God,vision and power

Enlightenment philosopher George Berkeley, Irish bishop of Cloyne (1695–1752) developed a theory of God's relation to the world both rooted in orthodox Western Theology and influential for European secular government. This article critically examines the notion of God in Berkeleian thought with special reference to its implications for his concrete recommendations and political projects in British government and empire building. To this end, it examines the application of early Christian ascetic techniques to enlightenment colonial government. Berkeley's thought exemplifies modernity's modelling of the governing autonomous self on a transcendent impassible God. His ethics represent a practice of cosmology, where the world is watched by the judging subject.     

Inclusivism and the spiritual journey of Marie de Souza Canavarro (1849–1933)

Every age has its share of religious seekers, but during some periods of spiritual crisis greater numbers of seekers seem to appear. Marie de Souza Canavarro, an American advocate and interpreter of Asian traditions, was a paradigmatic seeker in an age of religious wandering. Along the way, she embraced Catholicism, Theosophy, Buddhism, Bahá'í, and Hinduism. In this article I offer an interpretation of her life and work, drawing on her novels, poems, letters, lectures, articles, and autobiography. I argue that amidst the diversity of views she affirmed, there was some continuity. Canavarro longed for rest from her ceaseless wandering, and she hoped that religious and gender inclusivism might bring it. She, like others of her age, yearned for a tradition that elevated women and reconciled religions.     

Information dynamics and uniform substitution

The picture of information acquisition as the elimination of possibilities has proven fruitful in many domains, serving as a foundation for formal models in philosophy, linguistics, computer science, and economics. While the picture appears simple, its formalization in dynamic epistemic logic reveals subtleties: given a valid principle of information dynamics in the language of dynamic epistemic logic, substituting complex epistemic sentences for its atomic sentences may result in an invalid principle. In this article, we explore such failures of uniform substitution. First, we give epistemic examples inspired by Moore, Fitch, and Williamson. Second, we answer affirmatively a question posed by van Benthem: can we effectively decide when every substitution instance of a given dynamic epistemic principle is valid? In technical terms, we prove the decidability of this schematic validity problem for public announcement logic (PAL and PAL-RC) over models for finitely many fully introspective agents, as well as models for infinitely many arbitrary agents. The proof of this result illuminates the reasons for the failure of uniform substitution.     

Remembering our violent conversion: Conflict in the Icelandic conversion narrative

This article analyzes violent conflict in the medieval narratives of Iceland's conversion to Christianity, as told by the Icelanders themselves. The article considers physical and verbal aggression as interrelated forms of conflict connected in an economy of violent exchange. In the narratives, they are represented as attacks against material and symbolic resources. The competing pagans and Christians struggle to come out ahead as often as they can and thereby win the most converts. Verbal violence takes center stage in this analysis, more specifically three kinds of verbal violence: a particular sub‐genre of insults; coercive speech; and speech as a means of supernatural power. The first of these, the insults use deeply embedded medieval Icelandic constructions of gender to create a highly corrosive discourse that combines cowardice, homosexuality and laziness, among other things, as the traits of the least desirable sort of man. Finally, in contrast the commonplace occurrence of violent conflict in these texts, an internal critique of violence appears in the later versions of the conversion story. This critique reconsiders what forms of violence are legitimate, most significantly disapproving of the previously accepted masculine activity of revenge.     

Digital Animation as a Method to Disseminate Research Findings to the Community Using a Community-Based Participatory Approach

Community-based participatory research (CBPR) has garnered increasing interest over the previous two decades as researchers have tackled increasingly complex health problems. In academia, professional presentations and articles are major ways that research is disseminated. However, dissemination of research findings to the people and communities who participated in the research is many times forgotten. In addition, little scholarly literature is focused on creative dissemination of research findings to the community using CBPR methods. We seek to fill this gap in the literature by providing an exemplar of research dissemination and partnership strategies that were used to complete this project. In this paper, we present a novel approach to the dissemination of research findings to our targeted communities through digital animation. We also provide the foundational thinking and specific steps that were taken to select this specific dissemination product development and distribution strategy.     

Same faces, different labels: Generating the cross-race effect in face memory with social category information

Recognition of own-race faces is superior to recognition of other-race faces. In the present experiments, we explored the role of top-down social information in the encoding and recognition of racially ambiguous faces. Hispanic and African American participants studied and were tested on computer-generated ambiguous-race faces (composed of 50 % Hispanic and 50 % African American features; MacLin & Malpass, Psychology, Public Policy, and Law 7:98–118, 2001). In Experiment 1, the faces were randomly assigned to two study blocks. In each block, a group label was provided that indicated that those faces belonged to African American or to Hispanic individuals. Both participant groups exhibited superior memory for faces studied in the block with their own-race label. In Experiment 2, the faces were studied in a single block with no labels, but tested in two blocks in which labels were provided. Recognition performance was not influenced by the labeled race at test. Taken together, these results confirm the claim that purely top-down information can yield the well-documented cross-race effect in recognition, and additionally they suggest that the bias takes place at encoding rather than testing.     

