Voices outside the camp: Some significant nonpastoral books in 1979–80

A review article of recent books in disciplines related to pastoral care which may increase the effectiveness of the pastor's care and counseling ministries. Books selected challenge prevailing assumptions, offer new ways to perceive the pastoral task, and provide new and significant information. Books are reviewed from personality and psychotherapy, family history, theory and therapy, studies of violence and victimization, psychology and theology, and general ministry theory.Dr. Hunter is Associate Professor of Pastoral Theology and Book Review Editor ofPastoral Psychology. His address is: Candler School of Theology, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia 30322.     

Possibility and probability

Conclusion De Finetti was a strong proponent of allowing 0 credal probabilities to be assigned to serious possibilities. I have sought to show that (pace Shimony) strict coherence can be obeyed provided that its scope of applicability is restricted to partitions into states generated by finitely many ultimate payoffs. When countable additivity is obeyed, a restricted version of ISC can be applied to partitions generated by countably many ultimate payoffs. Once this is appreciated, perhaps the compelling character of the Shimony argument will be less overwhelming and the attractiveness of de Finetti's more permissive attitude will become more apparent.I want to push the permissive tendency in de Finetti still further. It seems doubtful that RUIWC should be required as de Finetti apparently suggested. It is also excessively dogmatic and restrictive to require that the credal states of ideally situated rational agents be numerically definite (Levi 1974, 1980). And de Finetti's rejection of objectivism in statistics overreached itself when he dismissed objective probabilities as meaningless metaphysical artefacts (Levi 1986). In this respect, the philosophically most important lessons de Finetti has to teach us are to be found not in his celebrated representation theorem but in his discussions of the relations between 0-probability and possibility, conditional probability and countable additivity. Perhaps, the technical issues involved are remote and pedantic. But the attitude de Finetti sought to inculcate is of profound importance.Thanks are due to Teddy Seidenfeld whose comments have improved this paper substantially. He is not to blame for its lingering defects.     

The Matching of Facial Expressions by Deaf and Hearing Children and Their Production and Comprehension of Emotion Labels

This paper reports the results of three tasks comparing the development of the understanding of facial expressions of emotion in deaf and hearing children. Two groups of hearing and deaf children of elementary school age were tested for their ability to match photographs of facial expressions of emotion, and to produce and comprehend emotion labels for the expressions of happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust, and surprise. Accuracy data showed comparable levels of performance for deaf and hearing children of the same age. Happiness and sadness were the most accurately matched expressions and the most accurately produced and comprehended labels. Anger was the least accurately matched expression and the most poorly comprehended emotion label. Disgust was the least accurately labeled expression; however, deaf children were more accurate at labeling this expression, and also at labeling fear, than hearing children. Error data revealed that children confused anger with disgust, and fear with surprise. However, the younger groups of deaf and hearing children also showed a tendency to confuse the negative expressions of anger, disgust, and fear with sadness. The results suggest that, despite possible differences in the early socialisation of emotion, deaf and hearing children share a common understanding of the emotions conveyed by distinctive facial expressions.     

Honoring accounts for sexual harassment: A factorial survey analysis

This study analyzes a factorial survey, incorporating vignettes about student-to-student sexual harassment, completed by undergraduates at a small liberal arts college. As in previous studies, perceived seriousness levels for such incidents are shown to depend primarily on the perpetrator's behavior. However, perceived seriousness also depends strongly on the accounts offered by the perpetrator for his behavior and to a lesser extent on verbal reactions of the female victim. Furthermore, some types of accounts reduce the perceived seriousness of the behavior, while others increase it. Male and female respondents differ in their overall means, but do not differ significantly in the factors that influence perceived seriousness. Some implications of these results for the study of sexual harassment and of accounts are noted.     

Analysis of four measures of positional bias within a multiple stimulus without replacement preference assessment

Positional bias is a pattern of responding to a specific location that can be influenced by response effort and/or prior learning history. Prior research on positional bias within stimulus preference assessments have focused primarily on its use in paired stimulus assessments due to the complex nature of the multiple stimulus without replacement (MSWO) preference assessment. The present study is a secondary data analysis that utilized four different methods to measure side and center bias in a MSWO preference assessment for 19 young children with autism spectrum disorder. Participants displayed varying degrees of biased responding but collectively engaged in minimal biased responding. This study includes an analysis of the four methodologies, discussion of general patterns of responding, and general recommendations for the application of these methodologies in future research.