How Does the Bible Refer to Christ? Interacting with Augustine the Allegorist

Abstract: Traditional Christianity teaches that the Bible's primary referent is Jesus Christ, the Messiah, and Christians have long looked for ways to connect every passage in the Bible to the Christ. One venerable strategy is the allegorical or figurative approach of creatively interpreting any unit of biblical meaning, sometimes down to the individual words, as referencing Christ. Alternatively, we might take the biblical narrative itself as referencing Christ and find the connection of smaller units of meaning to Christ through their place in that narrative. My article clarifies this topic through interaction with an exemplary practitioner of the strategy of figurative reading, the Church Father Augustine. I will first explain Augustine's reasons for his hermeneutics, which stem largely from his focus on smaller units of reference such as the word and the sentence. Then I will argue that his reasons are not persuasive if indeed the Bible does refer to Christ at a broader level, the level of narrative.     

No Place to Hide: When Shame Causes Proselfs to Cooperate

Shame is considered a social emotion with action tendencies that elicit socially beneficial behavior. Yet, unlike other social emotions, prior experimental studies do not indicate that incidental shame boosts prosocial behavior. Based on the affect as information theory, we hypothesize that incidental feelings of shame can increase cooperation, but only for self-interested individuals, and only in a context where shame is relevant with regards to its action tendency. To test this hypothesis, cooperation levels are compared between a simultaneous prisoner's dilemma (where “defect” may result from multiple motives) and a sequential prisoner's dilemma (where “second player defect” is the result of intentional greediness). As hypothesized, shame positively affected proselfs in a sequential prisoner's dilemma. Hence ashamed proselfs become inclined to cooperate when they believe they have no way to hide their greediness, and not necessarily because they want to make up for earlier wrong-doing.     

Revisiting the effects of Parkinson's disease and frontal lobe lesions on task switching: The role of rule reconfiguration

This study investigated the hypothesis that rule reconfiguration in task switching can isolate aspects of intact and impaired control at different stages of Parkinson's disease (PD) by comparing switches between concrete naming rules pertaining to stimulus selection, to switches between abstract rules which allocate categorization responses to these stimuli. Based on previous findings, it was hypothesized that attentional switches, where task set competition emerges at the stimulus but not response set level, highlights striatal dopaminergic function. Conversely, increasing the degree of task set competition to encompass reconfiguration of response set when switching between abstract rules, represents a condition which engages the prefrontal cortex (PFC) and renders this manipulation sensitive to frontal damage. To this end, we investigated task switching with concrete and abstract rules in unilaterally (Hoehn & Yahr stage I) and bilaterally (Hoehn & Yahr stage II) affected PD patients, as well as striatally intact frontal lesion patients. As predicted, frontal lesion patients demonstrated switching deficits only with abstract categorization rules, where switching engendered complete task set reconfiguration and a new response, as did stage II PD patients with presumed frontal cortical pathology. Replicating previous findings, stage I PD patients with relatively circumscribed striatal pathology demonstrated no such impairment. Disease severity also impacted on attentional switching indexed by naming rules, since medicated stage II but not stage I patients demonstrated switching deficits emerging from stimulus set reconfiguration, suggesting that the ameliorative efficacy of dopaminergic medication is inversely related to the severity of the striatal deficit. These findings illustrate that the nature of the rules that are switched, and its implication in terms of reconfiguring different task set elements, highlights different neural characters of cognitive flexibility. These manipulations may help decipher the differential effects of progressive neurodegeneration on parkinsonian cognition, and provide a framework in which to conceptualize the contributions of cortical and subcortical regions to cognitive control.     

The influence of discrete emotions on judgement and decision-making: A meta-analytic review

During the past three decades, researchers interested in emotions and cognition have attempted to understand the relationship that affect and emotions have with cognitive outcomes such as judgement and decision-making. Recent research has revealed the importance of examining more discrete emotions, showing that same-valence emotions (e.g., anger and fear) differentially impact judgement and decision-making outcomes. Narrative reviews of the literature (Lerner & Tiedens, 2006 Lerner, J. S. and Tiedens, L. Z. 2006. Portrait of the angry decision maker: How appraisal tendencies shape anger's influence on cognition. Journal of Behavioral Decision-Making, 19: 115–137. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]; Pham, 2007 Pham, M. T. 2007. Emotion and rationality: A critical review and interpretation of empirical evidence. Review of General Psychology, 11(2): 155–178. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) have identified some under-researched topics, but provide a limited synthesis of findings. The purpose of this study was to review the research examining the influence of discrete emotions on judgement and decision-making outcomes and provide an assessment of the observed effects using a meta-analytic approach. Results, overall, show that discrete emotions have moderate to large effects on judgement and decision-making outcomes. However, moderator analyses revealed differential effects for study-design characteristics and emotion-manipulation characteristics by emotion type. Implications are discussed.     

Strangers at the benchside: research ethics consultation

Institutional ethics consultation services for biomedical scientists have begun to proliferate, especially for clinical researchers. We discuss several models of ethics consultation and describe a team-based approach used at Stanford University in the context of these models. As research ethics consultation services expand, there are many unresolved questions that need to be addressed, including what the scope, composition, and purpose of such services should be, whether core competencies for consultants can and should be defined, and how conflicts of interest should be mitigated. We make preliminary recommendations for the structure and process of research ethics consultation, based on our initial experiences in a pilot program.     

What’s the point? Domestic dogs’ sensitivity to the accuracy of human informants

Animal Cognition - Dogs excel at understanding human social-communicative gestures like points and can distinguish between human informants who vary in characteristics such as knowledge or...     

Sex differences in navigation strategy and efficiency

Research on human navigation has indicated that males and females differ in self-reported navigation strategy as well as objective measures of navigation efficiency. In two experiments, we investigated sex differences in navigation strategy and efficiency using an objective measure of strategy, the dual-solution paradigm (DSP; Marchette, Bakker, & Shelton, 2011). Although navigation by shortcuts and learned routes were the primary strategies used in both experiments, as in previous research on the DSP, individuals also utilized route reversals and sometimes found the goal location as a result of wandering. Importantly, sex differences were found in measures of both route selection and navigation efficiency. In particular, males were more likely to take shortcuts and reached their goal location faster than females, while females were more likely to follow learned routes and wander. Self-report measures of strategy were only weakly correlated with objective measures of strategy, casting doubt on their usefulness. This research indicates that the sex difference in navigation efficiency is large, and only partially related to an individual’s navigation strategy as measured by the dual-solution paradigm.