Spirituality and Counselor Competence: A National Survey of American Counseling Association Members

A random sample of 505 American Counseling Association (ACA) members completed a questionnaire that evaluated respondents' ratings of the importance of 9 competencies developed at the Summit on Spirituality (G. Miller, 1999; “Summit Results,” 1995) meetings to effectively address spiritual and religious issues in counseling practice. Results suggest that, in general, ACA members strongly support the importance of the competencies for effective counseling practice.     

Lutheran Theology in Engagement with World Religions

Abstract : When Lutheran theology engages the world religions, it can offer valuable insights into God's word in action which could come from outside the church. In light of God's Word in action which is an indispensable part of Martin Luther's theology, the author draws special attention to Lutheran irregular theology in connection with a universal dimension of God's grace, theologia crucis, and God's reconciliation with the world. Thus, Lutheran theology is of pro‐Old Testament orientation in relationship with Israel, and also of dialogical and public character in dealing with the issue of religious pluralism.     

Health Beliefs and Behaviors of Women Who Have Received Genetic Counseling For Breast Cancer

There are both genetic and behavioral risk factors for breast cancer, but the interaction between these factors is not clear. Little is known about the impact of receiving genetic risk information for breast cancer on behaviors such as diet and physical activity. Seven focus groups were conducted with 23 women who had recently received genetic counseling for breast cancer, in order to explore health beliefs and behaviors following genetic counseling. Findings revealed that there was much confusion and uncertainty about the associations between health behaviors and breast cancer risk, and participants reported that receiving genetic counseling had little impact on health protective behaviors. Further research is required to understand variation in response to genetic risk information, and to assess the impact of providing additional information regarding lifestyle factors.     

Right-handers' reaching in contralateral hemispace: a kinematic observation

C. Gabbard and C. Helbig (2004) found, when examining seated participants' limb selection for reaching and grasping in hemispace, that right-handers preferred to switch to the nondominant left arm for objects located approximately 20 degrees horizontally from body midline (90 degrees) in left hemispace. In the present study, the authors examined 13 strongly lateralized seated right-handers' kinematics of reaching to object positions ranging from body midline to 40 degrees horizontally in left hemispace. Participants executed faster reaches with the left arm than with the right arm to objects placed 20 degrees-40 degrees from midline, whereas they did not change the proportion of time they spent accelerating the hands when the position of the object changed. A 2nd main finding was an increase in the left hand's trajectory curvature as object position moved farther from midline, with a corresponding decrease in the contribution of upper-arm motion to the reach. Those observations suggest that the switch from dominant right-arm reaching to nondominant left-arm reaching in left hemispace reported in the aforementioned study may have emerged from a shift from a shoulder-driven reach to an elbow-driven action.     

Development of a scale to measure problem use of short message service: the SMS Problem Use Diagnostic Questionnaire.

This exploratory study examines a subset of mobile phone use, the compulsive use of short message service (SMS) text messaging. A measure of SMS use, the SMS Problem Use Diagnostic Questionnaire (SMS-PUDQ), was developed and found to possess acceptable reliability and validity when compared to other measures such as self-reports of time spent using SMS and scores on a survey of problem mobile phone use. Implications for the field of addiction research, technological and behavioral addictions in particular, are discussed, and directions for future research are suggested.     

VR-based conversation training program for patients with schizophrenia: a preliminary clinical trial.

Schizophrenia is a devastating mental illness and is characterized by hallucinations and delusions as well as social skills deficits. Generally, social skills training designed to help patients develop social skills includes role-playing, but this form of training has typical shortcomings, which are largely due to a trainer's difficulties to project emotion. Virtual reality (VR)-based techniques have the potential to solve these difficulties, because they provide a computer-generated but realistic three-dimensional world and humanlike avatars that can provide emotional stimuli. In this paper, we report on a method of implementing virtual environments (VEs) in order to train people with schizophrenia to develop conversational skills in specific situations, which could overcome the shortcomings of or complement conventional role-playing techniques. The paper reports the efficacy of the proposed approach in a preliminary clinical trial with 10 patients with schizophrenia.     

Characteristics of social perception assessed in schizophrenia using virtual reality.

Impairment in social skills is one of the few criteria that all individuals diagnosed with schizophrenia must meet. Successful social skills require the coordination of many abilities, including social perception, which involves the decoding and interpretation of social cues from others. In this study, we examined the potential for virtual reality (VR) in social skill training. We attempted to determine if VR can be used to measure social skills and social perception, and to determine which VR parameters are related to schizophrenic symptoms. Some of these results have clear clinical relevance, while other observations need further study. The VR system appears to be useful in assessing the social perception of schizophrenics and normal people, and could be more widely used in the future for social training and in the assessment of social problem-solving abilities, assertiveness skills, and general social skills.     

Avoiding The Unavoidable? Judith Shklar’s Unwilling Search For An Overlapping Consensus

No less an authority than John Rawls identified Judith Shklar as a ‘political’ liberal. However, though their respective conceptions of political liberalism are similar in a number of important respects, Shklar emphasizes that her vision differs notably from that of Rawls. In particular, she explicitly eschews Rawls’s focus on establishing and sustaining an overlapping consensus, arguing that his belief in the possibility of securing such a consensus is naïve and, indeed, dangerous insofar as it embodies an obvious disregard for the painful lessons of history and thereby not only allows but invites the occurrence of new cruelties and horrors. Obviously, such an approach would seem to diverge dramatically from that promoted by Rawls and many other political liberals. The purpose of this essay is to analyze Shklar’s arguments and determine the validity of her claims regarding the differences between her conception and that of Rawls and, in so doing, assess the extent to which Shklar’s ‘liberalism of fear’ can be said to represent a meaningfully distinctive model of political liberalism.     

真理、符合与收缩论

The central claim of this essay is that many deflationary theories of truth are variants of the correspondence theory of truth. Essential to the correspondence theory of truth is the proposal that objective features of the world are the truthmakers of statements. Many advocates of deflationary theories (including F. P. Ramsay, P. F. Strawson and Paul Horwich) remain committed to this proposal. Although T-sentences (statements of the form “s is true iff p”) are presented by advocates of deflationary theories of truth as truisms or analytic truths, T-sentences are often understood as entailing commitment to the central proposal of the correspondence theory.