The Rabkin Test as a Means of Detecting and Analyzing Defective Color Vision

This study investigated the attentional and mental-set conditions which determine the acquisition and use of memory schema cues. Ninety male and female undergraduate Ss listened to and shadowed the Bransford-Johnson “washing clothes” paragraph under a variety of conditions defined by cue placement (before or during shadowing), attentional mental set (told of relation of cue to passage, or not told), and modality of cue (given visually or auditorily). It was found that cue placement and cue modality had no effect on subsequent recall of the passage, but that attentional mental set did. It was argued that the data supported a model of the mind that emphasized conscious intention in both attention and schema activation, a position associated with Wilhelm Wundt.     

Differentiated Consensus as a Means of Correcting Unilateral Ecclesiological Developments?

The methodology of “differentiated consensus,” which was used to arrive at the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification between Lutherans and Catholics in 1999, has led to more progress in 40 years than in the previous five centuries, through reinterpreting certain formulations that were seemingly incompatible, and allowing correction of those doctrinal developments that are unilaterally self‐referential and that reach far back in history. To assess the progress made, this article examines the type of doctrinal consensus originally required by the Catholic Church, so as to understand what is new about differentiated consensus and its potential for correcting unilateral doctrinal developments.     

The Glory of God is a Human Being Fully Alive: Predictors of Positive Versus Negative Mental Health Among Clergy

Clergy fulfill vital societal functions as meaning makers and community builders. Partly because of their important roles, clergy frequently encounter stressful situations. Further, studies suggest that clergy experience high rates of depression. Despite this, few studies have examined protective factors for clergy that may increase their positive mental health. We invited all United Methodist clergy in North Carolina to participate in a survey. Of church‐serving clergy, 85 percent responded (n = 1,476). Hierarchical multiple regression was used to assess the predictors of three positive and four negative mental health outcomes. The three sets of predictors were: demographics, which explained 2–10 percent of the variances; variables typically related to mental health (social support, social isolation, and financial stress), which explained 14–41 percent of the variances; and clergy‐specific variables, which explained 14–20 percent of the variances, indicating the importance of measuring occupation‐specific variables. Some variables (e.g., congregation demands) significantly related to both positive and negative mental health, whereas others (e.g., positive congregations, congregation support) significantly related primarily to positive mental health. In addition to their intervention implications, these findings support separate consideration for negative versus positive mental health.     

The violence of the ethical encounter: listening to the suffering subject as a speaking body

How does the clinical encounter work? To tackle this question, the present study centers on the paradigmatic clinical encounter, namely, psychoanalysis, paradigmatic in that it is structured by the encounter itself. Our question thus becomes: how does the clinical encounter work, when its only modality is speech? By reading Jacques Lacan and Emmanuel Levinas together, we better identify how speech sets up as subjects those who address one another and how this subjectivation touches the suffering body specifically. In this framework, a definition of the encounter is put to work: The encounter of a sufferer and a listener, that is, the clinical encounter, is the opening of an inter-human space beyond suffering. This conception of the encounter permits a specifying of the violence it avoids—respecting the transcendence of the other irreducibly other—but also the violence that it mobilizes—through a presumption of subjectivity imposed upon the other, by which the subjectivation at work in the encounter is, by definition, a subjection to the other. This outlines, then, an ethics of the clinical encounter: a relationship of man to man commanded by one sensing body to another, i.e. a minimal and therefore radical ethics that is structured as a sensible ethics between speaking bodies.     

Acute mood responses to a 15-minute long walking session at self-selected intensity: effects of an experimentally-induced telic or paratelic state

In the present controlled experiment, we examine the influence of opposite states of mind (the "telic" vs. "paratelic" state) on mood response to a 15 min long walk at self-selected pace. Fifty-five first-year students were randomized to a telic (n = 22) or paratelic (n = 33) motivational environment. These opposed motivational environments were created using established reversal theory based procedures to induce the telic versus paratelic state. More than 90% of participants walked within a motivational state corresponding to the environment they were allocated. No significant mood changes (neither positive, nor negative) occurred pre- to postexercise in participants who walked with the telic state operative (p > .05). This has important implications when considering the use of exercise to relieve depression in clinical populations. Also, our findings shed new light on the reasons why not all individuals respond in the same way to moderate exercise. Practically, these results suggest that motivational state should be considered to optimize the mood enhancing effects of aerobic exercise.     

You are not what you feel you are

Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences -     

“As Close as Possible to the Unlivable”: (Michel Foucault and Phenomenology)

This article aims at showing that in spite of Michel Foucault’s violent rejection of phenomenology, this discipline never ceased to bear a crucial significance for his archaeological and genealogical analyses, in that it can be construed as a symptom indicating the most serious challenge that the contemporary philosophy has to meet: thinking together Experience and Knowledge. The author intends to prove, by resorting to the Marxian concept of ‘objectively necessary appearance’, that Foucault’s main opposition to phenomenology stems from his original conception of the theory as a sort of experiment made by the philosopher on himself and on his own historical a priori.