Under Solomon's Tutelage: The Education of Desire in the Homilies on the Song of Songs

This essay examines how Gregory of Nyssa sees the Solomonic books of Scripture (Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs) train desire to long for God. The philosophical exercises contained in Proverbs and Ecclesiastes prepare the soul for the supreme training contained in the Song of Songs. The purpose of the Song of Songs is to lead the soul to union with God. The Trinitarian strategy of the philosophy contained in the Song of Songs exposes the soul to paradox and oxymoron, through which the soul is schooled to release its noetic–erotic grasp of concepts and is thus led to apophatic union with God.     

The effects of monitoring environment on problem-solving performance

While effective and efficient solving of everyday problems is important in business domains, little is known about the effects of workplace monitoring on problem-solving performance. In a laboratory experiment, we explored the monitoring environment’s effects on an individual’s propensity to (1) establish pattern solutions to problems, (2) recognize when pattern solutions are no longer efficient, and (3) solve complex problems. Under three work monitoring regimes—no monitoring, human monitoring, and electronic monitoring—114 participants solved puzzles for monetary rewards. Based on research related to worker autonomy and theory of social facilitation, we hypothesized that monitored (versus non-monitored) participants would (1) have more difficulty finding a pattern solution, (2) more often fail to recognize when the pattern solution is no longer efficient, and (3) solve fewer complex problems. Our results support the first two hypotheses, but in complex problem solving, an interaction was found between self-assessed ability and the monitoring environment.     

Facts and Possibilities: A Model‐Based Theory of Sentential Reasoning

This article presents a fundamental advance in the theory of mental models as an explanation of reasoning about facts, possibilities, and probabilities. It postulates that the meanings of compound assertions, such as conditionals (if) and disjunctions (or), unlike those in logic, refer to conjunctions of epistemic possibilities that hold in default of information to the contrary. Various factors such as general knowledge can modulate these interpretations. New information can always override sentential inferences; that is, reasoning in daily life is defeasible (or nonmonotonic). The theory is a dual process one: It distinguishes between intuitive inferences (based on system 1) and deliberative inferences (based on system 2). The article describes a computer implementation of the theory, including its two systems of reasoning, and it shows how the program simulates crucial predictions that evidence corroborates. It concludes with a discussion of how the theory contrasts with those based on logic or on probabilities.     

Factors that influence the generation of autobiographical memory conjunction errors

The constructive nature of memory is generally adaptive, allowing us to efficiently store, process and learn from life events, and simulate future scenarios to prepare ourselves for what may come. However, the cost of a flexibly constructive memory system is the occasional conjunction error, whereby the components of an event are authentic, but the combination of those components is false. Using a novel recombination paradigm, it was demonstrated that details from one autobiographical memory (AM) may be incorrectly incorporated into another, forming AM conjunction errors that elude typical reality monitoring checks. The factors that contribute to the creation of these conjunction errors were examined across two experiments. Conjunction errors were more likely to occur when the corresponding details were partially rather than fully recombined, likely due to increased plausibility and ease of simulation of partially recombined scenarios. Brief periods of imagination increased conjunction error rates, in line with the imagination inflation effect. Subjective ratings suggest that this inflation is due to similarity of phenomenological experience between conjunction and authentic memories, consistent with a source monitoring perspective. Moreover, objective scoring of memory content indicates that increased perceptual detail may be particularly important for the formation of AM conjunction errors.     

Locating Responsible Research and Innovation Within Access and Benefit Sharing Spaces of the Convention on Biological Diversity: the Challenge of Emerging Technologies

This paper reviews the location of Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) approaches within the access and benefit sharing (ABS) policy spaces of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and Nagoya Protocol. We describe how a range of dialogues on ethical research practices found a home, almost inadvertently, within the ABS policy process. However, more recent RRI dialogues around emerging technologies have not been similarly absorbed into ABS policy, due in part to the original framing of ABS and associated definitional and scope issues. Consideration is given to the challenges posed to these policy processes by the transformative and rapid nature of scientific and technological change today, including the emerging field of synthetic biology. Drawing on experiences from regulating ABS, we emphasize that the integration of RRI into policies for new, emerging, or poorly understood activities such as synthetic biology faces deficiencies such as limits to government capacity, jurisdictional confusion, shortages in funds, and an absence of strategic approaches. We conclude that a coordinated combination of diverse policy processes within the CBD might provide an invaluable space for RRI dialogues on social justice, sustainability, biosafety, and other issues raised by emerging technologies.     

Traditional Masculinity Ideology and Diagnostic Aversion Predict Symptom Expression in a Community Sample of Distressed Men

Sex Roles - Adherence to traditional masculinity ideology (TMI) is associated with a host of negative outcomes, including higher rates of internalizing and externalizing psychopathology. However,...     

Judging Yourself as You Judge Others: Moral Development and Exculpation

This study investigated two main issues: Whether people's judgments about real-life moral transgressions are affected by the role they play in them and whether self-serving biases in such judgments vary with level of moral development. One-hundred twenty university students took Colby and Kohlberg's (1987) test of moral judgment and made open-ended and rating-scale judgments about three real-life transgressions they considered moral in nature. As expected, participants made more exculpatory judgments about transgressions they committed than they did about transgressions others committed, but participants did not judge transgressions committed against them more harshly than they judged transgressions committed against others. The higher participants scored on Kohlberg's test the less they externalized and excused their moral transgressions. Contrary to expectation, this relation also applied to moral judgments about transgressions committed by others against others. These findings have important implications for models of moral development and social cognition.