Making Sense of Suffering: A Preliminary Study of Changes in Religious Women Adjusting to Severe Adversity

This qualitative study examined interviews from 25 women who held theistic beliefs from Christian, Islamic, or Jewish traditions. All had recently experienced severe adversity but reported they were coping well. Analysis illustrated changes in religious beliefs and attitudes they made as a result of learning to cope. Differences were found among the 3 religious groups. Findings of this preliminary study suggest that religious meaning and experience may change because of the process of learning to cope with severe adversity. Recommendations are made for counseling theistically oriented women.     

CONSCIOUS OBJECTIONS: GOD AND THE CONSCIOUSNESS DEBATES

Abstract. Consciousness studies are dogged with religious overtones, and many researchers fight hard against Christian ideas of soul or anything supernatural. This gives many studies on consciousness a particular relevance to religious belief. Many writers assume that, if consciousness can be explained physically, religious belief in a soul—and perhaps religious belief itself—must be false. Theorists of consciousness grapple with questions of materialism and reduction in trying to understand how the physical brain can produce the bizarre sensations that we call ourselves. In this essay I discuss the problems in trying to separate religion from science in such a “fuzzy” area as consciousness. I look at the question of what precisely theories of consciousness are trying to explain. I consider theories from David Chalmers, Daniel Dennett, and Roger Penrose as examples of different approaches. Although all of these are materialistically based, I argue that they do not necessarily demonstrate the nonexistence of a soul and also that religious belief does not necessarily require belief in a nonmaterial soul. I conclude with a discussion of why a physical/ materialist explanation of consciousness is desired and how religious bias is still a problem in this scientific/philosophical field.     

Graded representations in the acquisition of English and German transitive constructions

English and German children aged 2 years 4 months and 4 years heard both novel and familiar verbs in sentences whose form was grammatical, but which mismatched the event they were watching (e.g., ‘The frog is pushing the lion’, when the lion was actually the ‘agent’ or ‘doer’ of the pushing). These verbs were then elicited in new sentences. All children mostly corrected the familiar verb (i.e., they used the agent as the grammatical subject), but there were cross-linguistic differences among the two-year-olds concerning the novel verb. When English 2-year-olds used the novel verb they mostly corrected. However, their most frequent response was to avoid using the novel verb altogether. German 2-year-olds corrected the novel verb significantly more often than their English counterparts, demonstrating more robust verb-general representations of agent- and patient-marking. These findings provide support for a ‘graded representations’ view of development, which proposes that grammatical representations may be simultaneously abstract but ‘weak’.     

Transit Space: No Place is Nowhere

This article deals with representations of one specific city, Århus, Denmark, especially its central district. The analysis is based on anthropological fieldwork conducted in Skåde Bakker and Fedet, two well-off neighborhoods. The overall purpose of the project is to study perceptions of space and the interaction of cultural, social, and spatial organizations, as seen from the point of view of people living in Skåde Bakker and Fedet. The focus is on the city dwellers’ representations of the central district of Århus with specific reference to the concept of transit space. When applied to various Århusian locations, this might highlight unforeseen meanings and paradoxes.     

Factors associated with traumatic symptoms and internalizing problems among adolescents who experienced a traumatic event

The aim of the present study was to identify factors that are related to the traumatic symptoms and problem behavior among adolescents who experienced the New Years fire in 2001 in Volendam, The Netherlands. Three groups of factors were considered: pre-trauma (personality and coping), trauma-related (physical and emotional proximity to disaster), and post-trauma factors (received social support). Forty-five adolescents completed the questionnaire. Two years after the disaster, these adolescents experienced significant traumatic stress reaction (70% within the clinical range) and showed clinically significant levels of internalizing problems (37%). Pre-trauma, individual factors were identified as the most important predictors of distress, followed by received social support. The indicators of physical and emotional proximity to disaster explained little variance in distress.     

Do as I do: 7-month-old infants selectively reproduce others' goals

In the current study, we tested whether 7-month-old infants would selectively imitate the goal-relevant aspects of an observed action. Infants saw an experimenter perform an action on one of two small toys and then were given the opportunity to act on the toys. Infants viewed actions that were either goal-directed or goal-ambiguous, and that represented either completed or uncompleted goals. Infants reproduced the goal of the experimenter only in those cases where the action was goal-directed, in both the complete and incomplete goal conditions. These results provide the first evidence that infants as young as 7 months of age selectively imitate actions based on their goal-directedness, and that they are able to analyze the goals of even uncompleted actions. Even during the first year of life, infants' sensitivity to goal-directed action is expressed not only in their responses in visual habituation procedures, but also in their overt actions.     

Motivation and memory in zebra finch (<Emphasis Type="Italic">Taeniopygia guttata</Emphasis>) foraging behavior

Remembering combinations of information such as what resources have been seen in which locations could play an important role in enhancing individual survival through increased foraging success. To date, there have been relatively few investigations of avian memory involving more than one category of information. This study explored zebra finches’ (Taeniopygia guttata) capacity to recall two categories in combination, namely food-type and spatial location. Birds were trained to remove variously weighted flaps to find two types of food hidden beneath. Memory for food-types and locations was assessed by pre-feeding the birds to satiety on and devaluing one food-type, and then testing the birds’ efficiency at finding the non-devalued food. When allowed one trial to learn locations of two food rewards that were hidden beneath lightly weighted flaps, birds performed better than chance at locating a food reward. However, they did not preferentially search for the non pre-fed food, suggesting that they were unable to recall both food type and location in combination. Zebra finches made fewer errors when tested on the one-trial task using more heavily weighted flaps than with lightly weighted flaps; there was equivocal evidence that they remembered which food type was hidden where on this task. When given repeated exposures to the locations of the two food rewards, finches located a food reward more accurately than on the one-trial tasks, and were also more likely to recall the locations of the different food types. In this foraging paradigm, experience and motivation may have influenced the birds’ performance.