The Role of Postformal Cognitive Development in Death Acceptance

This research is the first to test the relation between postformal complex thought (PFT) and death acceptance. College students (N = 225) completed the PFT questionnaire (Cartwright et al., J Adult Dev, 2009), the Need for Cognition scale (Cacioppo et al., J Personality Assess 48:3, 1984), and Klug’s Death Acceptance Scale, comprised of death integration and confrontation scales (Klug and Sinha, Omega 18:229–235, 1987). A series of hierarchical regression analyses showed PFT made a significant contribution to death acceptance over the contributions of other cognitive and demographic variables, as predicted. Further, PFT made a significant contribution to death integration but not to death confrontation. These results are consistent with contemporary theories of adult cognitive development and PFT.     

Space for emotion in the spaces of activism

This paper explores the role of emotions in activism. Although, increasingly, researchers have examined what emotions inspire or deter different forms of political and social movement activism, this paper takes a new direction by considering what spaces, practices and emotional stances are necessary to sustain individual and collective resistance in the long-term. We argue that we need to sustain activism through emotional reflexivity, building sustaining spaces to create space for emotion in activism. Using empirical examples from different forms of autonomous (anti-capitalist) activism in Britain, the role and importance of emotions to the sustainability of activism is explored. In particular, we consider the role of different spaces in sustaining activists through the cycles of protest, what spaces of activism can be opened up by a closer attention to emotions, and how the spaces in which protest and other activist practices take place shape the emotional and affective engagements of participants. As autonomous forms of activism attempt to prefiguratively enact new post-capitalist social relations in the here and now, we suggest there is still some way to go in changing affective relationships within many of these groups.     

The political sacred and the holiness of life itself

ABSTRACT

This article reflects on Agamben’s formulation of the sacred within the political order of the West, contrasting this with the Durkheim/Bellah view of the sacred/profane opposition, and then presenting two arguments that reduction of the sacred to the political is insufficient, one a form of biological reductionism that seeks to locate the sacred within the common, biological nature of human life itself, the other an abductive argument for human transformation in terms of what Sloterdjik has called ‘vertical tension.’ This argument turns out to be one for locating holiness in the very notion of life itself that I wish to ground in the idea of social cognition.     

Scottish psychoanalysis: a rational religion

The ambition to rationally preserve a Christian religious inheritance distinctively informs Scottish psychoanalytic ideas. Scottish psychoanalysis presents the human personality as born into communion with others. The aim of therapy is to restore, preserve, and promote genuinely interpersonal relations. The Scottish psychoanalysis apparent in the work of W. R. D. Fairbairn, Ian Suttie, Hugh Crichton-Miller, and in the philosophy of John Macmurray, is exported to New Zealand, where it is promoted by the New Zealand Association of Psychotherapists. Scottish psychoanalytic ideas also remain effective in post-war Britain: the idea of communion appears in dialogue with other theories in the work of Harry Guntrip, John Macquarrie, R. D. Laing, and Aaron Esterson.     

Competing Contingencies Over Derived Relational Responding: A Behavioral Model of the Implicit Association Test

The Psychological Record - Subjects were exposed to a word-picture association training phase in which each of 2 arbitrary nonsense syllables printed in blue and red font, respectively, were paired...     

Explorations in a Theological Metaphor: Boethius,Calvin, and Torrance on the Creator/Creation Distinction

This article explores a theological metaphor, comparing God and creation to an author and story. Framed as an Einsteinian thought experiment, and broadly in the genre of theological retrieval, it seeks to resource the use of this metaphor in contemporary theology by bringing it into dialogue with three areas of theological reflection throughout church history: Boethius' doctrine of divine foreknowledge, the so‐called extra Calvinisticum, and Thomas Torrance's account of Christ's ascension. It is suggested that the story metaphor brings into greater visibility what unites and determines each of these different doctrines, namely, a simultaneously robust and dynamic Creator/creation relation. In particular, it is suggested that the metaphor of story illumines the ontological priority of God over creation, as well as the importance of the incarnation and ascension as the determining events for their relationship.