Rewriting German and Japanese primeval history: a comparative historical analysis of the Takeuchi monjo and ‘Himmler's Bible'

This study is concerned with two examples of religious re-interpretation of the origins of a ‘nation' legitimated by a text, respectively a ‘corpus' of material of allegedly ancient origin. The first examples are the Japanese Takeuchi monjo (‘Takeuchi texts'), which propose an extended and amended variant of the official ‘State Shintō' and its version of history and became the centre of a small ultra-nationalistic religious movement at the beginning of the 20th century. The second example is a text which was once labelled ‘Himmler's bible', the so-called Oera Linda Boek or Ura Linda Chronik, as it was introduced by its main German interpreter and exegete Herman Wirth in the 1930s. In both cases the texts overturn the view of history and mankind through insights into a so-far undetected prehistory.     

Power, Sex, and Violence: A Psychological Reconstruction of the 20th Century and an Intellectual Agenda for Political Psychology

Power, sex, and violence are three themes that characterize a good deal of 20th-century experience. Connections among these themes can be demonstrated through archival and field studies and by laboratory experiments, in the core disciplines of political psychology as well as in literature and art. Understanding and explaining this power-sex-violence fusion is an urgent theoretical and practical imperative. Two tasks are especially critical: understanding the nature of power-striving and how it might be tempered, and understanding how and why people construct "differences" among themselves. With its broad interdisciplinary tradition, its variety of traditional and innovative methods, and its links to the real world of human affairs, political psychology is well placed to assume this intellectual agenda.     

Linking property crime using offender crime scene behaviour: A comparison of methods

This study compared the ability of seven statistical models to distinguish between linked and unlinked crimes. The seven models utilised geographical, temporal, and modus operandi information relating to residential burglaries (n = 180), commercial robberies, (n = 118), and car thefts (n = 376). Model performance was assessed using receiver operating characteristic analysis and by examining the success with which the seven models could successfully prioritise linked over unlinked crimes. The regression‐based and probabilistic models achieved comparable accuracy and were generally more accurate than the tree‐based models tested in this study. The Logistic algorithm achieved the highest area under the curve (AUC) for residential burglary (AUC = 0.903) and commercial robbery (AUC = 0.830) and the SimpleLogistic algorithm achieving the highest for car theft (AUC = 0.820). The findings also indicated that discrimination accuracy is maximised (in some situations) if behavioural domains are utilised rather than individual crime scene behaviours and that the AUC should not be used as the sole measure of accuracy in behavioural crime linkage research.     

An activist religiosity? Exploring Christian support for the Occupy movement

While Christian involvement in progressive social movements and activism is increasingly recognized, this literature has rarely gone beyond conceptualising religion as a resource to consider instead the ways in which individual activists may articulate their religious identity and how this intersects with the political. Based on ten in-depth interviews with Christian supporters of the London Occupy movement, this study offers an opportunity to respond to this gap by exploring the rich meaning-making processes of these activists. The article suggests that the location of the Occupy camp outside St Paul’s Cathedral was of central importance in bringing the Christian Occupiers’ religio-political identities to the foreground, their Christianity being defined in opposition to that represented by St Paul’s. The article then explores the religio-political meaning-making of the Christian Occupiers and introduces the term ‘activist religiosity’ as a way of understanding how religion and politics were articulated, and enacted, in similar ways. Indeed, religion and politics became considerably entangled and intertwined, rendering theoretical frameworks that conceptualise religion as a resource increasingly inappropriate. The features of this activist religiosity include post-institutional identities, a dislike of categorisation, and, centrally, the notion of ‘doings’—a predominant focus on engaged, active involvement.     

Close Encounters With the Midwest: Forming Identity in a Bicultural Context

This study uses semi-structured interviews to examine how 16 people of Latvian heritage negotiated their cultural identities in high school (retrospectively) and at midlife (concurrently). Participants' high school and midlife cultural identity patterns were coded as marginalized, separated, assimilated, alternating integrated, or blended integrated. Although eleven participants were found to have had marginalized, separated, or alternating integrated patterns in high school, all 16 had either assimilated or blended integrated patterns at midlife. Further, there is evidence that the contexts in which identity negotiation occurred—specifically, the rigidity of the participants' Latvian and American contexts in high school and their relative openness at midlife—influenced these changes in pattern. The findings also underscore the importance of taking into account within-group differences when studying how people negotiate their cultural identities.     

The south beach study: Bystanders' memories are more malleable

People's reports are affected by what others say. The current study compared memory conformity effects of people who interacted with a confederate, and of bystanders to that interaction. A second goal was to observe if memory conformity occurs in a naturalistic setting. A male confederate approached a group of people at the beach and had a brief interaction. About a minute later a research assistant approached the group and administered a target‐absent lineup to each person in the group. Memory conformity was observed. Bystanders were twice as likely to conform as those who interacted with the confederate. Forensic investigators should take into consideration the role a person plays in an event when assessing eyewitness evidence. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

What Factors Influence Therapy Drop Out?

Are there systematic factors that predict client drop out in marriage and family therapy? Based on our review of literature we investigated the influence on drop out of personality characteristics such as hostility, anxiety, satisfaction with life, and self-esteem. We also investigated several demographic variables. The following variables were statistically significant predictors of client drop out: modality of treatment, marital status, occupation, income, and previous therapy experience.     

Does spatial learning ability of common voles (<Emphasis Type="Italic">Microtus arvalis</Emphasis>) and bank voles (<Emphasis Type="Italic">Myodes glareolus</Emphasis>) constrain foraging efficiency?

Place learning abilities represent adaptations that contribute also to foraging efficiency under given spatio-temporal conditions. We investigated if this ability in turn constrains decision making in two sympatric vole species: while the herbivorous common vole (Microtus arvalis) feeds on spatio-temporally predictable food resources (e.g. roots, tubers and shoots of plant tubers), the omnivorous bank vole (Myodes glareolus) additionally subsists on temporally unpredictable food resources (e.g. insects and seeds). Here, we compare the spatial reference memory and working memory of the two species. In an automated operant home cage with eight water places, female voles either had to learn the fixed position of non-depletable places (reference memory task) or learn and avoid previously visited water places depleted in a single visit (win-shift task). In the reference memory task, Microtus females required significantly more choices to find all water places, initially performed slightly worse than Myodes females, and displayed slightly lower asymptotic performance. Both species were highly similar in new learning of the same task. In the more complex win-shift task, asymptotic performance was significantly lower in Microtus (72% correct) than in Myodes (79%). Our results suggest that both vole species resemble each other in their efficiency to exploit habitats with low spatio-temporal complexity but may differ in their efficiency at exploiting habitats with temporally changing spatial food distributions. The results imply that spatial ability adjusted to specific food distributions may impair flexible use of habitats that differ in their food distribution and therefore, decrease a species’ chances of survival in highly dynamic environments.     

Phases of Organ Integration and Conflict in a Transplant Recipient: A Longitudinal Study Using a Diary

In this paper the results from a research project on self-perception and psychological processing following transplantation of solid organs are presented. A diary at the individual case level was introduced to generate a longitudinal analysis. In the following paper we describe an evaluation of the entries of a single patient following a living donor kidney transplant. Conflicts in the relationship between the transplant recipient and the donor, who is also his wife, are clearly evident, and these are interpreted as incorporation conflicts in light of current psychoanalytic theory.