The remaining few: Christian Zionists making sense of a changed ecclesiastic landscape

Using a hermeneutical method, this study seeks to understand Christian Zionism as a meaningful practice in late modern Sweden. We visited four Christian Zionist conferences where we observed, analysed the sermons, and conducted interviews. The conferences are almost entirely attended by elderly people and the style is characterized by an old-time revivalist nostalgia. Results show that Israel is seen as a key to understanding a general conflict that the informants experience in late modern Swedish society and in relation to the majority church. Supporting Israel is intertwined with support for conservative values and theology and Israel becomes a nodal point that puts the greater conflict in a new perspective: identifying with Old Testament prophecies and God’s dealings with Israel gives hope and a sense of continuity to a revivalist movement that has become out of date. In Israel, Christian Zionists connect with both the past and the future, personally and as a movement.     

Associations Between Financial Strain and the Diurnal Salivary Cortisol Secretion of Long-term Unemployed Individuals

OBJECTIVE: The study investigated the associations between self-rated financial strain and overall diurnal salivary cortisol levels, as well as secretory patterns among long-term unemployed individuals. METHODS: Psychosocial and life-style variables were assessed by means of questionnaires among 85 participants (mean age 42+/-9 years; 56% females). Salivary cortisol was sampled on four occasions during a 24-hour period and data was analysed separately for men and women. RESULTS: Among females, high financial strain was related to higher overall cortisol levels, and to elevated levels in the evening. These associations did not reach significance among men. Multivariate analyses showed that evening levels of cortisol were positively associated with financial strain, but largely unrelated to life-style variables and psychological distress. CONCLUSIONS: The results suggest that high financial strain influences the diurnal cortisol secretion of unemployed individuals in terms of elevated cortisol levels in the evening. The mediating mechanisms are in need of further investigation.     

Internalism and Accidie

Bernard Williams has famously argued that there are only “internal” reasons for action. Although Williams has produced several, slightly different versions of internalism over the years, one core idea has remained the same: the reasons a person has for acting must be essentially linked to, derived from, or in some other way connected to, that person’s “subjective motivational set”. I have two aims in this paper. First, after having cleared up some initial ambiguities, I try to show that Williams’s internalism admits of two rather different interpretations. Second, I will argue that both these interpretations are inadequate. The first interpretation is incompatible with certain claims that supposedly provide the reasons why we should accept internalism in the first place. The second interpretation faces other problems: given the essential link between reasons and motivation, this interpretation cannot adequately deal with the phenomenon of accidie. Furthermore, those who subscribe to this interpretation of internalism are, on pain of inconsistency, forced to accept an implausible account of reasonable regret.     

Rising up to higher virtues: Experiencing elevated physical height uplifts prosocial actions

Many challenges of society involve getting people to act prosocially in ways that are costly for self-interests but beneficial to the greater good. The authors in four studies examined the novel hypothesis that elevating (vertical) height promotes prosocial actions. In Study 1, shoppers riding up (vs. down) escalators contributed more often to charity. In Study 2, participants sitting higher (vs. lower) helped another longer, while in Study 3 participants sitting higher (vs. lower) were more compassionate. In Study 4, watching video primes depicting scenes from a high perspective led to more cooperative resource conservation. These studies contribute uniquely to the prosociality literature by documenting previously unexamined effects of metaphor-enriched social cognition, and to the metaphor-enriched social cognition literature by documenting effects of elevated height on real prosocial actions.     

Immediacy ‐ subjectivity ‐ revelation

Kierkegaard's fundamental view of life was negative and Gnostic. It was through his interpretation of life that his vision of the nothingness of existence became positive. What formed the material of Kierkegaard's interpretation was the common experience of existence, what ‘all’ men know. His concept of existence has a threefold content : immediacy, subjectivity, and the Christian Revelation. Immediate reality that is not made content of subjectivity becomes empty changeableness, and subjectivity that does not appropriate immediacy deprives itself of the concrete (as with the mystic). Immediacy's ‘text’ first acquires a qualitative transcendent content through the ‘repetition’ of subjective choice. Kierkegaard takes this appropriation of the immediate to be also the self‐development of subjectivity. Consciousness of guilt is an expression of a God‐relationship. Implicated with this consciousness is the consciousness of the nothingness of everything — echoed in man as dread. Yet even when subjectivity is conscious of guilt the truth remains immanent in subjectivity. In the Christian Revelation truth is outside man: subjectivity is untruth (sin).     

Working conditions predicting interpersonal relationship problems at work

Interpersonal relationships have been shown to be an important component of the psychosocial work environment that may affect health, job satisfaction, and productivity. The question whether interpersonal relationships at work are influenced by other psychosocial working conditions such as demands and control has not been studied. The aim of the present study is to investigate if high work demands and aspects of low work control could predict three indicators of detrimental interpersonal relationships at work. In a representative Swedish cohort study, data were obtained in two waves three years apart from 4049 participants, who did not change their jobs between the waves. These data were analysed by multiple logistic regression analyses. Odds ratios adjusted for possible confounders and negative interpersonal relationships at base-line showed that high demands predicted serious conflict and exclusion by co-workers. Low skill discretion predicted exclusion by co-workers. It is argued that these prospective findings are of relevance to interventions targeting troublesome and detrimental interpersonal relationships at work and that the findings can be important in understanding the development of work-related mental ill-health.     

Color makes a difference: two-dimensional object naming in literate and illiterate subjects

Previous work has shown that illiterate subjects are better at naming two-dimensional representations of real objects when presented as colored photos as compared to black and white drawings. This raises the question if color or textural details selectively improve object recognition and naming in illiterate compared to literate subjects. In this study, we investigated whether the surface texture and/or color of objects is used to access stored object knowledge in illiterate subjects. A group of illiterate subjects and a matched literate control group were compared on an immediate object naming task with four conditions: color and black and white (i.e., grey-scaled) photos, as well as color and black and white (i.e., grey-scaled) drawings of common everyday objects. The results show that illiterate subjects perform significantly better when the stimuli are colored and this effect is independent of the photographic detail. In addition, there were significant differences between the literacy groups in the black and white condition for both drawings and photos. These results suggest that color object information contributes to object recognition. This effect was particularly prominent in the illiterate group.