From brief gaps to very long pauses: temporal isolation does not benefit serial recall

Theoretical explanations of short-term memory for serial order can be classified on the basis of whether or not they invoke time as a causal variable. According to time-based accounts, such as temporal distinctiveness theories, there is an intimate link between time and memory. Event-based theories, by contrast, postulate processes such as interference or rehearsal to account for seemingly temporal phenomena in short-term memory. We report an experiment that examined whether extended temporal isolation benefits serial recall performance. Regardless of whether the participants were quiet or performed articulatory suppression during list presentation, temporal isolation did not benefit memory even if items were separated from their neighbors by up to 7 sec. These findings challenge time-based theories of short-term memory.     

Sin,Evil and Job: Monotheism as a psychological and pastoral problem

The Book of Job, as interpreted by Jung and Capps, reveals that evil exists in creation and has its source in God. Evil is the inevitable result of God choosing to be subject to logical norms in order to avoid a chaotic world. However, according to religious tradition, the good in God outweighs the evil, which is why believers in God go to God for help even when God seems to inflict suffering upon them.This paper arose from the course Personal Sin and Social Evil taught by Donald Capps and Richard K. Fenn at Princeton Theological Seminary in 1992.     

The Mediation of Redemption in Schleiermacher's Glaubenslehre

Abstract:  In §24 of the Glaubenslehre , Friedrich Schleiermacher conceives of a 'provisional antithesis' between Protestantism – which 'makes the individual's relation to the Church dependent on his relation to Christ'– and Catholicism – which 'makes the individual's relation to Christ dependent on his relation to the Church'. This antithesis has been criticized for defining a Protestantism that is inconsistent with the (Protestant) theology of redemption presented elsewhere in the Glaubenslehre . This article seeks to refute this criticism, arguing that while Schleiermacher acknowledges the roles of both Christ and the church in redemption, he ultimately gives theological priority to the former.     

Mother-child emotional availability in ecological perspective: three countries, two regions, two genders

This study used a cross-national framework to examine country, region, and gender differences in emotional availability (EA), a prominent index of mutual socioemotional adaptation in the parent-child dyad. Altogether 220 Argentine, Italian, and U.S. mothers and their daughters and sons from both rural and metropolitan areas took part in home observations when the children were 20 months old. In terms of country, Italian mothers were more sensitive and optimally structuring, and Italian children were more responsive and involving, than Argentine and U.S. dyads. In terms of region, rural mothers were more intrusive than metropolitan mothers, and boys from metropolitan areas were more responsive than boys from rural areas. In terms of gender, mothers of girls were more sensitive and optimally structuring than mothers of boys, and daughters were more responsive and involving than sons. Understanding how country, region, and gender influence EA exposes forces that shape child development, parent-infant interaction, and family systems.     

The Role of Masculinity in Children’s Bullying

The aim of the present study was to explore the association between gender role, in terms of self-attribution of masculine and feminine characteristics, and children's involvement in bullying problems during the elementary-school years. A total of 113, six- to ten-year-old children completed self-report measures of bullying and victimization and a masculinity–femininity scale. Their teachers provided ratings of pupils’ reactive and proactive aggressive behavior. Data from a hierarchical regression on bullying scores showed that, irrespective of sex, masculine traits predicted active bullying behavior. Moreover, bullying was also related to victimization and to teacher's evaluation of reactive aggression. Our findings suggest the need for longitudinal and cross-cultural studies in this line of research.     

Perceived collective efficacy to stop aggression at school: A validation of an Italian and a Swedish version of a scale for adolescents

Collective efficacy to stop peer aggression in the school context refers to adolescents’ beliefs about the capability of students and teachers in their school to work together to counteract aggressive behaviours among peers. This study presents the Italian and Swedish versions of a recently developed scale to measure the construct. Factorial structure and measurement invariance of the scale were assessed in two samples of adolescents aged 10–15 years. The findings support both a two-dimensional and a three-dimensional scale across gender and countries, demonstrating the importance of making distinctions between different forms of aggression when measuring collective efficacy to stop aggression. A one-dimensional scale was only supported in the Swedish sample. The results support the use of the Collective Efficacy to Stop Aggression scale with both Italian and Swedish adolescents.     

Does empathy predict adolescents' bullying and defending behavior?

Through structural equation modeling, this study tested a path of relations in which different levels of empathic responsiveness were posited to be differently associated to bullying and defending behavior. Three hundred and eighteen Italian adolescents (142 girls and 176 boys; mean age = 13.2 years) completed the Davis's Interpersonal Reactivity Index [Davis, 1983] for empathy and the Participant role scales [Salmivalli et al., 1996] for bullying and defending behavior. The results revealed that the model fitted the data adequately, but only in the case of boys. As hypothesized, low levels of empathic responsiveness were associated to students' involvement in bullying others. In contrast, empathy was positively associated with actively helping victimized schoolmates. However, the estimates algorithm did not reach convergence with girls' data. The current findings confirm and extend the literature on the relation between empathy, prosociality and aggressive behavior. Educational implications are also discussed.     

Distinctiveness revisited: Unpredictable temporal isolation does not benefit short-term serial recall of heard or seen events

The notion of a link between time and memory is intuitively appealing and forms the core assumption of temporal distinctiveness models. Distinctiveness models predict that items that are temporally isolated from their neighbors at presentation should be recalled better than items that are temporally crowded. By contrast, event-based theories consider time to be incidental to the processes that govern memory, and such theories would not imply a temporal isolation advantage unless participants engaged in a consolidation process (e.g., rehearsal or selective encoding) that exploited the temporal structure of the list. In this report, we examine two studies that assessed the effect of temporal distinctiveness on memory, using auditory (Experiment 1) and auditory and visual (Experiment 2) presentation with unpredictably varying interitem intervals. The results show that with unpredictable intervals temporal isolation does not benefit memory, regardless of presentation modality.