Indonesia's Nurcholish Madjid and Abdurrahman Wahid as intellectual Ulama: The meeting of Islamic traditionalism and modernism in neo‐modernist thought

This paper examines two of Indonesia's leading Islamic intellectuals, Abdurrahman Wahid and Nurcholish Madjid, and the movement of thought with which they are associated, neo‐Modernism, a new movement in Islamic thought in Indonesia that emerged amidst much controversy in the early 1970s and has since been of considerable influence in the development of Islamic thought, particularly amongst younger Muslim intellectuals. The paper argues that this new movement of thought represents the coming together of Islamic traditionalism, Modernism and Western education in the persons of a generation of thinkers from traditionalist backgrounds, who as youths obtained a pesantren (traditional religious boarding school) religious education and then went on to undertake modern Western‐style, higher education. In doing this it focuses on the life experiences of two of the most outstanding thinkers to emerge from this generation: Nurcholish Madjid, a respected scholar and public figure and one of Indonesia's leading Islamic intellectuals, and Abdurrahman Wahid, currently serving his third term as chairman of Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), the leading traditionalist organization (and with a claimed support base of 35 million, Indonesia's largest Islamic organization).     

Sex Differences in Visual Recognition Memory: Support for a Sex-Related Difference in Attention in Adults and Children

The selectivity hypothesis of Meyers-Levy (1989) proposes that cognitive sex differences reflect underlying differences in information processing between males and females. Males are considered to be more likely to organize information in a self-related manner, whereas females are more likely to adopt a comprehensive approach to information processing. We tested this hypothesis in children (10–15 years) and adults using recognition memory tasks. Tests were devised which employed male-oriented objects, female oriented objects, or random objects. In both the child and adult samples, females performed significantly better than males on tests using random and female-oriented objects. Males performed at the level of females only when tested for recognition of male-oriented objects. These results demonstrate that this sex difference is present prior to puberty and support the concept of sex differences in information processing.     

Sensitivity to Levels of Importance in the Logical Memory Subtest

The performance of Alzheimer's disease (AD) and neuropsychiatric patients was examined using the Logical Memory (LM) subtest of the WMS-R, utilizing a levels of importance methodology described by Haut et al. (1990). Although patient groups were matched for dementia severity, we found the expected differences between groups in terms of absolute level of performance. There was considerable variability, however, in the AD patients' performance. AD patients' recall and sensitivity to levels of importance depended on the story (Anna or Robert), and when the passages were recalled (immediate or delayed recalls). Results suggested that AD patients were able to utilize semantic information in their immediate recall, though this was dependent on individual story characteristics. AD patient's delayed recall was essentially absent. Thus, no conclusions could be drawn with respect to the level of importance factor. NP patient's recall performance was similar to patterns observed in other clinical samples for both immediate and delayed memory.     

Generic terms and generic sentences

Conclusion Whether or not the particular view of generic sentences articulated above is correct, it is quite clear that the study of generic terms and the truth-conditions of generic sentences touches on the representation of other parts of the grammar, as well as on how the world around us is reflected in language. I would hope that the problems mentioned above will highlight the relevance of semantic analysis to other apparently distinct questions, and focus attention on the relevance of linguistic problems to other already established areas of inquiry.     

False recognition of static and dynamic object properties by preschool children

A false recognition task was used to compare preschool children's use of static and dynamic properties of objects in semantic processing. Four, five, and six year old children heard a list of object names, and then were tested for recognition of these words with a recognition test list that included distractor words that were static or dynamic properties of the objects on the first list. False recognition scores of dynamic properties were higher than those for static, for 4 and 5 year old children, with no differences for 6 year old children. The results argue for a functional basis for the encoding of referential terms in memory, and are discussed in terms of two models of semantic development.This research was partially supported by Department of Health, Education, and Welfare Research Service Award HD 07066 and U.S. Public Health Service Grant HD 00870 from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development to the Kansas Center for Mental Retardation and Human Development.     

