Leibniz,Whitehead and the Metaphysics of Causation

Medieval Thought: The Western Intellectual Tradition from Antiquity to the Thirteenth Century by Michael Haren Second Edition. Macmillan 1992. Pp. ix + 315.

Being a Philosopher: The History of a Practice by D. W. Hamlyn London and New York: Roudedge 1992. Pp. x + 187. ISBN 0–415–02968–6.

A History of Western Philosophy Vol. 3, Renaissance Philosophy by Brian B. Copenhaver and Charles B. Schmitt Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. Pp. 450. Hb £30.00. Pb £8.99.

La Scepsi moderna. Interpretazioni dello scetticismo da Charron a Hume by Gianni Paganini Pp. 528. Cosenza: Edizioni Il Busento 1991. L 60,000.

A History of Modern Political Thought 185 A History of Modern Political Thought, Major Political Thinkers from Hobbes to Marx by Iain Hampsher‐Monk Oxford: Blackwell 1992 Pp. xiii + 609 Paperback, £14.99.

Malebranche and Ideas 189 Malebranche and Ideas by Steven M. Nadler New York: Oxford University Press 1992. Pp. 192. ISBN 0–19–507724–5. £35.00

Kantian Aesthetics Pursued by Anthony Savile Edinburgh University Press: Edinburgh, 1993, ISBN 0–7486–0439–1

Philosophy and Logic in Central Europe from Bolzano to Tarski by Peter Simons Kluwer 1992     

Fear of negative evaluation and attentional bias for facial expressions: An event-related study

Numerous studies have shown an exacerbation of attentional bias towards threat in anxiety states. However, the cognitive mechanisms responsible for these attentional biases remain largely unknown. Further, the authors outline the need to consider the nature of the attentional processes in operation (hypervigilance, avoidance, or disengagement). We adapted a dot-probe paradigm to record behavioral and electrophysiological responses in 26 participants reporting high or low fear of evaluation, a major component of social anxiety. Pairs of faces including a neutral and an emotional face (displaying anger, fear, disgust, or happiness) were presented during 200 ms and then replaced by a neutral target to discriminate. Results show that anxious participants were characterized by an increased P1 in response to pairs of faces, irrespective of the emotional expression included in the pair. They also showed an increased P2 in response to angry–neutral pairs selectively. Finally, in anxious participants, the P1 response to targets was enhanced when replacing emotional faces, whereas non-anxious subjects showed no difference between the two conditions. These results indicate an early hypervigilance to face stimuli in social anxiety, coupled with difficulty in disengaging from threat and sustained attention to emotional stimuli. They are discussed within the framework of current models of anxiety and psychopathology.     

Shaping Teachers' Interpretation of Spirituality: The Contribution of Anglican and Free Church Colleges in England and Wales

A sample of 298 primary-school teachers working within the state-maintained sector in England completed a 150-item questionnaire to assess their understanding of the term “spirituality.” The data demonstrate that after controlling for sex, age, personality, and current religiosity, teachers trained in an Anglican or Free Church College were more likely than teachers trained in secular institutions to interpret the educational construct of spirituality in terms of traditional features of Christianity. There is some evidence for the distinctive religious contribution of Church Colleges to teacher education.     

Purpose in Life and Prayer Among Catholic and Protestant Adolescents in Northern Ireland

Data are provided from a sample of 2,670 young people aged between 13 and 15 years from Northern Ireland. This article compares the replies of 1,206 young people who attend a Catholic school and 1,464 young people who attend a Protestant school. The data examine the relationship between frequency of personal prayer, perceived purpose in life, sex, age, church attendance, and personality (extraversion, neuroticism, and psychoticism). These data demonstrate a clear relationship between frequency of prayer and perceived purpose in life among the young people from the Protestant and Catholic communities.     

Unskilled and optimistic: Overconfident predictions despite calibrated knowledge of relative skill

Those who are less skilled tend to overestimate their abilities more than do those who are more skilled—the so-called Dunning–Kruger effect. Less-skilled performers presumably have less of the knowledge needed to make informed guesses about their relative performance. If so, the Dunning–Kruger effect should vanish when participants do have access to information about their relative ability and performance. Competitive bridge players predicted their results for bridge sessions before playing and received feedback about their actual performance following each session. Despite knowing their own relative skill and showing unbiased memory for their performance, they made overconfident predictions consistent with a Dunning–Kruger effect. This bias persisted even though players received accurate feedback about their predictions after each session. The finding of a Dunning–Kruger effect despite knowledge of relative ability suggests that differential self-knowledge is not a necessary precondition for the Dunning–Kruger effect. At least in some cases, the effect might reflect a different form of irrational optimism.     

