Illness, disease and sin: the connection between genetics and spirituality.

The New Testament, while rejecting any superficial connection between illness and sin, does not reject a possible connection between illness and a person's relationship with God. An example can be seen in the story of the young blind man who was healed (St. John 9:3). His blindness does not result from any fault he or his parents had committed but apparently from God's wish to reveal his own healing power. The inner blindness of the Pharisees is a different type of blindness far more difficult to heal. The blind young man was actually healed, not only in body but also in soul. Such miraculous healings are rare nowadays. However, if one takes a closer look at modern genetics and psycho-neuro-immunological findings, one may come to a better understanding of how miracle healings are linked to man's inner life and therefore also to his religiousness. Many diseases have genetic backgrounds. Defective genes, however, do not necessarily lead to subsequent illness. Genes have to be switched on or off. Only activated genes trigger pathological change. The human brain and all of man's thinking and feeling are intimately connected with such activations. We may thus conclude that both inner life and religious outlook on life are relevant to the origin and development of diseases.     

Is the delay discounting paradigm useful in understanding social anxiety?

The delay discounting paradigm was used to examine its utility in understanding motivational factors among socially anxious individuals. Participants (n=88) who reported high and low levels of social anxiety were randomly assigned to either a social threat or non-threat condition and their subsequent rates of discounting were examined. A significant difference in rates of discounting was found between the high and low social anxiety groups within the non-threat condition, with high social anxiety participants showing increased discounting. This study suggests that a modified version of the delay discounting paradigm may be useful in understanding motivational factors in social anxiety.     

Back to the self and the future

The thought-experiment presented by Bernard Williams in ‘The self and the future’ continues to draw the attention of writers in the debate about personal identity. While few of them agree on what implications it has for the debate, almost all agree that those implications are significant ones. Some have even claimed that it has consequences not only for personal identity, but also concerning the viability of thought-experiment as a method. This paper surveys what these consequences might be at both levels—as a substantive contribution to the debate on identity, and as to what it shows about the usefulness of thought-experiments. It argues ultimately that thought-experiments like Williams's do provide a useful philosophical tool as long as we temper our expectations of them, and that it offers some support to a view of personal identity but one which is at odds with Williams's own view.     

Conditional Reasoning and Emotional Experience: A Review of the Development of Counterfactual Thinking

What do human beings use conditional reasoning for? A psychological consequence of counterfactual conditional reasoning is emotional experience, in particular, regret and relief. Adults’ thoughts about what might have been influence their evaluations of reality. We discuss recent psychological experiments that chart the relationship between children’s ability to engage in conditional reasoning and their experience of counterfactual emotions. Relative to conditional reasoning, counterfactual emotions are late developing. This suggests that children need not only competence in conditional reasoning, but also to engage in this thinking spontaneously. Developments in domain general cognitive processing (the executive functions) allow children to develop from conditional reasoning to reasoning with counterfactual content and, eventually, to experiencing counterfactual emotions.     

Wage Differentials in the United States: Does Religious Participation Matter?

Using data on non‐Hispanics from the 2005 Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), this article examines the within‐religion association between religious participation and wages for mainline Protestants, conservative Protestants, and Catholics, the three major religious groups in the United States. While previous studies have examined this relationship for women only and using ordinary least squares (OLS), this article further analyzes gender differences and differences along the wage distribution using a quantile regression (QR) approach. The results indicate that high participation in religious services is associated with lower wages among mainline Protestant women and men, and among Catholic men. Among Catholic women, those who are not participating in religious activities earn higher wages relative to those who participate on a weekly basis. Furthermore, this advantage is more pronounced at high wages, as the QR estimates show. These results suggest the importance of defining religious participation in a manner that allows the detection of nonlinear effects. In addition, the findings speak to the importance of religion in the lives of individuals and may benefit policies dealing with male‐female wage differentials.     

Why Do You Ask? The Effects of Perceived Motives on the Effort that Managers Allocate Toward Delivering Feedback

Journal of Business and Psychology - Although people are generally motivated to perform well at work, there is often ambiguity regarding whether they are meeting their organization’s...     

Taken out of context? Cross-level effects of between-person self-efficacy and difficulty on the within-person relationship of self-efficacy with resource allocation and performance

Research examining the within-person relationship among self-efficacy, resource allocation, and performance has been decidedly mixed, with positive, null, and even negative relationships being observed. In the present research, we propose that relationship of within-person changes in self-efficacy with subsequent changes in resource allocation and performance depends upon one’s typical level of self-efficacy; that is, increases and decreases in self-efficacy have different implications for individuals that are generally highly efficacious than for individuals who are typically less efficacious. Moreover, we propose that these relationships further depend upon the difficulty of goal being pursued. Support for these arguments is found across two studies. These results provide support for self-efficacy’s non-monotonic relationship with resource allocation, including our proposition that the nature of this non-monotonic relationship differs as a function of difficulty. These results also help further illuminate when and for whom self-efficacy is likely to increase or decrease resource allocation and performance.     

The Extreme Claim,Psychological Continuity and the Person Life View

Marya Schechtman has raised a series of worries for the Psychological Continuity Theory of personal identity (PCT) stemming from what Derek Parfit called the ‘Extreme Claim’. This is roughly the claim that theories like it are unable to explain the importance we attach to personal identity. In her recent Staying Alive (2014), she presents further arguments related to this and sets out a new narrative theory, the Person Life View (PLV), which she sees as solving the problems as well as bringing other advantages over the PCT. I look over some of her earlier arguments and responses to them as a way in to the new issues and theory. I will argue that the problems for the PCT and advantages that the PLV brings are all merely apparent, and present no reason for giving up the former for the latter.