Forum: Quilting as metaphor for theological education

How is quilt‐making both metaphor and pedagogy for early‐career faculty of theology and religion who seek to cultivate critical and creative imagination for teaching, and to probe the challenges and promises of complex identities and vocations within 21st‐century landscapes of theological education? This forum presents essays (with explanatory introduction) by five members of the 2016–2017 Workshop for Early Career Theological School Faculty, who were impelled to story their experience of being “handed over to themselves” by an “arts and craft” project which forced them to think with their hands, speak with found objects, and re‐present themselves in the form of 12 × 12‐inch quilt squares. In self‐reflexive prose, these scholar‐teachers offer through this medium a glimpse of their unexpected moments of revelatory learning, as each was pulled into deeper contemplation of their personhood, experience, know‐how, and practical wisdom, each uncovering valuable hidden sources for more expansive theological query, and each re‐thinking the possibilities for theological education and its pedagogies.     

Constructing Finite Least Kripke Models for Positive Logic Programs in Serial Regular Grammar Logics

A serial context-free grammar logic is a normal multimodal logicL characterized by the seriality axioms and a set of inclusionaxioms of the form _ts1..._sk. Such an inclusion axiom correspondsto the grammar rule t s₁... s_k. Thus the inclusion axioms ofL capture a context-free grammar . If for every modal index t, the set of words derivable fromt using is a regular language, then L is a serial regular grammar logic. In this paper, we present an algorithm that, given a positivemultimodal logic program P and a set of finite automata specifyinga serial regular grammar logic L, constructs a finite leastL-model of P. (A model M is less than or equal to model M' iffor every positive formula , if M then M' .) A least L-modelM of P has the property that for every positive formula , P iff M . The algorithm runs in exponential time and returnsa model with size 2^O(n³). We give examples of P and L, for bothof the case when L is fixed or P is fixed, such that every finiteleast L-model of P must have size 2⁽ⁿ⁾. We also prove that ifG is a context-free grammar and L is the serial grammar logiccorresponding to G then there exists a finite least L-modelof _s p iff the set of words derivable from s using G is a regularlanguage.     

Experiences and Beliefs as Predictors of Ethnic Identity and Intergroup Relations

Factors affecting ethnic identity and other group orientation were assessed in 115 college students from 5 ethnic groups. Ethnic group self‐identification, negative and positive interracial experiences, perceptions of racial bias, social support, just‐world beliefs, and psychological distress were each associated with various components of ethnic identity and are discussed within a counseling perspective. Los factures que afectan la identidad étnica y otras orientaciónes hacia grupos fueron evaluados en 115 estudiantes colegiales de 5 grupos étnicos. La identificación de grupo etnico propio, las experiencias interraciales negativas y positivas, las percepciones del prejuicio racial, apoyo social, creencias en un mundo justo, y la afflicción psicológica fueron asociadas con varios componentes de la identidad étnica y son discutidos dentro de la perspectiva de la consejería.     

More Property,Better Sex? The Relationship Between Property Ownership and Sexual Satisfaction Among Married Vietnamese Women

Since the first sexuality research in Vietnam was conducted in the late 1980s, scholarship on this field has proliferated and the topic is now less of a taboo in public discourse. Nevertheless, little is known about the area of sexual satisfaction as well as factors determining a satisfying sexual life for Vietnamese women. Using data from 2783 married women collected from a national survey, we explore the relationships among their sexual satisfaction, socio-demographic factors, and sexual experiences with a focus on their association with ownership of property. Results demonstrated that income, ethnicity, living region, frequency of sex, and sexual experience had a strong relationship with a satisfying sexual life for married women. Additionally, we found that property ownership was a strong predictor of sexual satisfaction: Women who had a savings or bank account in their own name as well as held ownership over their housing or residential land had higher odds of feeling more sexually satisfied. The present study is an important step toward follow-up research that should delve deeper into the field of human subjective sexual well-being not only from the health point of view, but also through a social and cultural lens. The study also has useful implications for those working on sexual health rights as well as for practitioners of women’s rights in development programs and projects that aim to empower women through altering traditional discourses and practices over women’s role in property ownership.     