Health-Related Quality of Life and Perceived Need for Mental Health Services in Adolescent Solid Organ Transplant Recipients

The purpose of the current investigation was to assess interest in mental health services among parents of adolescent solid organ transplant recipients and the relationship between parent perceived need for mental health services and patient health-related quality of life (HRQOL). Sixty-three parents rated interest in receiving 10 mental health services, and patient HRQOL ratings were gathered from adolescent transplant recipients and their parents. Ninety-four percent of parents expressed some level of interest in at least one of the proposed services, with over 40 % indicating maximum interest. Parents’ perceived need for mental health services was inversely related to adolescent and parent reports of HRQOL on the behavior, mental health, family cohesion, and parental impact-emotional domains. Results suggest that parents of adolescent solid organ transplant recipients are interested in receiving mental health services for their families. Assessment of need for mental health services and HRQOL may inform the medical team of families requiring intervention.     

Reply to Letter to the Editor

The current policy of the National Institute of Health designed to increase the participation of women and minorities is radically different from previous policies designed to protect minorities from abuses in research studies. The principal arguments to support this policy are twofold: 1) Increased representation of minorities and women in research would increase the generalizability of research data and allow for valid analyses of differences in subpopulations; and 2) being in a clinical research study is advantageous to participants regardless of the final research study results. It remains unclear whether minorities find these arguments compelling. Instead of telling minorities that participation in research is good for them, the research community should focus on understanding what minority communities want from clinical research and then tailoring the message to meet this need. Persuasive arguments to promote long-term increased representation of minorities in clinical research must come from within minority communities.     

The Greensboro Child Response Initiative: A Trauma-Informed,Mental Health–Law Enforcement Model for Children Exposed to Violence

This article evaluates a trauma-informed, mental health–law enforcement intervention model called the Greensboro Child Response Initiative (CRI). CRI is a community-coordinated response to mitigate the development of traumatic stress symptoms in children exposed to violence, with the goals of decreasing mental health symptoms and other negative outcomes. Results from a quasi-experimental study indicated that caregivers appreciate the quick follow-up and support by CRI advocates and police reported seeing CRI as a critical component of their responses to calls for service related to families and children. Police line-ups and training provided by CRI increased levels of empathy and awareness of child trauma. Monthly stakeholder meetings promoted an informed victim response and increased communication and networking opportunities among community providers and law enforcement. Results suggest that CRI is a promising community-based early intervention, and implications and suggestions are provided for replicability.     

Changes are not localized before they are explicitly detected

Change detection is in many ways analogous to visual search. Yet, unlike search, successful detection depends not on the salience of features within a scene, but on the difference between the original and modified scene. If, as in search, pre-attentive mechanisms guide attention to the change location, the change itself must produce a preattentively detectable signal. Despite recent evidence for implicit representation of change in the absence of conscious detection, few studies have yet explored whether attention is guided to a change location prior to explicit detection. In four “change blindness” experiments using several variants of the “flicker” task, we tested the hypothesis that implicit or preattentive mechanisms guide change localization prior to explicit detection. None of the experiments revealed improved localization of changes prior to explicit reports of detection, suggesting that implicit detection of change does not contribute to the eventual explicit localization of a change. Instead, change localization is essentially arbitrary, driven by the salience of features within scenes.     

How much can you bend before you break: An experience of using constructionist consulting as a tool for organizational learning in the corporate world

This article reflects upon the experience the authors had in the process of designing and facilitating a year-long leadership development class within a division of a high-tech manufacturing corporation in the USA. The design reflected narrative (Simons, 1997; Epston & White, 1990), feminist (Ferguson, 1984; Ramsey & Calvert, 1994), and constructionist principles, and was implemented as a “learning-in-organizing process” (Abma, this issue). We have structured the article to capture the dynamic nature of this process. This includes a discussion of how we as “outsider” class instructors and “insider” participants negotiated and renegotiated the design of the class as well as the effects of these “relational negotiations” on our collective learning. We end with a consideration of the implications of our “learning-in-organizing” for other constructionist consultants (Campbell, Caldicott, & Kinsella, 1994) who are translating organizational learning theories into practice.