GOD'S PLACE IN A SPACE AGE

Abstract. The shift from a pre-Copernican to a Copernican world view has caused an ever increasing sense of homelessness for the idea of a theistically conceived God. This paper first traces the historical development of this problem and its implications for the Christian faith. Next it presents some historically evolved "rescue" attempts and examines them critically. Then follows an inquiry concerning the biblical understanding of God's relation to space and a critical presentation of some contemporary proposals to make God's presence intelligible. In conclusion we propose a dimensional model of relating God and the world, a model which allows for a reasonable discourse of God's immanence and transcendence.     

Cognitive and affective bases of opinion survey responses

Two experiments investigated the determinants of agreement with propositions that advocated social privileges for either people in general or specific social groups. Liking for the group to which a group-specific proposition referred had a contrast effect on agreement with a related general proposition that was considered immediately after it, but had a positive influence on agreement with a general proposition that did not occur until several items later. The latter effect was eliminated by instructing Ss to base their judgments on the consequences of the policies described in the propositions. Instructions to base judgments on affective reactions to the propositions produced contrast effects of group-specific propositions on judgments of general ones regardless of whether these items were separated or together in the questionnaire.     

Mixed‐methods Evaluation of the Good Behaviour Game in English Primary Schools

Inclusivity of all children in education and within educational settings is an important value and goal. Yet, where settings and practices are not oriented for inclusivity and engagement, some children can struggle with academic tasks and are often marginalised and exhibit disruptive behaviours. The study reported here addresses the social nature of school as a community for learning through a mixed‐methods concurrent triangulation evaluation of the implementation of the Good Behaviour Game (GBG) in six primary (elementary) schools with 10 classes and 222 children in Oxfordshire, England. The Teacher Observation of Classroom Adaptations ‐ Revised (TOCA‐R) was administered in individual interviews with class teachers. Additionally, individual semi‐structured interviews were conducted with teachers, coaches and head teachers (n = 22). In a pre–post design, improvements in child adaptation were observed on all TOCA‐R subscales. In an integrative analysis that brought together quantitative and qualitative findings, pupil improvement was identified in three major areas: inclusion and social participation, behaviour, and concentration. Interview results also highlighted the substantial practical challenges associated with implementing and using the GBG in schools in the UK. Overall, the results of this study support the idea that social relationships within the school community, between pupils and between pupils and teachers, provide an important context for learning and social development. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Die Hard in Notting Hill: Gender Differences in Recalling Contents from Action and Romantic Movies

We investigated the impact of movie genre preferences on memory for movie content. Starting from a well‐documented gender gap in movie preferences, we predicted that women would recall more contents from a romantic movie than from an action movie, whereas men were expected to recall more contents from an action movie than from a romantic movie. In two experiments, male and female participants watched 30‐minute clips from action and romantic movies and then answered 30 questions on movie content and additional questions. Both experiments showed that women recalled relatively more information from a romantic movie than from an action movie, whereas men showed the opposite pattern. Further analyses showed that these effects were independent from participants' familiarity with the movie and not mediated by participants' liking of a particular movie. In general, the results of our study provide further evidence for an effect of (gender‐related) interests on memory performance.Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Further tests of the interactive race model of divided attention: The effects of negative bias and varying stimulus — onset asynchronies

In Go/No-Go detection tasks, responses to redundant targets are typically faster than responses to either of these targets alone. One explanation of this redundant-targets effect is from race models, which assume statistical facilitation due to the activation of more than one processing channel under the redundant-targets condition. J. O. Miller (1982, 1986) has derived an upper boundary for the amount of facilitation these models can predict and has found this boundary to be consistently violated in bimodal divided-attention tasks and in letter-detection tasks. Thus, until recently race models were thought to be unable to predict the amount of facilitation commonly observed.Mordkoff and Yantis (1991) have challenged this conclusion and showed that no facilitation beyond the predictions of race models is observed if certain types of contingency within the experimental design are removed. The present study tries to replicate this basic finding and to generalize it to conditions with (a) nonsimultaneous signal presentation, and (b) negative interstimuius contingency benefit. Several important predictions of Mordkoff and Yantis' interactive race model were found to hold, but for nonsimultaneous signals presentations consistent violations of Miller's upper bound were found under certain conditions. The implications of the present results for models of divided attention are discussed.     

