Cultivating a Sense of Place in Religious Studies

This essay analyzes student learning through place‐based pedagogies in an American Religions course. In the course, students analyzed cultural meanings and practices of regional religious communities and participated in sensory awareness and ecological learning in a campus garden. Embodied learning increased student understanding and appreciation of land‐based religious practices and epistemologies, and promoted multiple student literacies. In Religious Studies, place‐based learning is vital to the examination of the rich dimensions and expressions of religious experience. Across disciplines, place‐based pedagogies can expand and deepen text‐based learning, cultivate recognition of various ways of knowing, foster affective connections to the local community, and develop critical skills for addressing patterns of displacement and ecological denigration.     

The Role of Family Affect in Juvenile Drug Court Offenders’ Substance Use and HIV Risk

Family-based interventions targeting parenting factors, such as parental monitoring and parent–child communication, have been successful in reducing adolescent offenders’ substance use and delinquency. This pilot, exploratory study focuses on family and parenting factors that may be relevant in reducing juvenile offenders’ substance use and sexual risk taking behavior, and in particular examines the role of family emotional involvement and responsiveness in young offenders’ risk-taking behaviors. Participants included 53 juvenile drug court offenders and their parents. Results indicate that poor parent–child communication is associated with marijuana use and unprotected sexual activity for young offenders; however, family affective responsiveness is also a significant unique predictor of unprotected sexual activity for these youth. Findings suggest that interventions focused on improving parent–child communication may reduce both marijuana use and risky sexual behavior among court-involved youth, but a specific intervention focused on improving parents and young offenders’ ability to connect with and respond to one another emotionally may provide a novel means of reducing unprotected sexual risk behaviors.     

Religiosity and Public Reason: The Case of Direct Action Animal Rights Advocacy

Recent social science research indicates that animal rights philosophy plays the functional role of a religion in the lives of the most committed animal rights advocates. In this paper, I apply the functional religion thesis to the recent debate over the place of direct action animal rights advocacy in democratic theory. I outline the usefulness of the functional religion thesis and explain its implications for theorists that call for deliberative theories to be more inclusive of coercive forms of activism.     

The nature of faith

Summary This paper examines the psychological conditions that bring the experience of faith into being, and the psychological components the word faith refers to and except for which faith would not be experienced. The problem of maintaining faith without recourse to supernaturalism is discussed in terms of man's social relations and value satisfactions.Reprinted by permission from the Journal of Individual Psychology, May, 1957.     

Does emotion help or hinder immediate memory? Arousal versus priority-binding mechanisms

People recall taboo words better than neutral words in many experimental contexts. The present rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) experiments demonstrated this taboo-superiority effect for immediate recall of mixed lists containing taboo and neutral words matched for familiarity, length, and category coherence. Under binding theory (MacKay et al., 2004), taboo superiority reflects an interference effect: Because the emotional reaction system prioritizes binding mechanisms for linking the source of an emotion to its context, taboo words capture the mechanisms for encoding list context in mixed lists, impairing the encoding of adjacent neutral words when RSVP rates are sufficiently rapid. However, for pure or unmixed lists, binding theory predicted no better recall of taboo-only than of neutral-only lists at fast or slow rates. Present results supported this prediction, suggesting that taboo superiority in immediate recall reflects context-specific binding processes, rather than context-free arousal effects, or emotion-linked differences in rehearsal, processing time, output interference, time-based decay, or guessing biases.     

A Default-Oriented Theory of Procedural Semantics

Procedural Semantics(PS), broadly construed, is the thesis that the meaning of a symbolic expression may be identified with procedures which specify how the expression is to be used, or applied to the world. J.A. Fodor has characterized PS as a wildly implausible form of the verification theory of meaning, and has argued that PS constitutes a plausible semantic theory only for highly simplistic universes, such as “blocks worlds” and databases. Fodor argued further that insofar as PS is defensible, it is “parasitic upon” classical denotational semantics. Fodor's critique of PS provoked various rejoinders. Although these rejoinders were not always in agreement, both Wilks and Woods reasoned that some form of PS must be true if we are to render coherent certain fundamental concepts of modeloretic semantics (e.g., denotations and truth-conditions). In the present paper these arguments are reviewed and extended. It is argued that not only Tarskian semantics, but other forms of model-theoretic semantics (including possible world and Situation Semantics) may very well ontologically presuppose some form of PS. In addition, a default-oriented form of PS is presented which avoids the “decision procedure” approach of early PS. The new theory embraces aspects of Quine's pragmatism, and assumes that semantic procedures may return pragmatic (default) truth values which may be revised, if the need arises, by adjudication procedures. On the theory here described, semantic procedures do not constitute the complete meanings of symbolic expressions, but constrain these meanings. It is argued that such constraints must exist if there are to be ontological foundations for such traditional notions as denotations and extensions.     

Health Care Professionals’ Views of Sharing Information with Families Who Have a Child with a Genetic Condition

The purpose of this study was to examine health care professionals’ views and strategies for individualizing information sharing in families who have a child with a genetic condition. The sample consisted of 37 health professionals from three clinical sites in the greater metropolitan area of a large Midwestern city. Qualitative content thematic analysis was used to analyze data from the health professionals’ semi-structured interviews. Four themes captured how health care professionals work with families around information management: Sharing Information with Parents, Taking into Account Parental Preferences, Understanding of the Condition, and Helping Parents Inform Others. These findings contribute to understanding the processes that health professionals use in sharing information with parents who have children with a genetic condition, and they provide guidance for clinical practice, professional training, and future research.     

Effects of level of retrieval success on recall-related frontal and medial temporal lobe activations

Brain dedicated single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) was used to compare the neuroactivation produced by the cued recall of response words in a set of studied word pairs with that produced by the cued retrieval of words semantically related to unstudied stimulus words. Six of the 12 subjects scanned were extensively trained so as to have good memory of the studied pairs and the remaining six were minimally trained so as to have poor memory. When comparing episodic with semantic retrieval, the well-trained subjects showed significant left medial temporal lobe activation, which was also significantly greater than that shown by the poorly trained subjects, who failed to show significant medial temporal lobe activation. In contrast, the poorly trained subjects showed significant bilateral frontal lobe activation, which was significantly greater than that shown by the well-trained subjects who failed to show significant frontal lobe activation. The frontal activations occurred mainly in the dorsolateral region, but extended into the ventrolateral and, to a lesser extent, the frontal polar regions. It is argued that whereas the medial temporal lobe activation increased as the proportion of response words successfully recalled increased, the bilateral frontal lobe activation increased in proportion to retrieval effort, which was greater when learning had been less good.     

Some effects of a model's performance on an observer's electromyographic activity.

It is suggested that motor reactions may be elicited in an observer as a consequence of his exposure to a model and that such reactions may become conditioned to environmental events. An experiment is reported in which observers showed greater EMG activity in the arm while watching models arm wrestle than while watching a model stutter, and greater lip EMG activity while watching a model stutter than while watching arm wrestling. Some evidence for conditioning was found in the arm activity of males watching wrestling.