HEBREW WISDOM AND PSYCHOTHEOLOGICAL DIALOGUE

Abstract. When understood as a potential resolution for the epistemological impasse between psychology and religion, Hebrew wisdom presents a model for dialogue. Noting that wisdom exhibits a special interest in human dispositions and behavior, the authors compare Viktor Frankl's logotherapy and Adlerian psychology with Proverbs and uncover a biblical, empirical approach to psychology which indirectly incorporates the religious dimension.     

Cognitive Load and Prism Adaptation

Subjects wore goggles with prisms that laterally displaced the visual field (rightward by 11.4 degree) and with full view of the limb engaged in paced (2-s rate) sagittal pointing at either an implicit ("straight ahead of the nose") target (Experiment 1) or an explicit (positioned leftward by 11.4 degree) target (in Experiment 2). In experimental conditions, subjects performed a secondary cognitive task (mental arithmetic) simultaneously during target pointing. In control conditions, no cognitive load was imposed. Aftereffect measures of adaptation to the prismatic displacement were not substantially different when problem solving was required, but terminal error of the exposure pointing task was reliably affected by cognitive load. These results are consistent with the hypothesis of separable mechanisms for adaptive coordination and adaptive alignment. Adaptive coordination may be mediated by strategically flexible coordinative linkage between sensory motor systems (eye-head and hand-head), but spatial alignment seems to be mediated by adaptive encoders within coordinatively linked subsystems. If the coordination task involves predominately automatic processing, coordinative linkage can be frequent enough under cognitive load for substantial realignment to occur even though exposure performance (adaptive coordination) may be less than optimal.     

The eleventh commandment fellowship: A new religious movement confronts the ecological crisis

Edward Tiryakian, Thomas Robbins and Phillip Hammond, among others, have highlighted the role of new religious movements (NRMs) as reflectors of larger social trends and innovators of broad cultural change. This paper presents a case study of the Eleventh Commandment Fellowship, a subgroup of the Holy Order of MANS (an American NRM founded in 1968) that attempted to uncover and articulate an ethic of ecology from within the Judeo‐Christian tradition during the late 1970s and 1980s. I contend that these efforts both reflected the broader movement within North American Christian denominations to engage seriously the ecological crisis, and offered innovative theoretical and practical solutions to this crisis. The fellowship is also shown to have been instrumental in the formation of an international coalition of both religious and secular environmental groups.     

Development of a Career Task Self-Efficacy Scale: The Kuder Task Self-Efficacy Scale

The present study consisted of developing the Kuder Task Self-Efficacy Scale (KTSES). The KTSES is a 30-item scale measuring a person's self-efficacy for tasks corresponding to Kuder's 10 occupational interest areas (Kuder Zytowski, 1991). Responses from the KTSES were compared with responses to the Self-Esteem Inventory (SES; Rosenberg, 1965) and the Career Decision-Making Self-Efficacy Scale (CDMSE; Taylor Betz, 1983) to see if career task self-efficacy was related to self-esteem and career decision-making self-efficacy. Answers to the KTSES were also compared with responses given for occupations corresponding to the Kuder Occupational Interest Survey (KOIS; Kuder Zytowski, 1991) to see if occupational self-efficacy was related to career task self-efficacy. Results supported the validity and reliability of the KTSES. The utility of having a task self-efficacy scale to go with the KOIS is discussed, and ideas for future research are given.     

The second epistemic way revisited: Reply to Professor Beard's, ‘Professor Lucas on omniscience’

International Journal for Philosophy of Religion -     

Anticipation of future food: suppression and facilitation of saccharin intake depending on the delay and type of future food

A series of studies examined the (Sprague-Dawley) rat's tendency to suppress intake of .15% saccharin when it was followed by a second food after 4-, 16-, or 32-min delays. The second foods examined were 32% sucrose, 64% sucrose, lab chow, a Nutrasweet solution, skim milk, and chocolate milk. Saccharin intake was influenced by both the delay and the specific food available. Subsequent analysis showed that saccharin intake before the 4-min delay was an inverse function of the caloric value of the second food. However, saccharin intake before the 16-min delay was better predicted as an inverse function of the hedonic value of the second food. The results suggest that the caloric and hedonic values of a food may influence food selection across different time courses, and that the effective time horizon for the sequential comparison of foods depends on the specific foods that are compared.