The Middle Passage,Trauma and the Tragic Re-Imagination of African American Theology

African American Christian consciousness developed in response to the traumatic field in which African American subjectivity took shape. The expression of the faith in the African American tradition is fundamentally tragic as a consequence. The Middle Passage is the existential and symbolic nodal point of this experience. There is a sense in which African Americans remain very much on the water; marginalized and suspended between worlds. There is a deeper sense in which the African American situation and response reflects the condition of modernity and post-modernity in the sense that it is hardly more than modernity becoming conscious of itself. A thorough examination and exploration of its significance is essential to developing a theology that adequately expresses African American Christian consciousness. This paper is an attempt to lay out, what I think, are some of the basic components of the experience and the bare outlines or orientation of such a theology grounded in it.     

A Contextualist Reply to the Direct Argument

The Direct Argument for the incompatibility of moral responsibility and determinism is designed to side-step complaints given by compatibilist critiques of the so-called Transfer Argument. I argue that while it represents an improvement over the Transfer Argument, it loses some of its plausibility when we reflect on some metalogical issues about normal modal modeling and the semantics of natural language. More specifically, the crucial principle on which the Direct Argument depends appears doubtful where context plays a role in evaluation of normative claims.     

From <Emphasis Type="Italic">Pintele Yid to Racenjude</Emphasis>: Chaim Zhitlovsky and racial conceptions of Jewishness

The Russian Jewish intellectual, Chaim Zhitlovsky (1865–1943), a leading architect of secular Jewish culture and thought, was a central figure in the progressive Jewish intelligentsia of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. In an essay written in 1927, Yidn un Yiddishkayt (Jews and Jewishness), he sought to define the secular essence of what he calls Yiddishkayt. This essay is not the first in Zhitlovskys long publicistic career in which he searches for new, secular definitions of Jewish identity and culture. But this essay differs, since it is marked by Zhitlovskys use of contemporary social scientific notions of race and racial traits to conceptualize what he believes constitutes Jewishness in a non-religious context, along with his adoption of the mystical Jewish concept of the pintele yid, the theory of an innate Jewishness embodied by a Jewish spark. Zhitlovskys desire to craft a truly secular theory of Jewish identity led him ironically to accept models of Jewish identity at odds with his stated larger vision. In turning to contemporary racial theory, as well as long nurtured mystical models of Yiddishkayt, Zhitlovsky reveals the wide range of ideological discourses that led him to innovative and controversial notions of modern Jewish identity.     

Silent reading rate and memory span

This paper reports two experiments concerned with the form of the linear function relating memory span to pronunciation rate. Experiment 1 asked whether the intercept of the equation is attributable to an interaction between modality, word-length, and serial position. The results lead us to reject this possibility. Experiment 2 examined the shape of the span function for visual presentation of lists read aloud or silently. The results show that the intercept of the span function disappears for silent presentation but not for aloud presentation. The results are discussed in terms of a balance between two opposing effects of word-length.     

The time course of response suppression: no evidence for a gradual release from inhibition

Most models of serial recall postulate that recalled items are suppressed and thus temporarily rendered unavailable. Response suppression can explain several results, for example the small number of erroneous repetitions and people's reluctance to report repeated items. Although it is clear that response suppression is not permanent (thus permitting renewed recall of an item on the next trial), nothing is known about its time course. We report two experiments that measured the time course of response suppression with a multiple cued-retrieval response-deadline method. Emphasis was on the extent of repetition inhibition for lists that contained a repeated item. Regardless of whether presentation was rapid (Experiment 1; 150 ms/item) or slow (Experiment 2; 500 ms/item), (a) the standard pattern of repetition inhibition and erroneous repetitions occurred and (b) repetition inhibition remained constant across increasing retrieval time. This suggests that the release from response suppression is a discrete, list-wide effect rather than a continuous, gradual wearing off. The latter conclusion is consistent with the operation of the SOB model (Farrell & Lewandowsky, 2002) but not with models that postulate complete suppression with gradual wearing off.     

Developing a Community Science Research Agenda for Building Community Capacity for Effective Preventive Interventions

Research has shown that prevention programming can improve community health when implemented well. There are examples of successful prevention in local communities, however many continue to face significant challenges, demonstrating a gap between science and practice. Common strategies within the United States to address this gap are available (e.g., trainings), but lack outcomes. Building community capacity to implement high quality prevention can help communities achieve positive health outcomes, thereby narrowing the gap. While there is ample research on the efficacy of evidence-based programs, there is little on how to improve community capacity to improve prevention quality. In order to narrow the gap, a new model of research—one based in Community Science—is suggested that improves the latest theoretical understanding of community capacity and evaluates technologies designed to enhance it. In this article, we describe this model and suggest a research agenda that can lead to improved outcomes at the local level.     

