Simulating Memory Impairment for Child Sexual Abuse

The current study investigated effects of simulated memory impairment on recall of child sexual abuse (CSA) information. A total of 144 adults were tested for memory of a written CSA scenario in which they role-played as the victim. There were four experimental groups and two testing sessions. During Session 1, participants read a CSA story and recalled it truthfully (Genuine group), omitted CSA information (Omission group), exaggerated CSA information (Commission group), or did not recall the story at all (No Rehearsal group). One week later, at Session 2, all participants were told to recount the scenario truthfully, and their memory was then tested using free recall and cued recall questions. The Session 1 manipulation affected memory accuracy during Session 2. Specifically, compared with the Genuine group's performance, the Omission, Commission, or No Rehearsal groups' performance was characterized by increased omission and commission errors and decreased reporting of correct details. Victim blame ratings (i.e., victim responsibility and provocativeness) and participant gender predicted increased error and decreased accuracy, whereas perpetrator blame ratings predicted decreased error and increased accuracy. Findings are discussed in relation to factors that may affect memory for CSA information. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Avoiding Cheap Grace: Luther and the Need for Moral Despair

Abstract : This article addresses two problems in the development of an adequate Lutheran ethics in our time: moral quietism in the public square and an overly narrow and individualistic moral vision. I argue that the construction of grace as “freedom” tends toward “cheap grace” and that grace needs, then, to be thought of as a compelling of moral striving. Second, I argue that our sense of moral despair today should be broadened to focus on our participation in social structures that damage humans and the nonhuman world as much as on our personal and individual failings.     

Sense of humor, emotional intelligence, and social competence

Associations among sense of humor, emotional intelligence (EI), and social competence were examined in 111 undergraduate students using measures of humor styles, trait cheerfulness, social competence, and an ability test of EI. Emotional management ability was positively correlated with self-enhancing humor and trait cheerfulness, and negatively correlated with trait bad mood. Ability to accurately perceive emotions was negatively related to aggressive and self-defeating humor. Positive humor styles and trait cheerfulness were positively correlated with various domains of social competence, whereas negative humor styles and trait bad mood were negatively correlated with social competence. Finally, the emotional management facet of EI was positively correlated with several social competence domains.     

Spare the rod: The figure of the dominatrix in the literary canon

The commonly cited maxim, “Spare the rod and spoil the child” is often traced incorrectly back to the biblical book of Proverbs when its point of origin lies instead first in Langland’s Piers Plowman and then, in the highly satirical and sexualized text of Samuel Butler’s Hudibras. Thus, from a religious origin, it has metamorphosed into a woman-man relationship. Indeed to follow the evolution of this phrase is to uncover the extent to which the disciplining impulses of religious rhetoric are eroticized in one Western European literary theme, that of feminine dominance, from the tenth century when the word Dominatrix appeared in the writings of Hroswitha of Gandersheim. The period leading up to the 1650s, when Butler turned the phrase into one line of a heroic iambic couplet in the middle of a stanza on an amorous jaileress, was also a time when medical research on human and animal anatomy and physiology had unravelled the pathways of libido-lifting buttock-beating. Far from demonizing woman the literary image of the whip-wielding mistress did not degrade the female sex but instead apotheosized the dominatrix as a major erotic image of the twentieth century.