Visual timing in hitting an accelerating ball

To investigate the timing of actions relative to events in the environment, we observed subjects leaping to punch a falling ball. We analysed their knee and elbow angles as functions of time for three ball-drop heights, finding that the differences in the functions for the different heights could be explained on the basis that the subjects were gearing their actions to a particular optic variable. This variable specifies the time remaining before contact with an object if the closing velocity is constant; for the falling ball it gives an increasingly accurate estimate of the time-to-contact. Our visuo-moto control model incorporates a delay parameter, the value of which was estimated from the data. In addition, correlations indicated that the knee and elbow were generally quite tightly coupled. The relationship of this task to laboratory tracking tasks and to the timing of actions in everyday life is described.     

A listing of therapists doing family therapy

Pastoral Psychology -     

Fons Iustitiae: Justice in the City of God

This article seeks to account for the nature of human justice in the City of God. I argue that finite justice, for Augustine, is participatory; it always ‘refers’ itself to the font of justice from which it overflows; it is always received by participation in Christ’s justice. This claim implicates both of Augustine’s central adversaries in the City of God, namely, imperial paganism and Pelagianism. Attention to how Augustine weaves the two major polemical antagonists of the City of God, imperial paganism and Pelagianism, into the same cloth reveals a unified claim about justice in the City of God. Both of Augustine’s antagonists are guilty of claiming a self‐referential and self‐manufactured conception of justice. Pagans and Pelagians do not confess justice as a gift received; they instead treat it as something constructed on the tottering foundation of collective or personal virtue. Justice in both cases fails and finds its end in self‐glorification and pride. Finally, I propose that Augustine’s participatory account of justice has implications for a vexed twentieth‐century debate about the City of God, namely the question of what allegiance, responsibilities and loves citizens of the heavenly city ought to have towards the earthly city in which they live as pilgrims.     

Inward- and Outward-Directed Violence in the Lives of Urban Minority Adults Followed from Middle School into Their Thirties

This study explores connections between inward-directed violence and outward-directed violence using data from the Reach for Health sample, which was originally recruited in the 1990s from three middle schools in economically distressed, predominantly African American neighborhoods of New York City. Now in their thirties, participants (N = 595) completed surveys assessing current suicidal thoughts and behaviors as well as other violence involvements, including intimate partner violence victimization and perpetration. About 10% of males and females reported any suicidal ideation or attempt in the past 12 months. In logistic regression analyses adjusting for sociodemographics, prior reports of feeling blue in middle school (OR: 1.12, CI: 1.02–4.39) and young adult suicidality (OR: 2.54, CI: 1.30–4.95) are significantly related to later suicidality. So are concurrent aggressive behaviors, including reports of physical fighting outside the home (OR: 2.70, CI: 1.29–5.67) and IPV perpetration (OR: 2.09, CI: 1.11–3.94). Neither IPV victimization nor witnessing neighborhood violence is correlated. Findings shed light on the persistence of suicidality in the lives of those who come of age, and often remain, in communities with high levels of poverty, and confirm linkages of suicidality with externally directed aggression. Life-stage interventions are needed to counter the interwoven causes and consequences of multiple forms of violence.     

Moral Values Reveal the Causality Implicit in Verb Meaning

Prior work has found that moral values that build and bind groups—that is, the binding values of ingroup loyalty, respect for authority, and preservation of purity—are linked to blaming people who have been harmed. The present research investigated whether people's endorsement of binding values predicts their assignment of the causal locus of harmful events to the victims of the events. We used an implicit causality task from psycholinguistics in which participants read a sentence in the form “SUBJECT verbed OBJECT because…” where male and female proper names occupy the SUBJECT and OBJECT position. The participants were asked to predict the pronoun that follows “because”—the referent to the subject or object—which indicates their intuition about the likely cause of the event. We also collected explicit judgments of causal contributions and measured participants' moral values to investigate the relationship between moral values and the causal interpretation of events. Using two verb sets and two independent replications (N = 459, 249, 788), we found that greater endorsement of binding values was associated with a higher likelihood of selecting the object as the cause for harmful events in the implicit causality task, a result consistent with, and supportive of, previous moral psychological work on victim blaming. Endorsement of binding values also predicted explicit causal attributions to victims. Overall, these findings indicate that moral values that support the group rather than the individual reliably predict that people shift the causal locus of harmful events to those affected by the harms.     

Correction to: Towards a Better Understanding of Cognitive Deficits in Absence Epilepsy: a Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

Neuropsychology Review - Due to an error during the editorial phase, a correction regarding Fig. 2 is added to the original article: “Towards a Better Understanding of Cognitive...