Cognitive behavior therapy for fear of flying: sustainability of treatment gains after September 11

This study examines the long-term efficacy of cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) for fear of flying (FOF) after a catastrophic fear-relevant event, the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Participants (N = 115) were randomly assigned to and completed treatment for FOF using 8 sessions of either virtual reality exposure therapy (VRE) or standard exposure therapy (SE) prior to September 11, 2001. Individuals were reassessed in June, 2002, an average of 2.3 years after treatment, with a response rate of 48% (n = 55). Analyses were run on the original data and, using multiple imputation procedures, on imputed data for the full sample. Individuals maintained or improved upon gains made in treatment as measured by standardized FOF questionnaires and by number of flights taken. There were no differences between VRE and SE. Thus, results suggest that individuals previously treated for FOF with cognitive-behavioral therapy can maintain treatment gains in the face of a catastrophic fear-relevant event, even years after treatment is completed.     

Introduction: W. E. B. Du Bois: Religion and Social Inequality

W.E.B. Du Bois understood the critical role religion plays in power inequities in the, world. He was very acquainted with how it is used as a tool to exclude and subordinate human beings and yet, at the same time, serve as a source of refuge. This special issue of the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion is a collection of articles that examines religion and social inequality from a variety of different angles with a Du Boisian lens. When we focus our lens on religion and social inequality, we are highlighting the ways in which religion plays a part in the unequal distribution of power across social groups in society. This special issue focuses on how religion impacts social life and the way individuals and groups embody or struggle to reclaim their agency within a context of silent oppression at times and not-so-silent oppression at others times at the personal-, group-, and global levels.     

The Face of Time: Temporal Cues in Facial Expressions of Emotion

Results of studies reported here indicate that humans are attuned to temporal cues in facial expressions of emotion. The experimental task required subjects to reproduce the actual progression of a target person"s spontaneous expression (i.e., onset to offset) from a scrambled set of photographs. Each photograph depicted a segment of the expression that corresponded to approximately 67 ms in real time. Results of two experiments indicated that (a) individuals could detect extremely subtle dynamic cues in a facial expression and could utilize these cues to reproduce the proper temporal progression of the display at above-chance levels of accuracy; (b) women performed significantly better than men on the task designed to assess this ability; (c) individuals were most sensitive to the temporal characteristics of the early stages of an expression; and (d) accuracy was inversely related to the amount of time allotted for the task. The latter finding may reflect the relative involvement of (error-prone) cognitively mediated or strategic processes in what is normally a relatively automatic, nonconscious process.     

Anti-realist truth and concepts of superassertibility

Crispin Wright offers superassertibility as an anti-realist explication of truth. A statement is superassertible, roughly, if there is a state of information available which warrants it and it is warranted by all achievable enlargements of that state of information. However, it is argued, Wright fails to take account of the fact that many of our test procedures are not sure fire, even when applied under ideal conditions. An alternative conception of superassertibility is constructed to take this feature into account. However, it is then argued that when this revised concept of superassertibility is taken as the truth predicate of probability statements, statements whose test procedures are paradigmatically not sure fire, then any anti-realist theory of the sense of such probability statements cannot be compositional, in Dummett's sense of compositional.     

Ordinary language and absolute certainty

Philosophical Studies -     

The calculation of sums of squares for interactions in the analysis of variance

A method is described for the calculation of the sum of squares for a second-order interaction. It is then shown that the method is general and can be used for the calculation of the sum of squares for any higher-order interaction.     

Conversation and remembering: Bartlett revisited

Bartlett's book Remembering (1932) is frequently cited as a major forerunner of the information processing approach to memory and cognition. This approach has itself been criticized by one of its founders, Ulric Neisser (1982), for its narrowness and artificiality compared with the nature of remembering in natural contexts. A re-examination of Bartlett's work demonstrates that it offers little basis for an information processing approach, but rather that it offers the foundation of a much broader, culturally contextualized and functional approach to the study of everyday remembering. Three particular themes are discussed: the integration of social judgements and affective reactions with cognition, the role of conventional symbols in the coding and communication of experience, and the importance of conversational discourse. Bartlett's best-known studies, involving the method of serial reproduction, are shown to be microcosmic demonstrations of the process that he was most concerned with—that of conventionalization of symbols rather than of the workings of an individual's memory. It is argued, again beginning with Bartlett, that everyday remembering may be most fruitfully studied in terms of its personal and social functions, and particularly through its realization in discourse.