Christ’s Love in the Midst of Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed vividly the pandemic of economic inequality, the pandemic of racism, and the pandemic of climate catastrophe. This article explores what it means to manifest Christ’s love, moving the world, in the midst of these pandemics. It begins by recalling firm faith claims on which to build a response, moving on to “reading” the context of these four pandemics, noting five signs of the times as guides for discerning how to respond. It concludes with four suggestions regarding gospel-grounded response: (1) seeking to address one of these pandemics without deep attention to the others is dangerous; (2) the four pandemics converge in a holy call to economic restructuring; (3) the movement toward a moral economy is not an impossible dream; and (4) religion, including the World Council of Churches, has a crucial role to play. They are suggestions, in other words, about the form of Christ’s love moving the world in the midst of these pandemics.     

A theology of pastoral multiplicity

The contemporary moment is characterized by liquidity and difference. “Liquidity” means rapidly changing social structures, accelerations in consumption, and constantly changing personal and group identities. In this increasingly diverse context, encounters with difference are not only inevitable, they are essential—and can be transformative for our understandings of our multiple selves, for our pastoral encounters with others, and for our theological imagination, as well. Viewing the self, especially the pastor's self, as a collection of multiple selves, identities, and performances illumines pastoral leadership; pastors who claim their multiplicity more wholly meet “others” when encountering difference. The triune God reveals divine multiplicity, so pastors who claim their multiplicity as their identity thereby make a theological claim.     

Excessive daydreaming: A case history and discussion of mind wandering and high fantasy proneness

This case study describes a patient presenting with a long history of excessive daydreaming which has caused her distress but is not incident to any other apparent clinical psychiatric disorders. We have treated this patient for over 10 years, and she has responded favorably to fluvoxamine therapy, stating that it helps to control her daydreaming. Our patient, and other psychotherpists, have brought to our attention other possible cases of excessive daydreaming. We examine the available literature regarding daydreaming, mind wandering, and fantasy proneness relative to current cognitive and neuroanatomical models of executive attention.     

Parent-Child Interaction Therapy for Children Born Premature: A Case Study and Illustration of Vagal Tone as a Physiological Measure of Treatment Outcome

Evidence-based psychosocial interventions for externalizing behavior problems in children born premature have not been reported in the literature. This single-case study describes Parent-Child Interaction Therapy (PCIT) with a 23-month-old child born at 29 weeks gestation weighing 1,020 grams, who presented with significant externalizing behavior problems. Treatment outcome was assessed using standard measures of maternal and child functioning and observational measures of the parent-child interaction, as well as a physiological measure of heart rate variability (i.e., vagal tone) used to assess parasympathetic control in the child. Maternal reports of child behavior problems and their own stress and depressive symptoms decreased after treatment. Behavioral observations demonstrated improved parenting practices and child compliance, and vagal tone showed comparable increases as well. Results suggest that PCIT is a promising psychosocial intervention for children born premature with externalizing behavior problems, and that vagal tone may be a useful measure of treatment outcome.     

Means to an end: Neotropical parrots manage to pull strings to meet their goals

Although parrots share with corvids and primates many of the traits believed to be associated with advanced cognitive processing, knowledge of parrot cognition is still limited to a few species, none of which are Neotropical. Here we examine the ability of three Neotropical parrot species (Blue-Fronted Amazons, Hyacinth and Lear’s macaws) to spontaneously solve a novel physical problem: the string-pulling test. The ability to pull up a string to obtain out-of-reach food has been often considered a cognitively complex task, as it requires the use of a sequence of actions never previously assembled, along with the ability to continuously monitor string, food and certain body movements. We presented subjects with pulling tasks where we varied the spatial relationship between the strings, the presence of a reward and the physical contact between the string and reward to determine whether (1) string-pulling is goal-oriented in these parrots, (2) whether the string is recognized as a means to obtain the reward and (3) whether subjects can visually determine the continuity between the string and the reward, selecting only those strings for which no physical gaps between string and reward were present. Our results show that some individuals of all species were able to use the string as a means to reach a specific goal, in this case, the retrieval of the food treat. Also, subjects from both macaw species were able to visually determine the presence of physical continuity between the string and reward, making their choices consistently with the recognition that no gaps should be present between the string and the reward. Our findings highlight the potential of this taxonomic group for the understanding of the underpinnings of cognition in evolutionarily distant groups such as birds and primates.     

Basis of metamemory judgments for text with multiple‐choice,essay and recall tests

Accuracy of metamemory for text was compared for multiple‐choice, essay and recall tests. Essay and recall tests were scored with Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA), number of correct idea units and number of word matches. Each measure was correlated with college students' predictions and posttest confidence judgments across texts to determine metamemory accuracy. Metamemory accuracy varied for different types of tests with multiple‐choice tests generally producing greater accuracy than essay tests. However, metamemory accuracy for essay and recall tests depended on the measure used to score them. Number of correct idea units produced the highest metamemory accuracy, word matches produced an intermediate level, and LSA produced the lowest accuracy. Students used the quantity of output in their judgments, so performance measures that related most strongly to quantity matched judgments better than measures based on answer quality. The results are compatible with an accessibility account of judgments about performance on text. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The New Person-Specific Paradigm in Psychology

ABSTRACT— Most research methodology in the behavioral sciences employs interindividual analyses, which provide information about the state of affairs of the population. However, as shown by classical mathematical-statistical theorems (the ergodic theorems), such analyses do not provide information for, and cannot be applied at, the level of the individual, except on rare occasions when the processes of interest meet certain stringent conditions. When psychological processes violate these conditions, the interindividual analyses that are now standardly applied have to be replaced by analysis of intraindividual variation in order to obtain valid results. Two illustrations involving analysis of intraindividual variation of personality and emotional processes are given.     

Leader Creativity as a Predictor of Leading Change in Organizations1

This investigation examined leader creativity, broadly conceptualized as a confluence of personal attributes, as a predictor of leading change in organizations. Because organizational change occurs primarily in the social system in support of the technical system, the role of social‐emotional competency was also examined. Two correlational studies were conducted in samples of U.S. Army officers. As predicted, leader creativity was a significant predictor of leading change. Creativity measures explained 42% of the variance in leading change performance measures in novice officers and 71% of the variance in early‐ to mid‐career officers. Social‐emotional competency was also a significant predictor of leading change, but less than creativity. “The art of the creative leader is the art of institution‐building, the reworking of human and technological materials to fashion an organization that embodies new and enduring values” ( Selznick, 1957 , pp. 152–153).     

Internet Daters’ Body Type Preferences: Race–Ethnic and Gender Differences

Employing a United States sample of 5,810 Yahoo heterosexual internet dating profiles, this study finds race–ethnicity and gender influence body type preferences for dates, with men and whites significantly more likely than women and non-whites to have such preferences. White males are more likely than non-white men to prefer to date thin and toned women, while African-American and Latino men are significantly more likely than white men to prefer female dates with thick or large bodies. Compatible with previous research showing non-whites have greater body satisfaction and are less influenced by mainstream media than whites, our findings suggest Latinos and African Americans negotiate dominant white idealizations of thin female bodies with their own cultures’ greater acceptance of larger body types.