The Devil's Envy: On Christ as Angelic Justifier and Demonic Stumbling Block

At least since Augustine, Christian theology, especially but not only in the Latin West, has been dominated by an account of angelic origins in which the Incarnation was a response to humanity’s fall, itself occasioned by the prior angelic fall, whose cause in turn was the proud desire to be like God. (We’ll call this the ‘pride-account’). Nonetheless, that Augustinian view has been balanced from the beginning by an ‘envy-account’, which stresses instead Wisdom’s claim, ‘Through the Devil’s envy, death entered the world’ (Wisd. 2:24). The earliest extra-biblical versions of the envy-account – developed in the Latin, Syriac, and Arabic ‘Life of Adam and Eve’ traditions – take the object of Satan’s envy to have been Adam in particular. In the thirteenth century, however, Robert Grosseteste, as part of his extended defense of the idea that the Son would have been incarnate even without sin, argued instead that the Devil and his angels fell in rejecting the to-be-incarnate Christ, whose merits serve to ‘justify’ not only unfallen humanity, but even the holy angels. On this view, which arguably has biblical roots in Hebrews 1 and Revelation 12, and which reached its apogee in Milton’s Paradise Lost, ‘the Devil’s envy’ was directed at the God-man in particular.     

Book reviews

The Many Faces of Science: An Introduction to Scientists, Values and Society, Leslie Stevenson & Henry Byerly, 1995. Oxford, Westview Press

Reason, Truth and Self: The Postmodern Reconditioned, Michael Luntley, 1995. London, Routledge xv + 247 pp., hb ISBN 0 415 118522

John Dewey: An Intellectual Portrait, Sidney Hook, 1995. New York, Prometheus xviii + 242 pp., hb ISBN 0 87975 9852

The Logical Status of Diagrams, Sun‐Joo Shin, 1994. Cambridge, CUP xii + 197 pp.     

Computers and pedagogy: Replacing telling with interactive computer-programmed instruction

Programmed instruction has been overlooked as a way of implementing more intensive application of learning principles, possibly because it has not been well understood. Today, most of the hardware problems of past teaching machines have been solved. Instructors can now expand their effectiveness and productivity by shifting to the creation of both classroom tests and computer-interactive tutorials, a change that would leave more time for personal interaction with students. But a better understanding of the contingency of reinforcement and the science in which this concept has evolved is necessary. The computer as a teaching machine has yet to be fully exploited.     

Health anxiety,anxiety sensitivity,and attentional biases for pictorial and linguistic health‐threat cues

The study investigated attentional biases for pictorial and linguistic health‐threat stimuli in high and low health anxious individuals, who were selected from the upper and lower quartile ranges of a normal sample using a screening measure of health anxiety. Attentional bias was assessed using a visual probe task which presented health‐threat and neutral pictures and words at two exposure durations, 500 ms and 1250 ms. The prediction that the high health anxious group would show a greater attentional bias for health‐threat cues than the low health anxious group was not supported despite the groups being well‐differentiated on a general measure of health anxiety, the Illness Attitudes Scale (IAS). Instead, the results indicated that individuals with high levels of anxiety sensitivity showed a significantly greater initial attentional bias for threat pictures compared with those with low anxiety sensitivity, as assessed by the Anxiety Sensitivity Index (ASI).     

Gender differences in smoking: A longitudinal study of beliefs predicting smoking in 11–15 year olds

This longitudinal study investigated differences in beliefs and perceived behavioural control between smokers and non-smokers in a large sample of adolescents. Positive and negative instrumental beliefs, normative beliefs, perceived behavioural control (PBC) and smoking status were assessed in the same participants at 11, 13 and 15 years of age. Prospective analyses among non-smokers revealed that for boys, negative instrumental beliefs in non-smokers at age 11 predicted smoking at age 15 years. For girls, normative beliefs and PBC in non-smokers at age 11 predicted smoking status at age 13; normative beliefs at age 11 predicted smoking at age 15; and positive instrumental beliefs and normative beliefs at age 13 predicted smoking status at age 15. Cross-sectional data revealed that smokers were significantly more likely than non-smokers to endorse positive instrumental beliefs, less likely to agree with negative instrumental belief items, more likely than non-smokers to perceive social pressure to smoke, and less likely to report control over smoking, and that female smokers reported less control over smoking and fewer negative instrumental beliefs than all other groups including male smokers at age 13. The need for belief-based preventative interventions that are age- and gender-relevant is discussed.     

Effects of emotion and age on performance during a think/no-think memory task

Recent studies have demonstrated that young adults can voluntarily suppress information from memory when directed to. After learning novel word pairings to criterion, participants are shown individual words and instructed either to "think" about the associated word, or to put it out of mind entirely ("no-think"). When given a surprise cued recall test, participants typically show impaired recall for no-think words relative to think or "control" (un-manipulated) words. The present study investigated whether this controlled suppression effect persists in an aged population, and examined how the emotionality of the to-be-suppressed word affects suppression ability. Data from four experiments using the think/no-think task demonstrate that older and younger adults can suppress information when directed to (Experiment 1), and the age groups do not differ significantly in this ability. Experiments 2 through 4 demonstrate that both age groups can suppress words that are emotional (positive or negative valence) or neutral. The suppression effect also persists even if participants are tested using independent probe words that are semantically related to the target words but were not the studied cue words (Experiments 3 and 4). These data suggest that the cognitive functioning necessary to suppress information from memory is present in older adulthood, and that both emotional and neutral information can be successfully suppressed from memory.     

Transdiagnostic Associations Among Parental Causal Locus Attributions,Child Behavior and Psychosocial Treatment Outcomes: A Systematic Review

Clinical Child and Family Psychology Review - Parents’ interpretations of the cause of their children’s behavior, i.e., parental attributions, are linked to parenting behavior and child...