Trauma awareness and preparedness: Their influence on posttraumatic stress disorder development related to armed conflict experience

This study examined influences of trauma awareness and preparedness on the development of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in civilian and military personnel with exposure to the civil war. Participants were 302 people with exposure to civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo (civilians = 68%; females = 47%; age range = 16 to 76 years old, SD = 13.58 years). Participants completed the Posttraumatic Checklist Scale, General Self-Efficacy Scale, and Traumatic Events List. The data were analysed to predict PTSD development from trauma awareness and preparedness, taking exposure to multiple traumas into account as a risk factor. Findings suggest that trauma awareness and preparedness play an important role among military personnel in moderating the risk of developing PTSD, more so than among the civilian population. Mental health professionals working with civil war survivors should seek to explore trauma awareness and preparedness as resources for minimising risk for PTSD in armed conflict situations.     

Collateral effects of behavioral parent training on families of children with developmental disabilities and behavior disorders

We evaluated collateral effects of behavioral parent training (BPT) on families with children who have developmental disabilities and behavior disorders. We compared 18 BPT graduates to 18 similar families waiting for service. The BPT graduates reported significantly less (i) child behavior problems, (ii) disruption to child and family quality of life due to child problem behavior, and (iii) stress related to limits on family opportunities and child physical limitations, up to 5 years after discharge. On a self‐efficacy scale, the graduates reported being more effective child behavior change agents in not only stopping child problem behavior, but also in preventing new occurrences and teaching the child appropriate behavior. These results suggest that BPT has persistent beneficial effects on children and parents. The findings reflect the program's focus on teaching parents how to use functional assessment derived positive teaching strategies to replace child problem behavior. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Do Personal Dispositions Affect the Relationship Between Psychosocial Working Conditions and Workplace Bullying?

There is scarce research on the interaction between psychosocial working conditions and being a target of workplace bullying with individual characteristics as a moderator. We therefore examined 3,363 employees from 60 Danish workplaces to test whether sense of coherence moderates the relationship between the job demand-control model and bullying. This work is exploratory in nature, as no previous study to assess this moderation was found. Hierarchical linear regressions showed that demand-control model was significantly associated with bullying. Sense of coherence displayed a significant though practically negligible moderating effect. This suggests that negative psychosocial working conditions are associated with bullying independently of personal characteristics, at least in terms of sense of coherence.     

Aspects of the logic of history-of-science explanation

The topic of history-of-science explanation is first briefly introduced as a generally important one for the light it may shed on action theory, on the logic of discovery, and on philosophy's relations with historiography of science, intellectual history, and the sociology of knowledge. Then some problems and some conclusions are formulated by reference to some recent relevant literature: a critical analysis of Laudan's views on the role of normative evaluations in rational explanations occasions the result that one must make aconceptual distinction between evaluations and explanations of belief, and that there are at leastthree subclasses of the latter, rational, critical, and theoretical; I then discuss the problem of whether explanations of discoveries are self-evidencing and predictive by focusing on views of Hempel and Nickles, and I attempt a formalization of some aspects of the problem. Finally, a more systematic and concrete analysis is undertaken by using as an example the explanation of Galileo's rejection of space-proportionality, and it is argued that the historical explanation of scientific beliefs is a type of logical analysis.     

久远的文明：以往的现实，当今的挑战

在其关于当今世界的教科书（1963年初版,1987年在作者去世后以《文明史纲》为书名再版）的开篇,费尔南·布罗代尔提醒我们说,civilisation（文明）一词具有多种含义,其用法在不同语言之间并不相互对应,因而经常造成翻译上的困难。这个词出现在18世纪中叶的法国,当时与“野蛮状态”形成了对照。“高贵的野蛮人”就被贬为后一范畴,尽管启蒙思想家因其生活方式的纯正性而将他们理想化。