The Holistic Way: John Wesley’s Practical Piety as a Resource for Integrated Healthcare

In the midst of the multifarious healthcare of the 21st century an Anglican clergyman from the 18th century named John Wesley can serve as a valuable resource for contemporary Christians seeking to faithfully live a life of well-being which incorporates different forms of medicine. In order to explore Wesley’s contributions to integrative care this essay will first situate Wesley in his 18th century context—a time period not completely unlike our own in which medicine was also experiencing dramatic shifts in practice and philosophy. In order to demonstrate his integration of the medical knowledge of his day the essay will look at Wesley’s own medical practices and his relationships to physicians as forging a “middle way” between physic and empiricism. The essay will examine Wesley’s theology as a practical piety which is grounded in a holistic sotieriology that sustains an integrative medicine (caring for body, mind, and spirit). Finally, the essay concludes with possibilities for integrated medicine in our own day as informed by a Wesleyan “way” of holistic practice.

Fluent Reading as the Improvement of Stimulus Control: Additive Effects of Performance-Based Interventions to Repeated Reading on Students' Reading and Error Rates

The impact of adding performance-based interventions to a skill-based intervention on oral reading fluency was examined with 3 elementary students identified as having difficulty with reading. Two performance-based interventions were combined with the skill-based intervention Repeated Reading (RR) to create the three instructional packages investigated. The packages included Repeated Readings (RR), Repeated Readings with Performance Feedback (RR/FB), and Repeated Readings with Performance Feedback and Contingent Reward (RR/FB/REW). Results suggested that Repeated Reading (RR) alone led to the greatest increase in reading fluency for participants with the highest reading rates and lowest error rates at baseline. In contrast, the participant who exhibited the lowest reading rate and highest error rate benefited the most when Repeated Readings was offered in conjunction with Performance Feedback (RR/FB) or Performance Feedback plus Contingent Reward (RR/FB/RW). Implications for blending skill- and performance-based interventions to develop stimulus control over fluent reading and future research directions are discussed.     

Negative thoughts in depression: A study in Iran

The cognitive theory of depression proposes significant relations between negative thoughts and depression. Evidence for the model has been widely observed in Western countries. However, despite the high prevalence of depression in the Middle East (ME), there has been limited research that has evaluated the cognitive profiles of people living in this region, and especially in non-Arab countries like Iran. The current research examined these relationships in Iran. Convenience sampling was used to recruit 80 depressed and 80 non-depressed individuals via advertising in clinics and public areas, respectively. Depression status was checked with a structured interview, the Major Depressive Disorder subscale of the Psychiatric Diagnostic Screening Questionnaire, and the Beck Depression Inventory-II. All participants completed the Automatic Thoughts Questionnaire-Negative to examine the frequency of negative automatic thoughts. Unlike other results from Arab countries, depressed participants indicated significantly more negative thoughts towards self and future compared with the non-depressed group. The results of the present study are consistent with the negativity hypothesis of the cognitive theory of depression. Further research is needed in the in ME, to investigate other hypotheses of this theory in this region. Strengths and limitations of the present study are discussed.     

Individual differences in anxiety level and eyewitness memory.

The present study investigated the relationship between individual differences in anxiety and eyewitness performance. Instructions designed to produce evaluative threat were given to anxious and nonanxious subjects at encoding and/or at retrieval. The performance of those subjects who were given anxiety-arousing instructions at encoding and retrieval and who scored high on the Test Anxiety Scale (TAS; Sarason, 1972) was less accurate on an eyewitness task than was that of the subjects who scored low on the scale. This difference in performance was attributable to improvement in the performance of nonanxious subjects, rather than debilitation in the performance of anxious subjects. Faced with the threat of failure, low-anxious subjects appeared to have the potential for increased effort. High-anxious subjects seemed to perform at or near capacity under all the experimental conditions because of their predisposition for task-irrelevant worry, which limited the possibility of an increase in working memory capacity.     

Concurrent performances: rate and accuracy of free-operant oddity responding

In pigeon's oddity performances, maintained by variable-interval reinforcement of pecks on the odd key of three keys in a triangular array, accuracy and response rate varied inversely with the rate of variable-interval reinforcement scheduled concurrently for pecks on a fourth, spatially isolated key. But when variable-interval and extinction components alternated in a multiple schedule for pecks on the spatially isolated key, oddity accuracy was greater during variable-interval components than during extinction components. Oddity response rate was not affected systematically by the alternating components. Changeovers between the oddity keys and the spatially isolated key were frequent during variable-interval components; responding occurred almost exclusively on the oddity keys during extinction components. This difference in performance during the two components was eliminated by arranging stimulus-correlated variable-interval reinforcement in the multiple schedule on the spatially isolated key: a stimulus was presented in the variable-interval components only when reinforcement became available, thereby reducing responding on this key to near-zero levels in both components while maintaining the variable-interval reinforcement. The effect of the multiple-schedule components on oddity accuracy was not altered, however, and thus apparently depended directly on concurrent reinforcement and not on differential sequential properties of concurrent responding during the two components.