Physiological reactivity to stressors in irritable bowel syndrome patients, inflammatory bowel disease patients and non-patient controls.

Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS) patients were compared with Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD) patients and non-patient controls on four separate physiological measures (heart rate, finger-tip temperature, skin resistance level, and forehead EMG) for their physical reactivity to 'laboratory stressors'. It was predicted that the IBS patients would respond to these stressors with more physiological reactivity than the two other groups. There were initial basal differences among the groups on heart rate and finger-tip temperature: in general, the IBS patients had lower basal heart rates and the non-patient controls had lower finger-tip temperatures. These findings are contrary to the previous body of literature regarding possible sympathetic nervous system (SNS) arousal states in the IBS patient. The results also indicated IBS patients were not significantly different than the IBD patients or the non-patient controls in their reactivity to stressors. Previous literature has suggested that IBS in their reactivity to stressors. Previous literature has suggested that IBS patients have an enhanced SNS arousal or an SNS mediated reactivity to environmental stressors, our current study has not found these results.     

Two controlled evaluations of multicomponent psychological treatment of irritable bowel syndrome.

We report two controlled comparisons of a previously validated multicomponent (relaxation, thermal biofeedback, and cognitive therapy) treatment for irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) to an ostensible attention-placebo control (pseudo-meditation and EEG alpha suppression biofeedback) and to a symptom-monitoring control. In Study 1 (n = 10 per condition) there were nonsignificant trends for the multicomponent treatment to be superior to the attention-placebo condition. In Study 2 (n = 30 per condition), we found no advantage for the multicomponent treatment over the attention-placebo condition. Subjects in both treatment conditions showed significant reductions in GI symptoms, as measured by daily symptom diaries, and significant reductions in trait anxiety and depression. The GI symptom reductions held up over a 6 month follow-up. Possible explanations for the results are explored.     

THE INTERPLAY BETWEEN SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY IN UNCOVERING THE MATRIX OF HUMAN MORALITY

Abstract. Theology and the life sciences are mutually dependent on one another in the task of understanding the origin and function of moral behavior. The life sciences investigate morality from the perspective of the historical and communal dimension of humanity and point to survival as the primary function of human behavior. A Christian ethic of self-sacrifice advances the preservation of the entire human and nonhuman creation and should not, therefore, be objected to by the life sciences. Religion, however, is more than a survival mechanism. It points to a preserving agency beyond humanity and prevents the life sciences from reducing life to its strictly biological side.     

A diffusion model of early visual search: Theoretical analysis and experimental results

Summary Meinecke (1989, Exp. 1, cond. HO) showed that the detectability of a visual target embedded in a linear noise array decreases with increasing retinal eccentricity, while the reaction time (RT) of the hits increases. One of the most interesting features of her results was that the RT of the correct rejections is consistently larger than the RT for signals presented near the fovea. This finding suggests that initially visual attention is concentrated near the fixation point and then diffuses across the stimulus array to perform a serial, exhaustive search. We present a diffusion model of early visual-search processes that quantitatively describes this evolution of attention in time and space; in contrast to most previous conceptions, it is based on a genuine relation between the spatial and temporal dimensions of the search processes performed. The model predicts quantitatively both detection performance and RT. We conducted an experiment similar to that of Meinecke (1989), but with an additional variation of the presentation time. All the main features of the 189 predictions could be explained by the model. The interpretation of the four model's parameters is discussed in some detail and compared with previous estimates of the microscopic search speed derived from alternative models. Finally, we consider some possible modifications related to results of Kehrer (1987, 1989), and some generalizations to multi target detection and two-dimensional stimulus arrays.