Effect of the Healthy MOMs Lifestyle Intervention on Reducing Depressive Symptoms Among Pregnant Latinas

Depression during the prenatal and postpartum periods is associated with poor maternal, perinatal and child outcomes. This study examines the effectiveness of a culturally and linguistically tailored, social support-based, healthy lifestyle intervention led by trained community health workers in reducing depressive symptoms among pregnant and early postpartum Latinas. A sample of 275 pregnant Latinas was randomized to the Healthy MOMs Healthy Lifestyle Intervention (MOMs) or the Healthy Pregnancy Education (control) group. More than one-third of participants were at risk for depression at baseline. MOMs participants were less likely than control group participants to be at risk for depression at follow-up. Between baseline and 6 weeks postpartum, MOMs participants experienced a significant decline in depressive symptoms; control participants experienced a marginally significant decline. For MOMs participants, most of this decline occurred during the pregnancy intervention period, a time when no change occurred for control participants. The change in depressive symptoms during this period was greater among MOMs than control participants (“intervention effect”). From baseline to postpartum, there was a significant intervention effect among non-English-speaking women only. These findings provide evidence that a community-planned, culturally tailored healthy lifestyle intervention led by community health workers can reduce depressive symptoms among pregnant, Spanish-speaking Latinas.     

A test of the survival processing advantage in implicit and explicit memory tests

The present study was designed to investigate the survival processing effect (Nairne, Thompson, & Pandeirada, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 33, 263–273, 2007) in cued implicit and explicit memory tests. The survival effect has been well established in explicit free recall and recognition tests, but has not been evident in implicit memory tests or in cued explicit tests. In Experiment 1 of the present study, we tested implicit and explicit memory for words studied in survival, moving, or pleasantness contexts in stem completion tests. In Experiment 2, we further tested these effects in implicit and explicit category production tests. Across the two experiments, with four separate memory tasks that included a total of 525 subjects, no survival processing advantage was found, replicating the results from implicit tests reported by Tse and Altarriba (Memory & Cognition, 38, 1110–1121, 2010). Thus, although the survival effect appears to be quite robust in free recall and recognition tests, it has not been replicated in cued implicit and explicit memory tests. The similar results found for the implicit and explicit tests in the present study do not support encoding elaboration explanations of the survival processing effect.     

Maternal Psychopathology and Early Child Temperament Predict Young Children’s Salivary Cortisol 3 Years Later

Neuroendocrine dysfunction is hypothesized to be an early emerging vulnerability marker for depression. We tested whether the main and interactive effects of maternal psychopathology and early child temperamental vulnerability for depression assessed at age three predicted offspring’s basal cortisol function at age 6 years. 228 (122 males) children participated in the baseline and follow-up assessments. At age three, maternal lifetime psychopathology was assessed with a diagnostic clinical interview, and child temperamental positive affectivity (PA) and negative affectivity (NA) were assessed using laboratory observations. At age six, children’s waking and evening cortisol were assessed on 2 days. Maternal lifetime anxiety predicted offspring’s higher morning cortisol at age six. Child temperamental NA at age three predicted higher evening cortisol at age six. There was a significant interaction between maternal lifetime depression and child temperamental PA at age three in predicting offspring’s morning cortisol at age six. For the offspring of mothers with lifetime depression, higher PA at age 3 predicted lower morning cortisol at age 6. These findings highlight the importance of examining the main and interactive effects of maternal psychopathology and early child temperamental vulnerability in predicting the development of offspring’s stress physiology. Findings hold significance in identifying etiological mechanisms of risk and delineating the complex developmental pathways to psychopathology.     

Discrepancies Between Parent and Adolescent Beliefs About Daily Life Topics and Performance on an Emotion Recognition Task

Parents and children and adolescents commonly disagree in their perceptions of a variety of behaviors, including the family relationship and environment, and child and adolescent psychopathology. To this end, numerous studies have examined to what extent increased discrepant perceptions—particularly with regard to perceptions of the family relationship and environment—predict increased child and adolescent psychopathology. Parents’ and children and adolescents’ abilities to decode and identify others’ emotions (i.e., emotion recognition) may play a role in the link between discrepant perceptions and child and adolescent psychopathology. We examined parents’ and adolescents’ emotion recognition abilities in relation to discrepancies between parent and adolescent perceptions of daily life topics. In a sample of 50 parents and adolescents ages 14-to-17 years (M?=?15.4 years, 20 males, 54 % African-American), parents and adolescents were each administered a widely used performance-based measure of emotion recognition. Parents and adolescents were also administered a structured interview designed to directly assess each of their perceptions of the extent to which discrepancies existed in their beliefs about daily life topics (e.g., whether adolescents should complete their homework and carry out household chores). Interestingly, lower parent and adolescent emotion recognition performance significantly related to greater parent and adolescent perceived discrepant beliefs about daily life topics. We observed this relation whilst accounting for adolescent age and gender and levels of parent-adolescent conflict. These findings have important implications for understanding and using informant discrepancies in both basic developmental psychopathology research and applied research in clinic settings (e.g., discrepant views on therapeutic goals).