WAIS digit span-based indicators of malingered neurocognitive dysfunction: classification accuracy in traumatic brain injury

The present study determined specificity and sensitivity to malingered neurocognitive dysfunction (MND) in traumatic brain injury (TBI) for several Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS) Digit Span scores. TBI patients (n = 344) were categorized into one of five groups: no incentive, incentive only, suspect, probable MND, and definite MND. Performance of 1,063 nonincentive patients (e.g., cerebrovascular accident, memory disorder) was also examined. Digit Span scores included reliable digit span, maximum span forward both trials correct, maximum span forward, combined maximum forward and backward span, Digit Span scaled score, maximum span backward both trials correct, and maximum span backward. In TBI, sensitivity to MND ranged from 15% to greater than 30% at specificities of 92% to 98%. Patient groups with documented brain pathology had higher false-positive error rates. These results replicate previous known-groups malingering studies and provide valuable data supporting the WAIS Digit Span scores in detection and diagnosis of malingering.     

Utility of the trauma symptom inventory's atypical response scale in detecting malingered post-traumatic stress disorder

The authors examined the Trauma Symptom Inventory's (TSI) ability to discriminate 88 student post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) simulators screened for genuine PTSD from 48 clinical PTSD-diagnosed outpatients. Results demonstrated between-group differences on several TSI clinical scales and the Atypical Response (ATR) validity scale. Discriminant function analysis using ATR revealed 75% correct patient classification but only 48% correct simulator classification, with an overall correct classification rate of 59% (positive predictive power [PPP] = .71; negative predictive power [NPP] = .51). Individual ATR cutoff scores did not yield impressive classification results, with the optimal cutoff (T score = 61) correctly classifying only 61% of simulators and patients (PPP = .66, NPP = .54). Although ATR was not developed as a malingered PTSD screen, instead serving as a general validity screen, caution is recommended in its current clinical use for detecting malingered PTSD.     

Sensitivity and specificity of reliable digit span in malingered pain-related disability

The reliable digit span (RDS) performance of chronic pain patients with unambiguous spinal injuries and no evidence of exaggeration or response bias (n = 53) was compared to that of chronic pain patients meeting criteria for definite malingered neurocognitive dysfunction (n = 35), and a group of nonmalingering moderate-severe traumatic brain injury (TBI) patients (n = 69). The results demonstrated that scores of 7 or lower were associated with high specificity (> .90) and sensitivity (up to .60) even when moderate to severe TBI are included. Multiple studies have demonstrated that RDS scores of 7 or lower rarely occur in TBI and pain patients who are not intentionally performing poorly on cognitive testing. This study supports the use of the RDS in detecting response bias in neuropsychological patients complaining of pain as well as in the assessment of pain-related cognitive impairment in patients whose primary complaint is pain.     

Deletion of the mu opioid receptor results in impaired acquisition of Pavlovian context fear

The mu opioid receptor may constitute a critical component of a negative feedback system that regulates Pavlovian fear conditioning. We investigated context fear conditioning acquisition and expression in mu opioid receptor knockout mice (on an inbred, C57 genetic background). We discovered that the mu receptor knockout results in an unexpected and significant deficit in context fear acquisition. Mice lacking the mu receptor showed normal fear acquisition when subjected to a 1-day fear conditioning protocol but evinced deficient fear learning when acquisition was conducted across 5 days. The knockout mice showed normal reactivity to footshock in both fear conditioning protocols. Finally, we confirmed the effectiveness of the receptor deletion in the C57 strain by subjecting the mice to a test of morphine analgesia in the hot-plate assay. As has been seen with mixed genetic background, the receptor deletion resulted in a complete lack of analgesic response to 10 mg/kg morphine. Surprisingly, mice with a single copy of the mu receptor gene (heterozygous knockouts) showed intact sensitivity to morphine but a significant deficit in Pavlovian fear conditioning. The results indicate that deletion of the mu receptor gene impairs fear conditioning and that the conditioning and analgesia effects of heterozygous deletion are dissociable. The conditioning deficit seen in this line of mice may be related to impairment in hippocampus function.