Individual differences in dopamine D<Subscript>2</Subscript> receptor availability correlate with reward valuation

Reward valuation, which underlies all value-based decision-making, has been associated with dopamine function in many studies of nonhuman animals, but there is relatively less direct evidence for an association in humans. Here, we measured dopamine D₂ receptor (DRD2) availability in vivo in humans to examine relations between individual differences in dopamine receptor availability and neural activity associated with a measure of reward valuation, expected value (i.e., the product of reward magnitude and the probability of obtaining the reward). Fourteen healthy adult subjects underwent PET with [¹⁸F]fallypride, a radiotracer with strong affinity for DRD2, and fMRI (on a separate day) while performing a reward valuation task. [¹⁸F]fallypride binding potential, reflecting DRD2 availability, in the midbrain correlated positively with neural activity associated with expected value, specifically in the left ventral striatum/caudate. The present results provide in vivo evidence from humans showing midbrain dopamine characteristics are associated with reward valuation.     

The Happy Farmer: Self-Employment and Subjective Well-Being in Rural Vietnam

Using a unique survey data set this paper documents a positive effect of self-employment in farming on subjective well-being. This direct effect is only partly offset by negative, indirect effects working through income and other variables. These findings are interpreted as effects of self-employment in farming on perceived autonomy, competence and relatedness. The results suggest that economic transformation is associated with a psychological cost, which may contribute to explaining earnings gaps between sectors and types of employment. We also investigate other determinants of happiness, and for example find strong positive effects of own income and strong negative effects of neighbors’ income, suggesting the importance of relative rather than absolute levels of income.     

The Impact of Migration and Remittances on Household Welfare: Evidence from Vietnam

This paper examines the pattern and the impact of migration and remittances on household welfare in Vietnam using fixed-effects regressions and panel data from Vietnam Household Living Standard Surveys 2010 and 2012. Overall, the effect of migration as well as remittances on employment of remaining members of home households is small. People in households with migration and remittances tend to work less than people in other households. The effect of migration on household welfare happens mainly through remittances. If migrants do not send remittances to their home households, there are no effects of migration on welfare of home households. Remittances, especially international remittances, help receiving households increase per capita income and per capita expenditure and reduce poverty.     

Dividing Attention Between Tasks: Testing Whether Explicit Payoff Functions Elicit Optimal Dual‐Task Performance

We test people's ability to optimize performance across two concurrent tasks. Participants performed a number entry task while controlling a randomly moving cursor with a joystick. Participants received explicit feedback on their performance on these tasks in the form of a single combined score. This payoff function was varied between conditions to change the value of one task relative to the other. We found that participants adapted their strategy for interleaving the two tasks, by varying how long they spent on one task before switching to the other, in order to achieve the near maximum payoff available in each condition. In a second experiment, we show that this behavior is learned quickly (within 2–3 min over several discrete trials) and remained stable for as long as the payoff function did not change. The results of this work show that people are adaptive and flexible in how they prioritize and allocate attention in a dual‐task setting. However, it also demonstrates some of the limits regarding people's ability to optimize payoff functions.     

Social support in a changing Europe: an analysis of three post‐communist nations

Despite the continuing interest in social transitions among social scientists, there has been little analysis of the impact of societal change on personal relationships. One important factor in helping individuals deal with the stresses associated with rapid transitions is social support. In our first study, 450 manual workers, students and entrepreneurs in Russia, Georgia and Hungary completed structured questionnaires assessing demographic and value predictors of the perception of support availability and the support they obtained to deal with changes in their societies. In our second study, the same respondents participated in semi‐structured interviews investigating the relationship between their work lives and support networks. Our findings demonstrate the importance of culture, occupation and values for both the perception and reception of support, and underline the multifaceted manner in which different work experiences in different nations influence support networks. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.