic Christian person today can advance in knowledge of God: in appropriation of divine disclosure. Ways in which a person may look on the Bible that go beyond those exhibited earlier are now made explicit. (The article fully allows that numerous views held by one or another follower of Jesus who does not adhere to Roman Catholicism may, in respects at stake, harmonize with a Catholic Christian faith‐perspective.)     

Teaching social‐learning procedures to paraprofessionals working with individuals with severe mental illness in a maximum‐security forensic hospital

This study describes an integrated technical method for teaching learning‐based interventions to paraprofessionals working in a maximum‐security psychiatric facility as a social‐learning program was implemented. This training approach combines brief didactic instruction with live demonstration and guided practice in specific procedures. Comparisons between baseline and post‐training functioning of staff were made using ongoing direct observational assessment data. Results revealed that following training and program implementation staff were much more active overall, interacted with clients far more often, and engaged in much lower rates of job‐irrelevant activity. Moreover, following training direct observational data of the patterns of staff–client interactions showed that staff were much more likely to demonstrate interactions reflective of learning‐based interventions than at baseline. These results have important implications for clinicians and administrators attempting to implement behavioral rehabilitation programs. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Emotional content of talk to the fetus and healthy coping behaviors during pregnancy

This study examined whether the emotional content of talk to the self and to the fetus were related to health behaviors and psychosocial factors during pregnancy. One hundred fifty-two third-trimester pregnant women attending childbirth preparation classes completed a survey containing the Intrapersonal Communication Questionnaire, which sampled spontaneous talk to the self (self-talk) and to the fetus (baby-talk), and which yielded ratings of emotional valence of talk quotations into positive, negative, neutral, and mixed categories; the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale; and indices for life stress, social support, and consumption behaviors. Baby-talk was more positive whereas self-talk was more negative, or emotionally distressed. More mixed baby-talk occurred with more medicine consumption, and medicine consumption was also related to lower self-esteem and more life stress. More negative baby-talk occurred when cigarette and caffeine consumption was higher. Emotional content of maternal talk to the fetus might indicate development of maternal bonding, and specific emotional contents might be related to health-relevant coping behaviors, for example, consumption of cigarettes and caffeine. Clinical implications for maternal behaviors after birth are discussed.     

Visual working memory for global,object, and part-based information

We investigated visual working memory for novel objects and parts of novel objects. After a delay period, participants showed strikingly more accurate performance recognizing a single whole object than the parts of that object. This bias to remember whole objects, rather than parts, persisted even when the division between parts was clearly defined and the parts were disconnected from each other so that, in order to remember the single whole object, the participants needed to mentally combine the parts. In addition, the bias was confirmed when the parts were divided by color. These experiments indicated that holistic perceptual-grouping biases are automatically used to organize storage in visual working memory. In addition, our results suggested that the bias was impervious to top-down consciously directed control, because when task demands were manipulated through instruction and catch trials, the participants still recognized whole objects more quickly and more accurately than their parts. This bias persisted even when the whole objects were novel and the parts were familiar. We propose that visual working memory representations depend primarily on the global configural properties of whole objects, rather than part-based representations, even when the parts themselves can be clearly perceived as individual objects. This global configural bias beneficially reduces memory load on a capacity-limited system operating in a complex visual environment, because fewer distinct items must be remembered.     

Probabilistic retroactive interference: the role of accessibility bias in interference effects

Probabilistic retroactive interference (RI) refers to the interfering effects of intermixing presentations of an earlier studied response (A-B) with presentations of a competing response (A-D). As an example, for a 2/3 condition, a cue word was presented with its earlier studied response twice and its competing response once during the interference phase. Performance on direct and indirect tests of memory for earlier studied responses was combined to reveal dissociations between effects on recollection and accessibility bias. Manipulating probabilistic RI influenced accessibility bias but left recollection unchanged. Effects of probabilistic RI were compared with effects of traditional, nonprobabilistic RI. The authors contrast their dual-process model with traditional accounts of RI and discuss the importance of distinguishing between recollection and accessibility bias for understanding interference effects.     

