Obedience and Disobedience/Rebellion in Biblical Versus Greek Narratives: Toward a Biblical Psychology

Contemporary psychology and psychiatry have been explicitly or implicitly based on an ancient Greek view of life. Even pastoral psychologists have been influenced by this view. The present article calls for a paradigm shift toward a biblical psychology. Illustrations of these contrasting worldviews are presented around the issue of obedience versus disobedience/rebellion. Three narratives are compared in this regard: 1) creation stories, 2) “flood” stories, and 3) father-son stories. Freud’s dependence on a Greek worldview is discussed, as is his disregard of biblical narratives. Pastoral psychologists, take heart! It is time to level the playing field.     

Self-reported mental problems in boys and girls: Preliminary findings

Previous research has reported higher frequency in boys than in girls of all psychopathological categories in childhood, and a reversal of the genders' ratio for adolescence and onwards. All studies about childhood mental health are based on referral by adults. The present study evaluated the prevalence of psychopathology in three age groups in childhood and adolescence, in both genders, using a new self-report scale of mental health problems for children and adolescents. Social desirability was measured separately. Five hundred sixteen school children in the fifth, seventh, and ninth grades were tested. Using the total mental health score, the study found that boys reported more disorders than girls in the two younger age groups, while the reverse was found in the oldest one. However, when social desirability was statistically controlled, the reversal phenomenon disappeared. In separate analyses of the subscales it was found that boys report more behavior problems, girls report more emotional problems in the youngest and oldest age groups, and both genders report an equal amount of school maladjustment. The results are discussed with regard to the importance of self-report and the control of social desirability.This study was conducted as an M.A. thesis in psychology by the first author, under the supervision of the second and third authors.     

Gradients of attraction as a function of the fit between social setting and stimulus person characteristics: Studies of the differentiation of attitude

Two experiments compared three alternative hypotheses concerning differences in attraction to a person across interaction settings: A compartmentalization hypothesis assumes that a person's (A's) intimate and nonintimate characteristics only affect attraction to him in intimate and nonintimate interactions, respectively, and that there is no generalization of attraction across levels of intimacy. An intimacy dominance hypothesis assumes that a person's intimacy-related characteristics determine attraction to him at all levels of interaction. Finally, an intimacy threshold hypothesis assumes that a person's intimacy-related characteristics become increasingly relevant to attraction as the intimacy of interaction increases, but that these characteristics need not influence attraction at nonintimate levels of interaction. Experiment 1 supported the compartmentalization hypothesis. Attraction to a formal teacher decreased as the intimacy of the anticipated setting increased, while attraction to an informal teacher increased with increasing setting intimacy. In Experiment 2, agreement on intimate topics promoted liking for a peer while no effect was found for agreement on superficial topics. This effect only emerged for intimate interaction settings, supporting the intimacy threshold hypothesis. High positive correlations between distance preference and attraction were obtained in Experiment 1, while analogous data obtained in Experiment 2 had less clear implications.     

The two-property and condensed detachment

In the first part of this paper we indicate how Meredith's condensed detachment may be used to give a new proof of Belnap's theorem that if every axiom x of a calculus S has the two-property that every variable which occurs in x occurs exactly twice in x, then every theorem of S is a substitution instance of a theorem of S which has the two-property. In the remainder of the paper we discuss the use of mechanical theorem-provers, based either on condensed detachment or on the resolution rule of J. A. Robinson, to investigate various calculi whose axioms all have the two-property. Particular attention is given to D-groupoids, i.e. sets of formulae which are closed under condensed detachment.     

Induction of copulatory behavior in Aplysia: atrial gland factors mimic the excitatory effects of freshly deposited egg cordons

Egg laying in the marine mollusc Aplysia is induced and coordinated by peptide products of the egg-laying hormone (ELH) gene expressed in the neuroendocrine bag cells of the central nervous system. At least three structurally related genes, belonging to the ELH family but distinct from the ELH gene, are expressed in the atrial gland, an exocrine organ of unknown function that secretes into the oviduct of Aplysia. The experiments described in this report were designed to test the hypothesis that the atrial gland gene products serve a pheromonal function for the animal, coordinating reproductive behavior among individuals. Our studies showed that there was a significantly shorter latency to copulation when an Aplysia was paired with an animal that was actively laying eggs than when it was paired with a sexually mature but nonlaying animal. Moreover, the addition of extracts or homogenates of the atrial gland to the seawater surrounding two nonlaying animals reduced the latency to mating compared to animals exposed only to seawater or to homogenates of other regions of the reproductive tract, including oviduct. These results suggest that atrial gland products, secreted onto the egg cordon as it passes through the oviduct, may play a pheromonal role and induce mating behavior between individuals. Experiments are in progress to determine whether the active atrial gland factor(s) are products of the ELH-family genes expressed in the gland.