Reinforced Behavioral Variability in Humans

The Psychological Record - This study aimed to assess the role of reinforced behavioral variability in the learning of a 6-digit target sequence (211212) with 3 groups of human participants (n =...     

Response of Methodist Preachers to Foot and Mouth Disease

In-depth interviews were conducted with a sample of eight Methodist preachers who led Harvest Festival services during the autumn of 2001 in areas where the harvest of flock and herd had been destroyed by foot and mouth disease. The data draw attention to both good practice and to bad practice in the ministry of preaching and pastoral engagement.     

Using empowerment theory in collaborative partnerships for community health and development

Models of community empowerment help us understand the process of gaining influence over conditions that matter to people who share neighborhoods, workplaces, experiences, or concerns. Such frameworks can help improve collaborative partnerships for community health and development. First, we outline an interactive model of community empowerment that describes reciprocal influences between personal or group factors and environmental factors in an empowerment process. Second, we describe an iterative framework for the process of empowerment in community partnerships that includes collaborative planning, community action, community change, capacity building, and outcomes, and adaptation, renewal, and institutionalization. Third, we outline activities that are used by community leadership and support organizations to facilitate the process of community empowerment. Fourth, we present case stories of collaborative partnerships for prevention of substance abuse among adolescents to illustrate selected enabling activities. We conclude with a discussion of the challenges and opportunities of facilitating empowerment with collaborative partnerships for community health and development. This work was supported by Kansas Health Foundation Grants 9206032B and 9206032A to support and evaluate community partnerships to prevent adolescent substance abuse. Thanks to Tom Wolff for sharing his wisdom about community coalitions so generously, and to Bill Berkowitz and anonymous reviewers for thoughtful comments on an earlier version of this manuscrpt. We also thank our colleagues from the Kansas Health Foundation, Mary K. Campuzano, Steve Coen, and Marni Vliet, and those from collaborating communities, who continue to teach us about ways to enhance community capacities to address local concerns.     

Book reviews

Women as Teachers and Disciples in Traditional and New Religions. Elizabeth Puttick & Peter B. Clarke, eds., 1993 Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press 146 pp., £48.24 ISBN 0–7734–9346–8

Vrouwen in de wereldgodsdiensten. Teksten, tradities en recente on‐twikkelingen [Women in the World Religions: Texts, Traditions and Recent Developments]. Catherine Cornille, 1994 Rotterdam: Lemniscaat 183 pp., Belgian francs 570.00 ISBN 90–6069–933–5

Shadow of Spirit: Postmodernism and Religion. Philippa Berry & Andrew Wernick, eds., 1992 London: Routledge 274 pp., £35.00 hb and £12.99 pb ISBN 0–415–06638–7 and 06639–5

Political Islam, a special volume of the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences. Charles Butterworth & I. William Zartman, eds., 1992 London: Sage 232 pp., US$17.00 £14.95 ISBN 0–8039–4687–2

The Sociology of Sacred Texts. Jon Davies & Isabel Wollaston, 1993 Sheffield: Sheffield University Press 195 pp., £35.00 ISBN 1–85075–404–7

A Generation of Seekers: The Spiritual Journeys of the Baby Boom Generation. Wade Clark Roof, 1993 New York: Harper Collins Publishers, Harper, San Francisco US$12.00 Aus$24.95 ISBN 006–066–9640

The American Encounter with Buddhism 1844–1912. Victorian Culture and the Limits of Dissent. Thomas A. Tweed, 1992 Bloomington, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press xxiv + 242 pp., US$29.95(h/b) ISBN 025–336–0994

Visions of Reality: What Fundamentalist Schools Teach. Albert J. Menendez, 1993 Buffalo, New York: Prometheus Books 152 pp., £12.50 ISBN 0–87975–802–3     

The relationship between discrimination and memory for spacing and feature changes in houses

Adults need to discriminate between stimuli and recognize those previously seen. For faces, feature changes (e.g., different eyes) and spacing changes (e.g., distances between eyes) are important cues. In two experiments, we assessed the influence of these on discrimination and recognition of houses, a commonly used control in face studies. In both experiments, discrimination was better for feature than spacing changes. Memory for spacing changes was generally poor but aided by extra learning and intermixing change types. Conversely, memory for features was good, especially when there were few houses, and change type was blocked. Unexpectedly, memory was best for differences that might signal something about occupants (e.g., changes to garden or bins), perhaps akin to hairstyles for faces. Overall, results are consistent with previous work showing poor discrimination of spacing in non-face objects and extends them to show that, unlike for faces, spacing differences are also not well remembered.     

The Quantificational Domain of <Emphasis Type="BoldItalic">dou</Emphasis>: An Experimental Study

Which NP does all associate with in e.g. “The pandas, the children all saw”—the pandas, the children, or both? The intuition of adult Mandarin Chinese native speakers regarding the interpretation of the adverbial quantifier dou ‘all’ remains unclear and controversial, and various incommensurate theories of domain selection have been proposed. These studies may have failed to yield clear results because they used testing materials in which the interpretation of dou is confounded with other principles of NP interpretation (e.g. zhexie xiaohai ‘these children’ is truth-functionally synonymous with ‘all these children’). To address these concerns, we present the first set of experimental studies on adult knowledge and use of syntactic constraints on the quantifier domain of dou. The results support the hypothesis that dou can take one and only one c-commanding NP as its domain, but falsify interesting theoretical accounts that assume a strict locality constraint on dou quantification.