MOTHERHOOD IN CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM: Critiques,Realities, and Possibilities

Common experiences of mothering offer profound critiques of maternal ethical norms found in both Christianity and Islam. The familiar responsibilities of caring for children, assumed by the majority of Christian and Muslim women, provide the basis for reassessing sacrificial and selfless love, protesting unjust religious and political systems, and dismantling romanticized notions of childcare. As a distinctive category of women's experience, motherhood may offer valuable perspectives necessary for remedying injustices that afflict mothers and children in particular, as well as for developing cross‐cultural understandings of justice in general.     

Gender Roles and Coping with Work Stress

Sex Roles - The influence of gender roles on coping with workplace stressors was examined among 176 adult undergraduate students (130 females, 46 males) who were concurrently employed while...     

Learning a procedural task: effectiveness of multimedia presentations

Three experiments investigated the effectiveness of presenting procedural information through different media and their combinations. Experiment 1 examined the effectiveness of text, line drawings, text and line drawings, video. and video stills for learning a first aid task. The results showed an advantage of text and line drawings and of the video presentation over the other three conditions for both bandaging performance and answering questions about the task. Experiment 2 showed that the beneficial effect of the combination of text and pictures could not be accounted for simply in terms of a dual coding explanation. Rather, the effectiveness of the media and their combinations was influenced by the extent to which they conveyed action information. Finally, Experiment 3 showed no evidence of a contiguity effect: text and pictures were as effective when presented together on the same screen as when they were presented separately. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Personality traits and the development of nicotine, alcohol, and illicit drug disorders: prospective links from adolescence to young adulthood

The personality traits constraint (CN) and negative emotionality (NE) have been more (CN) or less (NE) consistently associated with alcoholism. The authors examined the association of personality at age 17 with timing of onset and with prospective prediction of nicotine, alcohol, and illicit drug disorders 3 years later in a twin sample (569 females; 432 males). Earlier onset of alcohol and drug disorders (by age 17) was related to significantly lower CN compared with later onsets (by age 20); high NE was related to either onset. NE, as well as CN, uniquely predicted new onsets of all 3 types of substance use disorders by follow-up, with preexisting substance disorders taken into account. Personality traits confer generalized risk for developing any substance disorder, though some traits are more strongly linked with some substance disorders than with others.     

DEVELOPMENT OF THE PARENT‐CHILD PLAY SCALE FOR USE IN CHILDREN WITH FEEDING DISORDERS

The Parent‐Child Play Scale was developed as a scale that complements the Parent‐Child Feeding Scale, created by I. Chatoor et al. (1997), to evaluate mother–infant/toddler interactions in two different caregiving contexts of a young child's everyday life, specifically play and feeding. This Play Scale can be used with infants and toddlers ranging in age from 1 month to 3 years and provides reliable global ratings of mother–child interactions during 10 min of videotaped free‐play in a laboratory setting. The scale consists of 32 mother and infant/toddler interactive behaviors which are rated by trained observers from videotaped observations. Four subscales are derived: Dyadic Reciprocity, Maternal Unresponsiveness to Infant's/Toddler's Cues, Dyadic Conflict, and Maternal Intrusiveness. Construct validity and interrater and test‐retest reliability of the Play Scale have been demonstrated. This Play Scale discriminates between children with and without feeding disorders as well as between children with different subtypes of feeding disorders as defined by the Diagnostic Classification of Mental Health and Developmental Disorders of Infancy and Early Childhood, Revised (DC:0–3R) (Feeding Disorder of State Regulation, Feeding Disorder of Caregiver‐Infant Reciprocity, and Infantile Anorexia). It can be used for research or clinical practice in the diagnosis and treatment of early feeding problems, to assess the pervasiveness of mother–infant/toddler difficulties and to monitor changes following therapy.     

Assessment of Knowledge Gains in Proactive Training for Postvention

This paper describes the development of a knowledge measure for the evaluation of a proactive training program for suicide postvention and analyses of its psychometric properties. The 25-item true–false knowledge test was administered before and after each of 12 training sessions; a total of 205 school personnel participated in the training and evaluation. Participants showed significant improvement in overall test scores and on several individual items following the training. Analyses suggested that the measure has construct validity, and that it taps a single underlying dimension. Strengths and weaknesses of the measure, and measurement issues in program evaluation are discussed.     

‘My Future Son is Possibly Alive’. Existential Presupposition and Empty Terms in Abelard's Modal Logic

The aim of this paper is to investigate the problem of existential import in Abelard's modal logic, and to ask whether the system of logical relationships that he proposes for modal propositions maintains its validity when some of the terms included in these propositions are empty. In the following, I first argue that, just as in the case of non-modal propositions, Abelard interprets modal propositions as having existential import, so that it is a necessary condition for the truth of propositions like ‘It is possible for my son to be alive’ or ‘it is necessary that all men are animals’ that their subjects’ referents exist. Then, I present the schemata of inferences that Abelard proposes to describe the logical behaviour of de rebus modal propositions. I argue that these systems of relations are valid only as long as all the terms contained in the formulas have an existing referent. I also claim that Abelard was aware of this difficulty (at least in the Logica Ingredientibus), and, accordingly, he explicitly decided to restrict the validity of his modal system to propositions that do not contain empty terms.