Sartre on the Ontological Need for God

Adherents to the relatively new discipline of neurotheology profess that religious faith has a brain neural substrate, with structural, functional, and genetic elements that “hardwire” us to believe in God. It is argued here that a better way to approach the question of why people believe in a transcendent being would be to interrogate the structure of human being, with the intention of uncovering the meanings that underlie the phenomenon of faith. Jean-Paul Sartre may have already provided a necessary and sufficient explanation for this phenomenon. We are, he concluded, ontologically inclined to identify with a supreme being whose essence and existence transcend the limits of our own finite being. It is one thing to arrive at such a conclusion intuitively, but altogether something else to demonstrate, as Sartre does, how this conclusion follows from the structure of human being itself.     

Structural studies of ultrathin zirconia dielectrics

We present detailed structural and chemical studies on ultrathin zirconia films grown by ultraviolet oxidation and natural (no ultraviolet light) oxidation of Zr precursor metal layers on SiO2-passivated Si(100) wafers. Quantitative electron-energy-loss spectroscopy (EELS) was used to obtain the chemical composition and electronic structure on an atomic scale. The EELS OK near-edge fine structure was used as a fingerprint to study the stoichiometry and composition variation in the dielectric stacks. X-ray absorption spectroscopy studies were performed in order to aid interpretation of the EELS results. The electronic structure data are correlated with the electrical performance of the films.     

An Inquiry into Views,Beliefs and Faith: Lessons from Buddhism,Behavioural Psychology and Constructivist Epistemology*

Abstract

 The causes of disagreements between individuals, social groups, cultural groups, political parties, and nations can be traced down to the basic human tendency to give form to – and to reify views, beliefs, and opinions. With this being the case, I would like to ask the question: what, exactly are ‘views’ (including here such overlapping categories as ‘opinions’, ‘beliefs’ and ‘attitudes’,)? How, exactly, do we give form to them? Why is it so difficult to change, or get rid of them? The Buddhist tradition since the time of its inception, has been greatly concerned with the matter of identifying ‘false views’ and replacing them with ‘correct views’. But serious and insightful research into the formation and maintenance of views and beliefs is by no means limited to Buddhism. It has been a topic of great concern in the past century to a wide range of secular researchers: social and behavioural psychologists; literary theorists and epistemologists; scientists and marketing strategists. What the specialists in these various fields have to say about beliefs is diverse – and yet there is much overlap. The ways in which they overlap are thought-provoking, and their differences are revelatory. In this paper, I investigate a few prominent approaches to the study of views and beliefs, and show how these various approaches can do much to fill in each other’s discourse. Finally, I reframe the Mahayana Buddhist notion of ‘correct faith’ within the context of this exploration of views.     

Sticks and Stones May Break My Bones but Words Relate to Adult Physiology? Child Abuse Experience and Women's Sympathetic Nervous System Response while Self-Reporting Trauma

Child abuse predicts a wide range of long-lasting deleterious outcomes, including disruptions in the biological systems central to emotion arousal and regulation. However, little is known about the specific ways in which child abuse affects adulthood sympathetic reactivity and recovery. This study investigated the association between child abuse experience and adult skin conductance level and habituation in 85 at-risk women as they completed a self-report trauma questionnaire. Childhood emotional abuse was independently associated with blunted skin conductance habituation over the course of survey completion after controlling for other abuse subtypes and current trauma symptoms. These results suggest that women emotionally abused as children experience prolonged emotional arousal and poor physiological regulation of emotion in response to reminders of traumatic experiences.     

Visual Search for Conjunctions of Motion and Form: The Efficiency of Attention to Static versus Moving Items Depends on Practice

Visual search for some motion-form conjunctions can be performed in parallel. Yet, if the target is easy to discriminate from the nontargets (target line tilted 45 from the vertical), search can be easier for a moving than for a stationary target. Driver and McLeod (1992; Berger & McLeod, 1996) took this asymmetry to argue that gross aspects of form discrimination are performed within a motion filter thatrepresents only the moving items, whereas discrimination of stationary items (and all fine discrimination) relies on a static form system. However, recent (unsuccessful) attempts to replicate the asymmetry (Muller & Found, 1996; Muller & Maxwell, 1994) suggested that it may occur only early during task performance, due to participants having difficulty keeping the moving items out of the search for a stationary target (but not vice versa). This was confirmed by the present study, which investigated the effects of practice on search among the moving and stationary subset of items. The results suggest that attention to the stationary subsetis difficultinitially because participants cannotefficiently compensate for the natural bias of the motion filter to pass the moving items (rather than filter them out). This ability improves with practice. Thus, there is no fixed limit to performance with stationary targets and, consequently, no need to assume that any form discrimination is performed within the motion filter.     

Mnemonic differences and similarities across opposing social groups: The linguistic conflict at the University of Leuven as a case study

In the 1960s, a historical event occurred at one of Europe's most prestigious universities: The Dutch-speaking students forced the French-speaking students to relocate and establish their own university. We compared the extent to which members of each social group developed elaborate memories of the events surrounding the conflict and whether they were associated with differences in rehearsal type (media, conversational, rumination) and initiating conditions (importance, political engagement, and negative/positive emotions). All participants were university students at the time of the conflict. We found that Dutch-speakers exhibited more elaborate memories compared to French-speakers and that importance was associated with elaborate memories only for the Dutch-speakers. However, positive emotions appear to be critical in the formation of elaborate memories across the social groups. We found no such associations for negative emotions. We discuss these results in terms of the social/cognitive processes transcending social group membership in understanding how individuals remember past conflicts.     

Does European citizenship breed xenophobia? European identification as a predictor of intolerance towards immigrants

The European Union is generally perceived as endorsing universalistic and multi‐cultural values. However, social identity and self‐categorization theories predict that, when certain conditions are met, a negative relation between ingroup identification and tolerance towards outgroup members should be observed. We argue that the creation of the status of ‘Citizen of the Union’ in Maastricht may contribute to meeting those conditions and therefore to increase intolerance towards resident foreigners. If that is the case, a paradoxical situation could emerge, in which people's levels of tolerance towards foreigners would contradict group values. We examined the relations between values associated with Europe, European and national identification, and tolerance towards foreigners through a survey study with a—non‐representative—sample of undergraduate French‐speaking Belgian students. Results show that Europe was generally associated with humanistic values. But they also reveal that strong European identifiers tended to express more xenophobic attitudes than weak European identifiers, whilst national identification was not related with such attitudes. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Limits of rhythm perception

To what extent are listeners sensitive to the time intervals separating non-consecutive events in sound sequences? The subjects of Experiment 1 were presented with sequences of 20 identical tones in which the 10 odd-numbered tones or the 10 even-numbered tones made up an isochronous sub-sequence (with a periodicity of 0.5-1 s) whereas the other tones, acting as distractors, occurred at random moments. Such sequences appeared to be very difficult to discriminate from sequences without any timing regularity, which revealed a lack of perceptual sensitivity to their "second-order" intervals. Experiment 2 employed repetitive sequences in which the first-order intervals (separating consecutive tones) took two possible values, forming a ratio that subjects had to classify as larger or smaller than 2. The results of this experiment suggest that subjects were able to make use of second-order intervals in their task, but mainly due to the predictable nature of the sequences; the relative positions of subjective accents (Povel & Essens, 1985) had no significant effect on performance. It is concluded that the perception of subtle timing details in "ordinary" music may rest on nothing more than a sensitivity to the relations between first-order intervals (within a given auditory stream).