Defensive Pessimism and Optimism: The Bitter-Sweet Influence of Mood on Performance and Prefactual and Counterfactual Thinking

Three studies demonstrated that manipulated moods influence the prefactual (alternative preoutcome predictions) and counterfactual (alternative postoutcome “what might have beens”) mental simulations of defensive pessimists and optimists. In Study 1, negative moods induced more upward (better than expected) prefactuals, and defensive pessimists performed best under such conditions; optimists performed best under induced positive moods, after which they used little prefactual thinking. In Studies 2 and 3, manipulated moods again influenced the strategies of defensive pessimists and optimists. In Study 2, optimists responded with more downward (worse than actuality) counterfactuals, suggesting attempts at mood repair. In Study 3, defensive pessimists and optimists each coped effectively by using preferred mental simulation strategies; both groups rebounded on a second task from poor performances on a first task.     

Phonological Awareness Development as a Discrete Process: Evidence for an Integrative Model

The theoretical and practical implications of examining young children's acquisitions of phonological awareness skills with specific and differentiated processing tasks are explored in this study. The study presents data from 269 kindergarten children completing a phonological awareness protocol that provided information on 14 discrete phonological awareness skills. The data supported the assertion that phonological awareness develops in a gradual and continuous fashion and illustrated the importance of measuring phonological awareness while controlling for the effects of task difficulty, linguistic complexity, and phoneme position within syllables. In addition, three general patterns of literacy development were confirmed in these analyses that frame the integrated model of phonological awareness development.     

Summer Reading: Predicting Adolescent Word Learning from Aptitude,Time Spent Reading,and Text Type

Mostly low-income African American and Hispanic teens (N = 192) were tested in (a) passage comprehension, (b) vocabulary ability, (c) cloze task performance, and (d) listening comprehension in the spring and vocabulary in the fall. Students were surveyed about reading (a) narrative, (b) expository, (c) teen culture, and (d) online texts. Interaction terms created by the product of cloze task scores with the time and frequency of student narrative and expository reading were both significant predictors of fall vocabulary. Online reading was popular but did not predict vocabulary gains. Teen culture reading predicted vocabulary loss. Text type and student profiles both play a role in predicting fall vocabulary scores from summer reading.     

Jung's reflections on self-healing

Not long before his death on July 17, 1998, Edward Edinger asked me to draw together a book of quotations by Jung on religious themes. Edinger's image was that of a thin, leather-covered book containing spiritual uplift and consolation, that one might carry around in a pocket or purse: a “vademecum” or “enchiridion,” as he termed it. It was a project he had begun by collecting quotations from Jung's Answer to Job and Letters. Always fond of “giving the last word to Jung,” he then employed those quotes to conclude Transformation of the God-Image and The New God-Image, respectively. But he lacked the energy, he confessed, to complete this project

The Vademecum which, I hope, resembles what Edinger had in mind-is now nearly complete. It is tentatively entitled, Jung on Soul: Quotations on Religious Themes. The following excerpted chapter is entitled “On Self-Healing.” The other topical divisions are: First Principles; The Inner Life; Consciousness; Good and Evil; The Paradoxical God-Image; Individuation; Continuing Incarnation; Psychology and Christianity; Old Age, Death and Beyond; Community, Society, Culture; Civilization in Crisis; Love and Sex; Parents and Children; Healing; Analyst and Patient; C. G. Jung: Personal; and From Jung's Answer to Job.     

Time Perception in Boys With Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder According to Time Duration,Distraction and Mode of Presentation

The present study describes the incidence of test refusal at neuropsychological assessment, investigates its correlates, and its stability. The participants were 124 children aged 3.5 years whose development has been followed from birth in the Jyväskylä Longitudinal Study of Dyslexia (JLD). The frequency of test refusal on the Finnish version of the NEPSY was analyzed with respect to the children's concurrent and earlier cognitive and language skills, assessed using tests and parental ratings. Refusal during test-taking was found to be relatively common at this age, and high frequency of refusal at an earlier age was associated with similar tendency at a later age. High test refusal was associated with compromised neuropsychological and linguistic test scores. Missing data due to refusal were more common in neuropsychological tasks requiring verbal production. It is concluded that test refusals reflect a child's poor underlying skills and an attempt to avoid failure, rather than noncompliant or oppositional behavior.     

LEO-II and Satallax on the Sledgehammer test bench

Sledgehammer is a tool that harnesses external first-order automatic theorem provers (ATPs) to discharge interactive proof obligations arising in Isabelle/HOL. We extended it with LEO-II and Satallax, the two most prominent higher-order ATPs, improving its performance on higher-order problems. To explore their usefulness, these ATPs are measured against first-order ATPs and built-in Isabelle tactics on a variety of benchmarks from Isabelle and the TPTP library. Sledgehammer provides an ideal test bench for individual features of LEO-II and Satallax, revealing areas for improvements.     

Refocusing on the Learning in “Integration of Faith and Learning"

The purpose of this study was to assess student perceptions of the faith-learning integration process in instructional methods courses taught by a single professor. Thirty-one students were asked by the professor to complete an open-ended questionnaire at the end of their course experience. Results indicated that students in this study described or defined the integration of faith and learning in ways reflective of the content of the courses, which was teaching methods. While not all students said integration of faith and learning occurred in the classes, all students did provide examples of integrative moments. Most students described faith-learning integration in terms of teacher actions rather than student actions. Thus, it appears that these students were describing integration of faith and teaching more so than integration of faith and learning.