Functional similarity and interpersonal attraction

A pair of related experiments examined the relationship of functional similarity (i.e., the degree of similarity between two interactants in assessing mutually known others on personal construct dimensions) to interpersonal attraction. In Experiment I, 10 previously unacquainted college students of both sexes participated in 10 hours of dyadic disclosure exercises over a 5-week period. As predicted, members of high functional similarity dyads evidenced greater attraction to one another than did members of low functional similarity dyads. Experiment II investigated the relationship of functional similarity to level of acquaintance (i.e., friends, nominals) and type of assessment (i.e., physical, interactional, psychological) in a 2 × 3 factorial design. As hypothesized, “friendship” pairs of male undergraduates displayed greater functional similarity than did “nominal” pairs from the same population, particularly at the deeper level of “psychological” assessment. Results are discussed in relation to classical conditioning (D. Byrne, In L. Berkowitz (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology, Vol. 4. New York. Academic Press, 1969), affect-reinforcement (G. L. Clore, In S. W. Duck (Ed.), Theory and practice in interpersonal attraction. New York/London: Academic Press, 1977) and information processing ( I. Ajzen, In S. Duck (Ed.), Theory and practice in interpersonal attraction, New York/London: Academic Press, 1977) models of interpersonal attraction, and are interpreted as supporting and extending (S. Duck's Theory and practice in interpersonal attraction, New York/London: Academic Press, 1977) filtering theory of friendship formation.     

Coping with Person-Environment Incongruence1

Students' psychosocial functioning during their transition to university was examined in terms of person-environment incongruence and the flexibility of individuals' construction processes in coping with this incongruence. Using content analysis scaling methodology it was found that the experience of person-environment incongruence was mediated by size of university environment and students' stage of life and education. Mature age students experienced more person-environment incongruence, and less interpretive and core anxiety and satisfaction in a larger university environment. Students who were recent school leavers experienced more person-environment incongruence, interpretive anxiety, and less satisfaction in a smaller environment. In the smaller environment, students who had participated in an intervention maintained higher levels of inflexibility and expressed less social hostility than nonintervention students. These effects of the intervention did not hold in the larger environment where both intervention and nonintervention students experienced a significant decrease in inflexibility over time.     

Personality dimensions and domains of service performance: A field investigation

Although recent meta-analytic studies have investigated the validity of the Big Five domains of personality by classifying pre-existing personality measures into the five dimensions, published validity studies incorporating explicit measures of the five broad traits are rare. This concurrent validity study examines relationships between direct measures of Big Five traits and job performance for a sample of 105 service workers. Analyses specifically examine relationships between three personality dimensions and factorally independent domains of service performance. Both conscientiousness and extraversion are found to correlate with specific performance dimensions. Contrary to our expectation, the extraversion-performance relationship is, however, negative.     

A dimensional analysis of claustrophobia

The present study investigated whether situational and cognitive dimensions of claustrophobia exist. To this end, the Claustrophobia Situations Questionnaire (CSQ) and the Claustrophobia General Cognitions Questionnaire (CGCQ) were developed and exploratory factor analyses were performed on these scales. Two-factor solutions for both the anxiety and the avoidance ratings on the CSQ were obtained, accounting for 40.1% and 34.2% of the variance, respectively. Two subscales were created from the two-factor solution of the anxiety section of the CSQ: (1) Fear of Entrapment and (2) Fear of Physical Confinement. Two subscales were also created from the two-factor solution of the avoidance section of the CSQ: (1) Avoidance of Crowds and (2) Avoidance of Physical Confinement. A three-factor solution was obtained for the CGCQ, accounting for 54.4% of the variance, from which the following three subscales were created: (1) Fear of Loss of Control, (2) Fear of Suffocation, and (3) Fear of Inability to Escape. Cronbach alphas for all subscales ranged from .84 to .94. Exploratory correlational analyses were conducted between the situational and the cognitive dimensions.