Children and Spirituality in the Context of a Traditional Festival: Halloween

This paper examines some of the contemporary cultural practices associated with the traditional festival of Halloween as it is celebrated by children in Britain and the United States. Using ethnographic evidence from a variety of sources, the authors seek to explore the range of activities which constitute the modern Halloween, particularly as it is mediated to children through the forms of consumer culture. The paper analyses the changing social, historical and religious patterns which have displaced the celebration of Halloween onto children, and offers an account of them which points to the persistence of a coherent spirituality—what the authors term a ‘spirituality of boundaries‘—to be found in the symbolism of the festival and its interaction with the lives and representation of children.     

Atomic discourse inThe Feynman Lectures on Physics

We examine the compromises that are actually made in modern scientific discourse concerning atoms. We conclude that even the ideals of clarity and consistency can be legitimately compromised in order to obtain other advantages.     

Utility of the Mini-Mult with parents of emotionally disturbed children.

In order to determine the potential usefulness of the Mini-Mult as a screening instrument with parents of emotionally disturbed children, two studies were conducted. In the first study 128 MMPI profiles were rescored for the Mini-Mult and comparisons with MMPI were made. In the second study 50 parents were administered both the MMPI and the Mini-Mult. Results of both studies indicate that the Mini-Mult is not a good screening instrument with parents of emotionally disturbed children.     

The determinants of the symmetry or asymmetry of social orientation schemata

Both the distances and the angles at which doll pairs are placed have been shown to vary according to the type of social encounter represented by the figures. The present study investigated the conditions under which asymmetrical orientations occur. It was argued that figure orientations reflect the need for and tolerance of eyecontact on the part of the interactors they represent, and that, therefore, asymmetrical orientation patterns would occur in an encounter in which one interactor had high eye-contact needs or tolerance, and the other low eye-contact needs and tolerance. Subjects placed doll pairs to represent three situations in which one interactor was expected to have a high level of direct gaze and the other a low level (asymmetrical situations), and three situations in which eye-contact needs and tolerance were the same for both interactors (symmetrical situations). Orientation asymmetry was considerably greater in the asymmetrical situations than in the symmetrical situation, and in the case of placements representing the asymmetrical situations the high eye-contact interactor was almost always the more directly facing of the two figures.     

Can Word Puzzles be Tailored to Improve Different Dimensions of Verbal Fluency? A Report of an Intervention Study

Verbal fluency is commonly used as a proxy measure of executive functioning, as it involves cognitive flexibility, working memory, and inhibitory control. Previous research has demonstrated that crosswords can be a useful means of improving verbal fluency, results consistent with the cognitive reserve hypothesis; the form of verbal fluency affected has, however, differed across studies. The present study sought to assess the extent to which it was possible to target phonemic (PVF) and semantic verbal fluency (SVF) separately through word puzzles designed to focus on semantic/thematic and structural clues respectively. Fifty-three university students were randomly assigned to one of three groups: semantic/thematic, structural, or a daily diary control group. They were assessed on PVF and SVF at baseline, and immediately following a four-week intervention. Age, sex, and depression scores were controlled for. A 2 × 3 mixed ANCOVA showed that the structural group improved significantly more in PVF during the intervention period than did the semantic/thematic or control groups, with the improvement linked to improved switching performance. The effect size was large. No significant difference in improvement in SVF emerged, although the effect size was moderate. The findings support the notion that it is possible to improve specific forms of verbal fluency through tailored brief word-puzzle interventions.