Perceived stress,life events,dysfunctional attitudes,and depression in adolescent psychiatric inpatients

Hewitt, Flett, and Mosher (1992) examined the factor structure of the Perceived Stress Scale (PSS) and its relation to depression in adult psychiatric patients. This study sought to replicate and extend their findings, using a sample of 203 adolescent psychiatric inpatients. All patients admitted to the adolescent unit in a psychiatric hospital over a 3-year period were administered the PSS, as well as measures of depression, life events, dysfunctional attitudes, and intellectual abilities. Consistent with Hewittet al., two factors were found in the PSS, reflecting perceived distress and perceived coping ability. Regression analyses indicated that, for males, both factors account for independent variance in depression, whereas for females, only the distress factor is related to depression. In addition, for both male and female, dysfunctional attitudes account for significant variance in depression in addition to PSS, but negative life events do not. None of the variables were related to intellectual abilities. Implications for clinical assessment and intervention are discussed.     

The self and recollective experience

Three experiments investigated the hypothesis that self-reference at encoding increases the probability of recollective experience in recognition memory. In all three experiments separate groups of subjects studied words naming personality traits. One group judged the self-relevance of the traits, the other groups performed orientating tasks low in self-reference. In a recognition test subjects first identified old items and then indicated which of these were accompanied by recollective experience ('remember' responses) and which were recognized on some other basis ('know' responses). No reliable differences in overall recognition performance between self-referent and semantic encoding tasks were observed. However, subjects who encoded trait adjectives with reference to the self produced reliably more remember responses and few know responses than subjects who had encoded the items in the low self-referent tasks. Experiment 1 demonstrated a self-reference effect in recognition accompanied by recollective experience after 1-hour retention interval, while Experiment 2 found this effect to persist over a 24-hour retention interval. Experiment 3 demonstrated that this self-reference effect is obtained under incidental as well as under intentional learning conditions. Taken together these findings demonstrate the importance of self-reference as a factor in determining the likelihood that recognition judgements will be accompanied by recollective experience.     

Syed Ameer Ali: A bridge‐builder?

This paper examines whether there is any truth in the contention that Syed Ameer Ali (to adopt the English formulation of his name that he himself used) was an effective interpreter of Islam between East and West. To that end, it examines his background and early life, his credibility as an interpreter of Islam to the British élite and as a Muslim interpreter of Christianity. It concludes that he was far more at home in Western intellectual assumptions of his day than in Islamic scholarship and was not the effective interpreter he aspired to be. This raises on‐going questions about whether there is any future for Islamic modernism or whether it is too tainted by association with imperialism and other Western phenomena.     

Gender bias and moral decision making: The moral orientations of justice and care

This study investigated gender related moral reasoning in student essays containing arguments on moral issues. Undergraduate students in a medical ethics course viewed two films on morally controversial issues. The students wrote brief essays about the films which were transcribed and numerically coded to conceal the author's gender from the evaluator. Using a coding scheme originated by Lyons, the evaluator classified each essay as a justice/right essay or a care/response essay or an equal response essay. Subsequently, calculations were made to determine the percentage of male authored essays that were justice/rights essays or care/response essays and the percentage of female authored essays that were justice/rights or care/response essays. The males (87.7%) tended to exhibit the justice/rights moral orientation, and the females (69.4%) exhibited the care/response moral orientation. Several different calculations were made to determine various degrees of gender related orientations also. The difference in orientation was highly statistically significant (p≤0.001). These data contribute to understanding moral orientation and development. Interpretations are given to explain some differences between the genders and help explain the traditional roles in society that males and females have played historically.     

Heterogeneity of deficits in developmental dyslexia and implications for methodology

Most of the studies overviewed by Farmer and Klein (1995) in their review of temporal processing disorders in developmental dyslexia have taken a group study approach in which a group of dyslexic readers is compared with a group of normal readers on some task thought to be relevant to the reading disorder. Because of the acknowledged heterogeneity of deficits among developmental dyslexics, this group study methodology is inappropriate and is likely to lead to findings in one lab that cannot be replicated in another. The single case study methodology, which has been used successfully in the study of adult neuropsychological impairments, should be adopted in the study of developmental impairments as well. In the case study approach, each individual is studied thoroughly with tasks designed to tap the various components of the cognitive domain under study in order to determine which components are spared and which impaired. Data are not averaged, but reported separately for each case. Some recent findings from case studies on developmental dyslexia are reviewed and suggestions are made as to how the case study approach could be used in analyzing whether a temporal processing disorder, or any other hypothesized factor, is causal to the reading disorder.     

Daniel Howard-Snyder (ed.), The Evidential Argument from Evil

International Journal for Philosophy of Religion -     

Seeking Social Support in Old Age as Reasoned Action: Structural and Volitional Determinants in a Middle-Aged Sample of Argentinean Women1

Given that the availability of social support influences physical and psychological well-being, the provision of positive contacts is often crucial for older women. The purpose of the present study was to test the utility of both structural and volitional factors as determinants of support-seeking intentions. Two intentions to seek social support were studied in a group of 106 middle-aged women: (a) the intention to go to a doctor at least once a year after 55; and (b) the intention to visit a family member at least once a week after 55. The structural variables of interest were age, educational level, presence of partner, number of children, and number of grandchildren. The volitional factors assessed were intentions, beliefs, attitudes, and norms. There was little evidence that structural factors influenced support seeking. In contrast, as predicted from the theory of reasoned action (Ajzen & Fishbein, 1980; Fishbein & Ajzen. 1975), intentions to go to the doctor and to visit a family member could be successfully predicted from attitudes and norms.     

Achievements of the hermeneutic-phenomenological approach to natural science A comparison with constructivist sociology

The hermeneutic-phenomenological approach to the natural sciences has a special interest in the interpretive phases of these sciences and in the circumstances, cognitive and social, that lead to divergent as well as convergent interpretations. It tries to ascertain the role of the hermeneutic circle in research; and to this end it has developed, over the past three decades or so, a number of adaptations of hermeneutic and phenomenological concepts to processes of experimentation and theory-making. The purpose of the present essay is to show how appropriate these concepts are to an important current research program (solar neutrinos) and thus to point out what difference they make to our understanding of science as a whole. This goal is pursued by means of comparison. The program of social constructivism in natural science has produced alternative but parallel concepts, embodied in an alternative and parallel vocabulary. The contrast between this vocabulary and that of hermeneutics and phenomenology reveals, so I argue, the advantages of the latter. But actually it does more: It reveals as well the pre-understanding or prejudgment of science embedded in each approach.