Forgive them for I have sinned: The relationship between guilt and forgiveness of others' transgressions

We propose that guilt leads to forgiveness of others' transgressions. In Study 1, people prone to experience guilt (but not shame) were also prone to forgive others for past misdeeds. In Study 2, we manipulated harm‐ and inequity‐based guilt; both increased forgiveness of others' transgressions. Further, the effect of guilt on forgiveness was mediated by identification with the transgressor. In Study 3, we replicated the guilt–forgiveness relationship and examined three other plausible mediators: capability for similar wrongdoing, empathic understanding, and general identification; only identification with the transgressor satisfied the criteria for mediation. In Study 4, we induced guilt by asking participants to harm a friend or stranger. Guilt induced by harming a friend led to greater forgiveness of third‐party transgressors, and again, identification with the transgressor mediated the effect. We discuss the implications of these results for understanding how the prosocial effects of guilt extend beyond the boundaries of a single interpersonal relationship.     

Preliminary evaluation of an abstinence-based program for 7th grade students from a small rural school district

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of an abstinence-based program designed for 7th grade students (n = 59) from a rural school district. Analysis suggested that after the program more students intended to avoid having sex before marriage but no change was noted for knowledge, attitudes, and self-efficacy.     

Democratic Moral Education and the Gifts of the Holy Spirit

How far is Thomas Aquinas available for current discussions in political philosophy? While there are certainly things to be learned from him about our political preoccupations, the pedagogy of his moral teaching typically resists our familiar questions. This holds even when the question is put in terms that Thomas should recognize—say, as a question about the virtues appropriate for a democracy. Thomas not only gives different meanings to these terms, he moves political topics away from the center of theological attention and so organizes them very differently. A reader can notice these differences at many points but perhaps especially in the attention that Thomas gives in the Summa to the gifts of the Holy Spirit. His account of these gifts qualifies significantly what he says of virtue and suggests large limits on human agency, whether in ethics or in politics.     

Secondary self‐deception

According to doxastic accounts of self‐deception, self‐deception that P yields belief that P. For doxastic accounts, the self‐deceiver really believes what he, in self‐deception, professes to believe. I argue that doxastic accounts are contradicted by a phenomenon that often accompanies self‐deception. This phenomenon – which I term ‘secondary deception’ – consists in the self‐deceiver's defending his professed (deceit‐induced) belief to an audience by lying to that audience. I proceed to sketch an alternative, non‐doxastic account of how we should understand self‐deception in terms of the self‐deceiver's misrepresentation of himself as believing that P.     

Assessing the generality and durability of interview‐informed functional analyses and treatment

Due to the limited research demonstrating socially valid outcomes of function‐based treatments in ecologically relevant environments (Santiago, Hanley, Moore, & Jin, 2016), we replicated and extended the effects of the interview‐informed functional analysis and skill‐based treatment procedure described by Hanley, Jin, Vanselow, and Hanratty (2014) with two children diagnosed with autism in a home setting. The assessment and treatment was implemented by a home‐based service provider and treatment was extended to the participants’ parents. Following the interview‐informed functional analyses, we taught the participants functional communication responses and to engage in less‐preferred activities when functional communication outcomes were delayed. We observed large reductions in problem behavior following the introduction of the function‐based treatment. The effects extended to novel settings, stimuli, and caregivers and the results maintained at 6‐week follow‐ups.     

Decreasing influence of arbitrarily applicable verbal relations of recreational gamblers: A randomized controlled trial

Twenty‐one recreational gamblers were randomly assigned to two groups; one group was exposed to a conditional discrimination relational training task to bias choice allocation to a black machine presented concurrently with a red machine, and the other group underwent the same relational training task immediately followed by a defusion procedure, designed to expand upon the relations developed in the initial relational task. Both groups completed a simulated slot‐machine task before and after the relational training task, with or without the defusion procedure. Results showed that 9 of 11 participants in the relational training only group showed an increased bias toward the black machine, compared to only 4 of 10 in the relational training plus defusion group; this latter group also showed greater matched responding. Results suggest that expanding verbal–relational networks may reduce the influence of any single verbal relation on gambling choice behavior.     

Why does impression management positively influence interview ratings? The mediating role of competence and warmth

Though interviews assess job applicants' skills and abilities, they can be influenced by extraneous factors, including impression management (IM) tactics. Interviewees’ self‐promotion and ingratiation IM tactics predict higher interview ratings; however, researchers have yet to determine why these tactics work. We assessed whether two fundamental dimensions of social perception, competence and warmth, mediate the relationship between IM tactics and interview ratings. We hypothesized that interviewee competence mediates the relationship between self‐promotion and interview ratings, and interviewee warmth mediates the relationship between ingratiation and interview ratings. Using real employment interviews, we found that competence mediates the relationship between self‐promotion and interview ratings, but warmth did not mediate the relationship between ingratiation and interview ratings in the way we expected.     

Clarity and creativity as womanist ethics for teaching and evaluating theological writing

This article uses womanist ethics and theories of writing instruction to illuminate the experiences of black women seminarians with theological writing at a predominantly white institution. The three cases presented here highlight two ethics for teaching and evaluating theological writing: clarity and creativity. Already triply marginalized by race, sex, and class, black women are often greeted with unwritten norms around academic theological writing that threaten their self‐concept and their development as producers of theological knowledge. This work centers reflections of student‐learning on the voices of black women who found their own ways of negotiating these demands. Their responses to the problems of writing for and in white, male‐dominated theological discourses provide moral strategies that all writers can employ and that all theology professors can make a regular part of their ethical pedagogical practice.