Facial averageness and attractiveness in an isolated population of hunter-gatherers

Average faces possess traits that are common to a population. Preferences for averageness have been found in several types of study of both real and computer-manipulated faces. Such preferences have been proposed to be biologically based and thus should be found across human populations, though cross-cultural evidence to date has been limited. In this study we examined preferences for averageness in both the West and in an isolated hunter-gatherer society, the Hadza of Northern Tanzania in Africa. We show that averageness is generally preferred across faces and cultures, but there were no significant preferences for averageness in European faces by Hadza judges. The different visual experience of the two cultures may explain the differences in preferences. While Westerners have visual experience of both European and African faces, the Hadza are limited in their experience of European faces, potentially leading to a lack of preference for averageness in this group because of the lack of a representation of the 'norm' of European faces.     

Social dominance in preschool classrooms

The authors examined preschoolers' aggressive and cooperative behaviors and their associations with social dominance. First and as predicted, directly observed aggressive interactions decreased across the school year, and same-sex aggression occurred more frequently than cross-sex aggression. Next, the authors examined the relation between aggression and reconciliation, cooperation, and social display variables. Teacher ratings of children's aggression related to observed aggression but not to observed "wins" of aggressive bouts. Instead, wins were related to cooperation and display variables. Finally, they examined the relative power of wins and cooperation in predicting 2 measures of social dominance. After age was controlled, wins alone predicted teacher-rated social dominance. Results are discussed in terms of different forms of competition and how school ethos affects these forms.     

Hoarding in obsessive-compulsive disorder: results from the OCD Collaborative Genetics Study

Hoarding behavior occurs frequently in obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Results from previous studies suggest that individuals with OCD who have hoarding symptoms are clinically different than non-hoarders and may represent a distinct clinical group. In the present study, we compared 235 hoarding to 389 non-hoarding participants, all of whom had OCD, collected in the course of the OCD Collaborative Genetics Study. We found that, compared to non-hoarding individuals, hoarders were more likely to have symmetry obsessions and repeating, counting, and ordering compulsions; poorer insight; more severe illness; difficulty initiating or completing tasks; and indecision. Hoarders had a greater prevalence of social phobia and generalized anxiety disorder. Hoarders also had a greater prevalence of obsessive-compulsive and dependent personality disorders. Five personality traits were independently associated with hoarding: miserliness, preoccupation with details, difficulty making decisions, odd behavior or appearance, and magical thinking. Hoarding and indecision were more prevalent in the relatives of hoarding than of non-hoarding probands. Hoarding in relatives was associated with indecision in probands, independently of proband hoarding status. The findings suggest that hoarding behavior may help differentiate a distinct clinical subgroup of people with OCD and may aggregate in some OCD families. Indecision may be a risk factor for hoarding in these families.     

Evidence for distinct contributions of form and motion information to the recognition of emotions from body gestures

The importance of kinematics in emotion perception from body movement has been widely demonstrated. Evidence also suggests that the perception of biological motion relies to some extent on information about spatial and spatiotemporal form, yet the contribution of such form-related cues to emotion perception remains unclear. This study reports, for the first time, the relative effects on emotion recognition of inverting and motion-reversing patch-light compared to fully illuminated displays of whole-body emotion gestures. Inverting the gesture movies or playing them backwards significantly impaired emotion classification accuracy, but did so more for patch-light displays than for identical but fully illuminated movement sequences. This result suggests that inversion impairs the processing of form information related to the configuration of body parts, and reversal impairs the sequencing of form changes, more than these manipulations impair the processing of kinematic cues. This effect was strongest for inversion, suggesting an important role for configural information in emotion recognition. Nevertheless, even in combination these stimulus manipulations did not abolish above chance recognition of any of the emotions, suggesting that kinematics help distinguish emotions expressed by body gestures. Disproportionate impairments in recognition accuracy were observed for fear and disgust under inversion, and for fear under motion reversal, suggesting a greater role for form-related cues in the perception of these emotions.