Disciples and Pilgrims,Arusha, and Karlsruhe

A striking feature of the 11th Assembly of the World Council of Churches (WCC), held at Karlsruhe in Germany in 2022, was its lack of attention to the “Arusha Call to Discipleship” issued by the WCC World Mission Conference held in Tanzania four years earlier. Further ecumenical amnesia was evident in the Assembly's neglect of the centenary of the formation of the International Missionary Council (IMC) in 1921. It is therefore timely to recall the purpose of the integration of the IMC and the WCC in 1961. This was driven, above all, by the theological imperative that mission and unity can never be separated from one another in the ecumenical movement. On the contrary, these two essential evangelical impulses must continuously inform and energize one another. It was in expectation of such synergy that the integration of the IMC and WCC was enacted. Today, a new opportunity to fulfil this ecumenical hope presents itself. Currently, the “unity strand” in the WCC has a preference for the language of pilgrimage when it comes to expressing the nature of the ecumenical journey, while the “mission strand” has opted for the language of discipleship. The opportunity missed at Karlsruhe was to draw the two into conversation with one another. Enabling the two motifs of disciple and pilgrim to inform and enrich one another could prove to be a vital source of renewal for the ecumenical movement in the next phase of its journey.     

PARENT EDUCATION PROJECT II. INCREASING STIMULATING INTERACTIONS OF DEVELOP MENTALLY HANDICAPPED MOTHERS

Two studies are reported on the assessment and training of parent-child interactional skills in developmentally handicapped mothers. Study 1 compared the interactions of eight developmentally handicapped versus eight nonhandicapped mothers during play with their young (6–25 months) children. Results showed that the former group generally interacted much less with their children and that they were less likely to praise appropriate child behavior and imitate child vocalizations. Study 2 attempted to remediate these deficits, using a training package consisting of discussion, modeling, feedback, social reinforcement, and self-recording. Results showed, first, that the training did increase the targeted skills to well within the range found for the nonhandicapped mothers. Second, training effects generalized from the group instructional setting to the mothers' own homes. Third, newly acquired skills were generally maintained at or above levels found for the nonhandicapped mothers over a 5- to 10-month follow-up period. Finally, all seven children showed increases in vocalizations concomitant with parent training. The results suggest that developmentally handicapped mothers can be taught to provide more effective and stimulating interactions to their young children.     

Psychostimulant medication and perceived intensity in hyperactive children

Adult ratings of children's activity, based on impressionistic scales, are good indicators of psychostimulant medication effects. These ratings seldom correlate with objective indicators, however, and their behavioral referents are poorly understood. Two separate studies tested the hypothesis that intensity of child behavior, as perceived by others, would differentiate medicated and unmedicated states. College student subjects assessed randomized videotaped segments of children's behaviors. The perceived intensity of hyperactive children's responses decreased with medication, while there were no medicationrelated changes in either gross motor locomotion or off-task behaviors. In a test for observer sensitization or expectancy, the results for subjects who were looking for medication effects did not differ from those for uninformed subjects.This research was supported in part by NIMH grant 29475 and NIDA grant 01070. We thank Andy Christensen and Carol Whalen for helpful comments.     

Persistence of inaccurate beliefs about the self: perseverance effects in the classroom

The perseverance of erroneous self-assessments was examined among high school students. Subjects were first exposed to either highly effective or thoroughly useless filmed instruction, leading, respectively, to their consequent success or failure. No-discounting subjects received no assistance in recognizing the relative superiority or inferiority of their instruction. Discounting subjects, by contrast, were subsequently shown the opposite instructional film, highlighting the obvious differences in instructional quality. Subsequent measures revealed that all subjects recognized the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of their instruction, although this contrast was clearer for discounting subjects. Nevertheless, both discounting and no-discounting subjects continued to draw unwarranted inferences--in line with their initial outcomes--about their personal capacities, immediately afterward. Dissociated and disguised measures of academic preferences and perceptions completed weeks later produced even more dramatic results: The continuing impact of initial outcomes was generally greater for discounting than no-discounting subjects.     

Olfactory stimuli as context cues in human memory

Olfactory stimuli were used as context cues in a recognition memory paradigm. Male college students were exposed to 50 slides of the faces of college females while in the presence of a pleasant or an unpleasant odor. During the acquisition phase, ratings of physical attractiveness of the slides were collected. After a 48-hr delay, a recognition test was given using the original 50 slides and 50 new slides. The recognition test was conducted with either the original odor or the alternative odor present. A no-odor control group did not receive olfactory cues. The attractiveness ratings indicated that the odor variations had no effect on these social judgments. Analyses of d' scores, hits, and false alarms for the recognition performance indicated support for the predicted interaction in which presence of the same odor at both sessions led to better overall performance.     

Language specificity in lexical organization: Evidence from deaf signers' lexical organization of American Sign Language and English

A sign decision task, in which deaf signers made a decision about the number of hands required to form a particular sign of American Sign Language (ASL), revealed significant facilitation by repetition among signs that share a base morpheme. A lexical decision task on English words revealed facilitation by repetition among words that share a base morpheme in both English and ASL, but not among those that share a base morpheme in ASL only. This outcome occurred for both deaf and hearing subjects. The results are interpreted as evidence that the morphological principles of lexical organization observed in ASL do not extend to the organization of English for skilled deaf readers.     

Establishing Careers Education within a Modular Degree System

For the first time at degree level in the United Kingdom, modular students at Oxford Polytechnic now have the opportunity of studying independently the complex and stressful task of career decision-making. The proposal to offer a self-contained 'graduate careers' module generated a lively debate, and a survey within the polytechnic revealed that academic staff were evenly divided in their support and opposition to the innovation. The four key issues identified were 'academic rigour', on or off the curriculum, 'mollycoddling' the students, and staff resources. The approval process also threw some light on the perceptions of careers counselling held by academic staff.     

Sex and race discrimination resulting from manager-client relationships: Applying the rational bias theory of managerial discrimination

Rational bias theory predicts that discrimination may be situationally influenced by circumstances in which a show of bias seems likely to be rewarded or punished by others. This study applies the theory in an examination of managerial sex and race discrimination in situations in which normative or unusual signals are given. In agreement with rational bias theory, the participants, acting in the role of managers, indicated that they would be less likely to discriminate in personnnel decisions with cues indicating that discrimination might not be needed or wanted. The results are interpreted as supportive of rational bias theory and as useful for the design of new policies aimed at ending discrimination. The findings also suggest that the importance of discrimination against blacks of both sexes in management has been widely ignored.     

The inflected noun system in Serbo-Croatian: Lexical representation of morphological structure

Repetition priming is examined for alternating and nonalternating morphologically related inflected nouns. In Experiments I and 2, latencies to targets in nominative and dative/locative cases, respectively, were invariant over case of prime. In Experiment 3, latencies to nominative-case nouns were the same whether the nouns were primed by forms in which the spelling and pronunciation of the common stem were shared (nonalternating) or not (alternating) with the nominative form. Results are interpreted as reflecting lexical organization among the members of a noun system. In Experiments I and 2, the pattern of latencies to primes suggests a satellite organization in which nominative forms are more strongly linked to oblique forms than oblique forms are to each other. In Experiment 3, atypical cases of alternating forms showed a different pattern of prime latencies, suggesting that the organization within a noun system may differ for alternating and nonalternating forms.