Confession and Forgiveness: A Pastoral Reading of <Emphasis Type="Italic">A Father’s Son</Emphasis> by Lionel Dahmer

This paper offers a pastoral reading of the memoir written by Lionel Dahmer, the father of the serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer. I suggest that the literary genre of the memoir provided Lionel with a means of confession that enabled him to process three particular experiences related to his son—namely, grief, shame, and regret. I also suggest that the writing of this confession enabled Lionel to forgive his son for his son’s various failures and, potentially, to forgive himself for his own failures as a father, though this latter point can only be offered speculatively. This memoir is inherently pastoral and theological because it deals with the themes of confession and forgiveness, and, theologically, the memoir also may be viewed as a work of penance. One theological upshot, based on Lionel’s experience, entails challenging the idea that God the Father abandoned God the Son on the cross: A more divine model of fatherhood would be one in which a father could embrace the shame of standing by his son when the chips are down.     

The Craftsman and His Apprentice: A Kohutian Interpretation of the Gospel Narratives of Jesus Christ

Kohutian theory suggests that relationships play a central role in structuring and sustaining the psychological self. In this article, we apply self psychology to the Father-Son dyad found in the Synoptic and Johannine narratives in order to understand the Jesus of the gospels in a new, psychologically informed manner. Conclusions are drawn related to how self psychology can help to elucidate the biblical relationship between God the Father and Son, or the craftsman and his apprentice, as well as how, conversely, the Father-Son dyad described in the gospels can inform self psychology.     

The bystander-effect: a meta-analytic review on bystander intervention in dangerous and non-dangerous emergencies

Research on bystander intervention has produced a great number of studies showing that the presence of other people in a critical situation reduces the likelihood that an individual will help. As the last systematic review of bystander research was published in 1981 and was not a quantitative meta-analysis in the modern sense, the present meta-analysis updates the knowledge about the bystander effect and its potential moderators. The present work (a) integrates the bystander literature from the 1960s to 2010, (b) provides statistical tests of potential moderators, and (c) presents new theoretical and empirical perspectives on the novel finding of non-negative bystander effects in certain dangerous emergencies as well as situations where bystanders are a source of physical support for the potentially intervening individual. In a fixed effects model, data from over 7,700 participants and 105 independent effect sizes revealed an overall effect size of g = -0.35. The bystander effect was attenuated when situations were perceived as dangerous (compared with non-dangerous), perpetrators were present (compared with non-present), and the costs of intervention were physical (compared with non-physical). This pattern of findings is consistent with the arousal-cost-reward model, which proposes that dangerous emergencies are recognized faster and more clearly as real emergencies, thereby inducing higher levels of arousal and hence more helping. We also identified situations where bystanders provide welcome physical support for the potentially intervening individual and thus reduce the bystander effect, such as when the bystanders were exclusively male, when they were naive rather than passive confederates or only virtually present persons, and when the bystanders were not strangers.     

Facilitated attentional disengagement from negative information in relation to self-reported depressive symptoms of Dutch female undergraduate students

Prior research has shown that depressive symptoms are associated with an enhanced attention toward negative stimuli and difficulty of disengaging attention from negative stimuli. The current study was an extension of a 2005 study by Koster and colleagues. A different stimulus presentation time and word set were used. The whole range of depressive symptoms was included in this sample instead of creating dichotomized groups. The Exogenous Cueing Task with negative, positive, and neutral cues was administered to 85 female undergraduate university students. Participants completed the Beck's Depression Inventory-II-NL questionnaire to measure self-reported depression. Contrary to previous findings, depressive symptoms were related to a facilitated rather than impaired attentional disengagement from negative stimuli. An explanation for the discrepancy with findings from Koster, et al. may be the different stimulus presentation time (1000 msec. instead of 500 or 1500 msec.).     

Contextual Inequalities in Religious Youth Programming

Religious congregations are hypothesized to be a community organization affected by contextual inequalities. Survey and interview data are analyzed to investigate the type and prevalence of youth programming in a geographic area. Rather than drawing a sample of religious congregations in the area, the telephone survey was conducted with every congregation located in the three contiguous cities. Coupled with the high response rate (98.9%), this allows for a unique analysis of a total population of congregations in the specified area. In-person interviews were also conducted with religious youth ministers sampled from the broader population of congregations. U.S. Census (American Factfinder, 2000) data on the areas in which the congregations were located was linked to survey and interview data. Results demonstrate contextual effects in religious youth programming, net of denomination, congregation size, and budget. The availability and type of youth programming in different locations relates to the inequalities embedded in these contexts. This study indicates that social disorganization theories apply to religious organizations not in inequalities of the number of congregations located in any particular area but in inequalities in the level of youth programming density available within those congregations.     

Children's word fluency strategies

Two word fluency tasks, the FAS letter fluency task and the "animal" semantic fluency task, were administered to 130 healthy Swedish-speaking children between 6 and 15 years of age. The main aim was to gather normative data on these word fluency tasks for Swedish-speaking children. Another purpose was to examine the switching and clustering strategies used, along with the occurrence of erroneous responses, in relation to demographic data and number of words retrieved. Both phonological and semantic analyses of switching and clustering were conducted. Higher age was found to be related to a more effective use of phonological and semantic switching and clustering strategies. The reference data resulting from this study may be of clinical value in examinations of children with various diagnoses, including language impairment.     

Measuring Latent Quantities

A distinction is proposed between measures and predictors of latent variables. The discussion addresses the consequences of the distinction for the true-score model, the linear factor model, Structural Equation Models, longitudinal and multilevel models, and item-response models. A distribution-free treatment of calibration and error-of-measurement is given, and the contrasting properties of measures and predictors are examined.     

Speaking Well of the Dead: On the Aesthetics of Eulogies

Robert Solomon criticized the philosophy of death for abstracting from human reality to treat our mortality as a collection of metaphysical puzzles. Nowhere is death less abstract than in our response to the death of our loved ones. The public face of our response is the memorial service and the eulogies that move us. Our experience of a eulogy can be as cathartic as Aristotle theorized as part of great tragedy. However, treating the oration as a work of art seems inappropriate; seeking to understand our engagement in aesthetic terms disrespectful to the grieving. This paper attempts to resolve this paradox by exploring analogies between the structures of eulogies and those of tragedy, and showing that, rather than traditional aesthetics' "promise of happiness," our engagement is concerned with the "promise of meaning." Psychological research on the nature of empathy theorizes that humans are hard-wired to feel the experiences of others and this is undoubtedly at work in our emotional responses to literature and eulogies. Drawing on the work of Dacher Keltner, the paper argues that the key to the aesthetics of eulogies and literature lies in their power to invoke our "awe" in response to their words.