John Wesley's Doctrine of Grace in Light of the Christian Tradition

This ecumenically minded article explores Wesley's understanding of grace both in its relation to experience – inward religion – and in relation to his doctrines of justification and sanctification. Wesley's treatments of justification and sanctification are compared to those of Luther, Calvin and Trent. His unique and ecumenical blending of traditions allowed Wesley to develop a doctrine of grace which offers significant resources to contemporary understandings of Christian life and practice.     

Executive functions and linguistic performance in SCD older adults and healthy controls

Subjective cognitive decline (SCD) might represent the preclinical phase of Alzheimer’s disease. Given the interest to characterize it, the present study explores (1) if there are differences in lexical retrieval (LexR) and sentence comprehension (SComp) between SCD and matched controls, and (2) the predictive value of demographic variables and executive functions in relation to LexR and SComp in each group. A sample of 135 participants voluntarily took part in this study (66 with SCD). They all completed the Trail Making, the Stroop, the Boston Naming, and the ECCO-Senior tests, as well as verbal fluency tasks (VF). Results show that (1) groups differ in LexR and in inhibition efficiency, and (2) VF is explained by years of formal education, particularly in the control group; SComp in the most complex items seems to rely in different strategies, related to flexibility in controls and to inhibition efficiency in SCD patients.     

Status Incongruence and Supervisor Gender as Moderators of the Transformational Leadership to Subordinate Affective Organizational Commitment Relationship

Grounded in role congruity theory, we examine how status incongruence (when the subordinate is older, has more education, work experience, and/or organizational tenure than the supervisor) in subordinate–supervisor dyads affects transformational leaders’ ability to foster affective organizational commitment among their subordinates. Across two field studies, our findings show that the relationship between transformational leadership and subordinate affective organizational commitment is less positive when status incongruence is high. Furthermore, in both field studies we found a 3‐way interaction among transformational leadership, status incongruence, and supervisor gender predicting subordinate affective organizational commitment. Specifically, in Study 1 (pink‐collar employees in Turkey), low status incongruence strengthened the positive relationship between transformational leadership and subordinate affective organizational commitment for male leaders. In Study 2 (pink‐collar employees in the United States), low status incongruence strengthened the positive relationship between transformational leadership and subordinate affective organizational commitment for female leaders. Furthermore, Study 2 also revealed that collective identity was a mediator of both the significant 2‐ and 3‐way interaction effects on subordinate affective organizational commitment.     

Counselling and psychotherapy as a form of learning: some implications for practice

This paper explores counselling and psychotherapy as a form of learning. Previous experiences may create distortions in meaning-making perspectives, distortions that create templates for evaluating future experience. These templates act as barriers to being open to experience; thus there is an inability to learn from experience. The process of therapy can provide a learning milieu for the exploration and working through of these barriers, with a potential outcome of a return to learning from experience. It is suggested here that intrinsic to the learning milieu created in therapy there are elements of significant, transformative and emotional learning. Therapy is thus a reparative discourse that facilitates a return to learning from experience. A deconstruction of this concept is provided here as a way of developing the exploration of counselling and psychotherapy as a form of learning.     

The lived experience of psychotherapists working with older clients: an heuristic study

This paper presents the results of an heuristic study based on the research question: ‘How do psychotherapists experience working with older clients?’ The question came from the researchers’ experience and interest in working with older clients in general practice. It started from the researchers’ desire to examine more closely feelings and elements present in their own experience in dialogue with seven other practising therapists who had an interest and experience of working with this client group. Qualities and elements identified were: perceptions of old age and ageism; boundaries and settings; changes to practice; culture and experiences; awareness of time; loss; decline and mortality; and parents and children. These are illustrated by material from each of the participants, a composite depiction of the experience, a creative synthesis and examples from the researchers’ experiences.     

RSK2 signaling in brain habenula contributes to place aversion learning

RSK2 is a Ser/Thr kinase acting in the Ras/MAPK pathway. Rsk2 gene deficiency leads to the Coffin-Lowry Syndrome, notably characterized by cognitive deficits. We found that mrsk2 knockout mice are unable to associate an aversive stimulus with context in a lithium-induced conditioned place aversion task requiring both high-order cognition and emotional processing. Virally mediated shRNA-RSK2 knockdown in the habenula, whose involvement in cognition is receiving increasing attention, also ablated contextual conditioning. RSK2 signaling in the habenula, therefore, is essential for this task. Our study reveals a novel role for RSK2 in cognitive processes and uncovers the critical implication of an intriguing brain structure in place aversion learning.     

High-fat diets impair spatial learning in the radial-arm maze in mice

It has been suggested that hyperglycemia and insulin resistance triggered by energy-dense diets can account for hippocampal damage and deficits of cognitive behaviour. We wonder if the impairment of learning and memory processes detected in diet-induced obese (DIO) mice is linked to diet composition itself. With this purpose we have evaluated learning performance in mice undergoing a short-term high-fat (HF) treatment, which leads to a pre-obese state characterized by increased adiposity without significant changes of glucose and insulin plasma levels. C57BL/6J mice were fed either a HF (45 kcal% from fat) or control diet (10 kcal% from fat) during 8 weeks. Learning performance was evaluated by using the four-arm baited version of the eight-arm radial maze test (RAM). Mice were trained to learn the RAM protocol and then memory was tested at different time-points. Time spent to consume food placed in baited arms and errors committed to find them were measured in all sessions. DIO mice significantly spent more time in learning the task and made a greater number of errors than controls. Moreover, retention tests revealed that both working and total memory errors were also more numerous in DIO mice. The current results show that short-term DIO impairs spatial learning and suggest that impairment of hippocampal learning elicited by HF diets might be perceptible before metabolic alterations linked to obesity develop.     

Expert-novice differences in cognitive and execution skills during tennis competition

This study deals with decision and execution behavior of tennis players during competition. The study is based on the expert-novice paradigm and aims to identify differences between both groups in the decision-making and execution variables in serve and shot actions in tennis. Six expert players (elite Spanish tennis players) and six novice players (grade school tennis players) took part in this study. To carry out this study, the observation protocol defined by McPherson and Thomas in 1989, in which control, decision-making and execution variables were included, was used, where it was applied to the performance of the tennis player in a real match situation. In the analysis, significant differences between experts and novices in decision-making and execution variables are found wherein it can be observed that experts display a greater ability to make the appropriate decisions, selecting the most tactical responses to put pressure on the opponent. Expert tennis players were also able to carry out forceful executions to their opponent with greater efficiency, making the opponent's response to a large extent more difficult. These findings are in accordance with those of McPherson and colleagues.     

CER suppression, passive-avoidance learning, and stress-induced suppression of drinking in the Syracuse high- and low-avoidance strains of rats (Rattus norvegicus)

The Syracuse strains of Long-Evans rats were selectively bred for good (SHA) or poor (SLA) avoidance learning in a two-way shuttle box, which resulted in a phenotypic difference that is correlated with behavior patterns indicative of emotional reactivity, SLA animals showing evidence of greater emotional reactivity than SHA animals. The first three experiments examined conditioned suppression of bar pressing and compared paired and unpaired conditioned- and unconditioned-stimulus presentations to evaluate the influence of conditioning versus primary aversive stimulation on baseline responding. SLA animals acquired conditioned suppression faster than SHA animals and also showed greater suppression of baseline responding than SHA animals. In Experiment 4, SLA animals learned a passive-avoidance task faster than SHA animals. In Experiment 5, SLA animals showed greater stress-induced suppression of drinking a weak quinine solution than SHA animals. These data are consistent with the hypothesis that SLA animals are more emotionally reactive than SHA animals.