华人社会中的宗教与环保初探

面对环境问题,宗教领袖选择对宗教经典进行重新诠释,认为宗教在处理这些议题上扮演了重要的角色.本文则越过宗教教义,直接考察华人社会宗教团体的环保参与,并得出一些初步的认识:第一、宗教与环保没有直接的因果关系,但宗教可以成为环保运动的同路人,并对处理环境危机做出贡献.许多宗教参与环保并非源自其教义,而是因为世俗的环保运动如火如荼.第二,有组织的宗教(如台湾的佛教)比那些没有组织的宗教(如儒教)在进行资源动员保护环境方面更有效率.第三,强调自利与个人主义的民间宗教更多地推动地方上的环境保护,而强调利他和集体主义取向的宗教团体则更具心系苍生、环保天下的气质.     

Models for the processing and identification of faces

Representations of human faces were constructed from Identi-Kit in a comparison of several possible models of information processing relating to facial recognition. There was no experimental evidence that faces were treated as unitary Gestalten, or that the component features were processed to any significant extent in parallel, even when the stimuli were presented as photographic positives in the normal upright mode. Instead, the best theoretical model to fit the data involved serial self-terminating processing, without replacement. Task difficulty, determining both processing time and number of errors made, was found to be a function both of the number of critical features present and the orientation (upright or inverted). Photographic negatives were handled in every way the same as positives. The more difficult the task, the stronger the evidence for a serial model and the greater the effects of practice. The latter suggests that, given time, Ss could handle inverted presentations as readily as upright ones, and that inversion may merely increase the difficulty in separating out the individual features for subsequent processing.     

Implicit contributions of context to recognition

Studies of the impact of context on remembering have not focused on the influence of contextual contingency on subsequent recognition in the condition in which the contingency cannot be verbalized. In two experiments, we analyzed the effect of an implicitly encoded position contingency involving location and semantic category on both hit and false alarm recognition judgments after 1 day and 1 week delays. We vigorously probed for what participants could say about the contingency. We found context effects for both hits and false alarms, whether or not participants could verbalize any knowledge they might have of contingency. These results suggest that people may use contextual information when making a recognition judgment even if they are not aware of this information.     

Clinical pastoral education and post privacy legislation: an Australian perspective

Recently introduced privacy legislation in Australia has required that professional associations approaching education from the perspective of human cases review their standards and develop new policies and procedures to protect the privacy of individuals. In this article, the author explores the disruption created for Clinical Pastoral Education by the introduction of these privacy laws, demonstrates that it is possible to be loyal to both a commitment to privacy and learning from "living human documents," develop strategies for changing the educational culture, and establish new procedures, strategies, and policy.     

Factorial validity of the 20-item Toronto Alexithymia Scale

The 20-item Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS-20) was developed in previous research to measure a general dimension of alexithymia with three inter correlated factors. These three factors reflect distinct facets of the alexithymia construct: (1) difficulty identifying feelings and distinguishing them from the bodily sensations of emotion, (2) difficulty describing feelings to others, and (3) an externally orientated style of thinking. This study tested the three-factor model for the TAS-20, using confirmatory factor analysis, in separate samples of young adults from Germany, Canada, and the United States. The previously established three-factor model was found to be replicable in all three samples. In addition, the full TAS-20 and its three factors demonstrated adequate internal reliability in all three samples. Although evaluation of the convergent, discriminant, and criterion validity of the TAS-20 is required in diverse cultural groups, the present results provide evidence for the factorial validity and internal reliability of the TAS-20.