Understanding as compression

Philosophical Studies - What is understanding? My goal in this paper is to lay out a new approach to this question and clarify how that approach deals with certain issues. The claim is that...     

Mission and People with Disabilities

This article begins with a few thoughts and some historical and canonical encounters about how lay and ordained people with disabilities have been involved in Orthodox mission work in the past. It then presents two concrete contemporary situations in which people with disabilities are involved in Orthodox ordained ministry work despite the persisting tradition that disabled people not be ordained. The first example is taken from the Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church, where the involvement of people with disabilities in both ordained and lay ministry provides significant support for a church that lives in a delicate situation. The second example is taken from the Romanian Orthodox Church and presents the case of Father Theophilus P?r?ian, one of the most prominent contemporary Romanian Orthodox monastic figures, who served as an ordained priest despite his disability. This article pleads for a deeper involvement of disabled people in both ordained and lay ministry in Orthodox churches.     

Specificity of Dating Aggression and Its Justification Among High-Risk Adolescents

Ninety-five high-risk adolescents were studied to determine whether their dating aggression and its justification as a response to interpersonal problems were specific to the current partner, general to dating relationships, or part of a global age-mate (same-sex peers and opposite-sex dating partners) aggression problem. Approximately one-third of males and two-thirds of females reported physical aggression against their current dating partner. Males' aggression (and its justification) toward their current dating partner was part of a generalized pattern of dating aggression, whereas for females, physical aggression against a current dating partner (and its justification) was partner-specific and unrelated to aggression in other relationships. Findings are discussed with regard to intervention and future research on adolescent dating aggression.     

Reaction to Mortality: An Interdisciplinary Organizing Principle for the Human Sciences

Ernest Becker's theory about death denial is one example of depth psychological theory. Because very important features of Becker's theory have now successfully and singularly met the rigorous empirical testing of Terror Management Theory (TMT), it must be concluded that the theory of death denial stands apart from and above alternative depth psychological theories in explaining human behavioral and attitudinal motivation. Nevertheless, TMT only touches the surface of Becker's theory in the round. This essay looks at how Becker's wider theories of death denial are applied to (1) personal psychological, (2) social psychological, (3) political, and (4) spiritual aspects of human experience and suggests that what Becker has given us is an organizing principle, a theory of considerable integrative, explanatory, and interpretive power, for a broadly interdisciplinary social science of human behavior.     

Sexuality and Spirituality: A Humanist Account

Typical accounts of spirituality define it by association with religious faith and especially one's relationship with God. Without impugning the validity of theological considerations, this humanist account treats spirituality apart from them. Whereas the standard model of the human being is bipartite (body and mind), this paper distinguishes two dimensions within the human mind—psyche and spirit—and thus proposes a tripartite model (organism, psyche, and spirit). Attention to human spirit grounds an account of spirituality, and attention to organism and psyche introduces sexuality into the picture. Then, the reconciliation of sexuality and spirituality is nothing other than the integration of the human being: organism, psyche, and spirit. Granted that human spirit entails its own criteria for unbounded unfolding, such integration would generally express the ideals of spirituality proposed by the various religions. Psychotherapist and educator at     

Case illustration: Moving along…and,is change gradual or sudden?

A sequence of analytic sessions of a professional woman in her forties is used to illustrate the moving along process. The material shows a gradual change, where the patient's experience of her sense of agency is altered through a particular kind of interactive sequence. The example is intended to make it clear that the group's view of how change occurs is not strictly or primarily in terms of sudden changes, and that the problem of assessing moments of meeting as well as quantitative and qualitative shifts is one with which the group continues to struggle. © 1998 Michigan Association for Infant Mental Health     

Assessment of delusional beliefs during the modification of delusional verbalizations

This study examined the strength of delusional beliefs during the modification of delusional verbalizations of a 51 year-old chronically mentally ill inpatient. The changing-criterion design was used to document the effectiveness of a behavioral treatment package to alter the rate of delusional responses to personal background questions. The results revealed a stepwise decline in the frequency of delusional responses. Generalization effects to novel interviewers were obtained. No changes were obtained on the subject's ratings of delusional beliefs, with the subject assigning ratings of absolute conviction to his beliefs throughout the duration of the study.     

Voice Identification Over the Telephone1

Following a telephone survey investigating attitudes toward police and frequency of personal victimization. 177 citizens between the ages of 18 and 88 years participated without forewarning in a field study on telephone voice identification. Identification accuracy (hits) improved with longer conversation durations (an average duration of 7.8 min compared to conversation durations of 3.2 min and 4.3 min. on average), but the false alarm rate also reliably increased with longer durations in a target-present lineup. False alarms were consistently high (overall M= .48) in the target-absent lineup. No significant differences were found in hit scores or false alarm scores over a two to three day retention interval. No significant correlation was found between confidence scores and accuracy of performance on the target-present lineup (r= .10). but a significant correlation (r= 36) was found on the target-absent lineup.     

Feeding-based arousal effects on visual recognition memory in early infancy.

Arousal effects on a 1-trial visual recognition paired-comparison task were studied at newborn, 1-month, and 4-month test ages. Infants were tested before and after feeding, with arousal assumed to be lower after feeding. Newborns and 1-month-olds shifted from a familiarity preference before feeding to a novelty preference after feeding. A control group tested only after feeding confirmed that this shift was not due to increased stimulus exposure from the prefeeding test. By 4 months, infants showed novelty preferences independent of feeding. This age by arousal interaction for recognition memory extends previous knowledge by including endogenous arousal with age, stimulus, and length of exposure as contributors to familiarity-novelty preferences. It also extends and provides converging evidence for arousal effects on visual attention in early infancy found previously with preferential looking. A shift from subcortical to cortical dominance is supported.