Jesus ACTED UP and Any Possible Future of “Queer Theology”

What can we learn about the prospects for “queer theology” from how Goss wrote Jesus ACTED UP into the future for which he hoped? Theology seems to add four things to the book's political arguments and exhortations. It deepens the analyses of oppression, provides stronger means for re-education, invokes divine help, and doubles political theater with sacrament. These tasks of critique, re-education, invocation, and ritual will continue to define any Christian theology that might be called “queer.” Each requires the transformation of language. In order to have a future, queer theology must undertake a poiesis outside the endless prattle that sustains present power. Its poetry may first appear as silence.     

Attachment in Adolescence and Borderline Personality Disorder

Borderline personality disorder (BPD) has been conceptualized as a constellation of symptoms related to problems in self-functioning, emotion regulation, and interpersonal relationships. Its etiology has been connected to individuals’ early childhood environment, caregiving relationships, and traumatic life events. Recent literature has noted the potential presence of BPD beginning in adolescence, or even earlier in childhood. Attachment theory offers a lens for understanding the symptoms of borderline personality disorder and identifying potential aspects of treatment that may be specifically valuable for adolescent patients. Adolescence marks a time when the attachment system has increased relevance due to the importance of identity formation, peer relationships, body representations and the development of autonomy at this time, in the face of physical changes and academic challenges. This article will summarize research on attachment, body representations, personality disorders, and features of development in adolescence, in order to enhance clinical understanding of patients who presenting with these types of difficulties.     

Reporting Ethics Committee Approval in Public Administration Research

While public administration research is thriving because of increased attention to social scientific rigor, lingering problems of methods and ethics remain. This article investigates the reporting of ethics approval within public administration publications. Beginning with an overview of ethics requirements regarding research with human participants, I turn to an examination of human participants protections for public administration research. Next, I present the findings of my analysis of articles published in the top five public administration journals over the period from 2000 to 2012, noting the incidences of ethics approval reporting as well as funding reporting. In explicating the importance of ethics reporting for public administration research, as it relates to replication, reputation, and vulnerable populations, I conclude with recommendations for increasing ethics approval reporting in public administration research.     

Let Go of Your (Inflated) Ego: Caring more about Others Reduces Narcissistic Tendencies

Narcissists are known for having excessively positive self‐views, but an equally defining characteristic of narcissism may be a disregard of other people. Could encouraging people to care more about others, or feel more connected to them, reduce narcissism? We describe a series of studies demonstrating that a more communal focus on others reduces narcissistic tendencies. In particular, repeating communal self‐statements (i.e., “I am a caring person”), recalling a time when one was caring, feeling empathy, focusing on monetary expenditures (which increases a sense of dependence on others), and interdependent self‐construal all situationally reduce narcissism. These effects occur on a small scale but are significant because they establish that communal focus causes changes in narcissism. They also suggest that narcissism may have a state‐like or context‐dependent component, fluctuating across time and situations. Everyone may have the propensity to be narcissistic, but caring more about others may help to curb narcissism.     

Does Sex Matter? The Moderating Role of Sex on the Relationship Between Stress Biomarkers and Cognition

We examined the moderating role of sex on the relationship between salivary cortisol and alpha-amylase (sAA) and a diverse battery of cognitive outcomes including measures of working memory capacity, executive functioning, and prospective memory in addition to a more traditional memory measure (episodic memory). The final sample for the analyses included 144 participants (34 men and 110 women). Multiple regressions were performed to test the moderating role of sex on the stress biomarker-cognition relationship. For backward counting performance, higher cortisol levels were related to worse performance in men, but not women. Higher cortisol levels were also related to lower word recall, but only in men. Finally, men, but not women, had higher switching costs in the Trail Making task as levels of sAA rose. The results provide evidence that sex moderates the stress biomarker-cognition relationship in a variety of cognitive outcomes. Although not part of the primary analysis, sAA and cortisol interacted such that increased sAA levels were only negatively related to backward counting performance when cortisol levels were low. The findings are discussed primarily in terms of biological sex differences in the stress response.     

Aging and the use of interword spaces during reading: Evidence from eye movements

In an eye movement experiment, we assessed the performance of young (18–30 years) and older (65 + years) adult readers when sentences contained conventional interword spaces, when interword spaces were removed, or when interword spaces were replaced by nonlinguistic symbols. The replacement symbol was either a closed square (■) that provided a salient (low-spatial-frequency) cue to word boundaries, or an open square (□) that provided a less salient cue and included features (vertical and horizontal lines) similar to those found in letters. Removing or replacing interword spaces slowed reading times and impaired normal eye movement behavior for both age groups. However, this disruption was greater for the older readers, particularly when the replacement symbol did not provide a salient cue as to word boundaries. Specific influences of this manipulation on word identification during reading were assessed by examining eye movements for a high- or low-frequency target word in each sentence. Standard word frequency effects were obtained for both age groups when text was spaced normally, and although the word frequency effect was larger when spaces were removed or filled, the increases were similar across age groups. Therefore, whereas older adults’ normal eye movements were substantially disrupted when text lacked conventional interword spaces, the process of lexical access associated with the word frequency effect was no more difficult for older than for young adults. The indication, therefore, is that although older adults struggle from the loss of conventional cues to word boundaries, this is not due to additional difficulties in word recognition.     

Spirituality and Optimism: A Holistic Approach to Component-Based,Self-management Treatment for HIV

For people living with HIV (PLWH), spirituality and optimism have a positive influence on their health, can slow HIV disease progression, and can improve quality of life. Our aim was to describe longitudinal changes in spirituality and optimism after participation in the SystemCHANGE?-HIV intervention. Upon completion of the intervention, participants experienced an 11.5 point increase in overall spiritual well-being (p = 0.036), a 6.3 point increase in religious well-being (p = 0.030), a 4.8 point increase in existential well-being (p = 0.125), and a 0.8 point increase in total optimism (p = 0.268) relative to controls. Our data suggest a group-based self-management intervention increases spiritual well-being in PLWH.     

On Reasons,Evidence of Oughts,and Morally Fitting Motives

In a series of papers, Stephen Kearns and Daniel Star defend the following general account of reasons: R: Necessarily, a fact F is a reason for an agent A to Φ iff F is evidence that an agent ought to Φ. In this paper, I argue that the reasons as evidence view will run afoul of a motivational constraint on moral reasons, and that this is a powerful reason to reject the reasons as evidence view. The motivational constraint is as follows: M: For some consideration C to be a moral reason for an agent to Φ it must be possible for C to figure as part of the agent’s motivation for Φing without thereby undercutting (either partially or wholly) the positive moral evaluation of the agent in acting as she does. M presents a problem for Kearns and Star’s view because there will be cases where some consideration is evidence that an agent ought to Φ, but where if an agent was motivated by that consideration the agent’s action would thereby be worse from a moral perspective for that very reason. Further, I argue that this problem will likely arise on any moral theory that evaluates the motivation of an agent as a component of assessing the moral status of acts.