A Review of: “Fairburn,C. G. (2008). Cognitive Behavior Therapy and Eating Disorders.”

Successful reports of behavioral treatment of encopresis describe interventions as unpleasant as the disorder: hospitalization, laxatives, prompted toileting, aversive consequences. The focus on soiling rather than on the constant constipation that precedes encopresis, on the reduction of soiling rather than on the acquisition of effective toilet use. Five normal chronically constipated children (four of whom were encopretic) were treated at home with combinations of: preparatory instructions, rewards for clean pants, reward for appropriate toileting (bowel movement in toilet). Once soiling was eliminated and appropriate bowel movements occured regularly, all families were taught to fade treatment contingencies. To determine the contribution of the toileting reward to treatment effectiveness, this reward was added to the other two treatment components in a multiple baseline across four cases; it provided a significant ingredient in short-term success. A fifth child achieved short-term success with only the instructions and the clean pants reward. Long-term results (11-20 months) revealed that the fifth child, who never received the toileting reward, was the only one who relapsed.     

Islam and Christianity: On “Religions of Law”

The pursuit of mutual understanding has not infrequently led Muslims and Christians to define their religious traditions in stark doctrinal opposition one to the other. In this regard, the “religion of law” (Islam)/“religion of grace” (Christianity) dichotomy has a particularly venerable history. This article sets out to re-examine and deconstruct a couplet that would strike many as a platitude, first by giving an account of the Sunni tradition of law-generation, situated in the broad context of the many options represented by different Islamic sects, and then by revisiting the paradigmatic understanding of law in the Christian dispensation worked out by Aquinas. This exposition leads to the conclusion that any simple opposition is to be avoided at all costs, obfuscating, as it does, much more than it elucidates. Furthermore, Christianity emerges from our chosen perspective as, in some sense, more essentially a “religion of law” than Islam ever could be.     

One-year retention of general and sequence-specific skills in a probabilistic,serial reaction time task

Procedural skills such as riding a bicycle and playing a musical instrument play a central role in daily life. Such skills are learned gradually and are retained throughout life. The present study investigated 1-year retention of procedural skill in a version of the widely used serial reaction time task (SRTT) in young and older motor-skill experts and older controls in two experiments. The young experts were college-age piano and action video-game players, and the older experts were piano players. Previous studies have reported sequence-specific skill retention in the SRTT as long as 2 weeks but not at 1 year. Results indicated that both young and older experts and older non-experts revealed sequence-specific skill retention after 1 year with some evidence that general motor skill was retained as well. These findings are consistent with theoretical accounts of procedural skill learning such as the procedural reinstatement theory as well as with previous studies of retention of other motor skills.     

Recognition and Recall-Like Processes in the Long-Term Reconstruction of Order

Abstract

Four experiments examined whether the recovery of an item's position in a sequence taps processes similar to recognition and/or recall. Across the experiments, subjects either recalled, recognised, or made position judgements about list items that differed in word frequency. Typical word frequency effects were found in recall and recognition, but frequency failed to affect measures of position memory consistently across the four experiments. Despite the apparent procedural similarities across tasks, it appears that the recovery of position information may tap mnemonic processes that are different from those tapped by recognition and recall. Implications of these findings for current models of position memory are discussed.