Maximus the Confessor and the Problem of Participation

In defining the theological problem of participation as the question of how created beings, namely human beings, can participate (μ?θεξι?) in the transcendent Uncreated God towards deification (θ?ωσι?) without a pantheistic blurring of essences, this article examines the Christologically intuitive way in which Maximus the Confessor (580–662) would have responded. Specifically, Maximus’ Cyrilline Chalcednonianism, featuring an unconfused perichoretic union between Christ's two natures in his hypostatic union, serves directly as an apologetic and hermeneutic for humanity's and creation's participation in God. In addition, taking into account the scholarly debate over Maximus’ understanding of the relationship between the Logos and the logoi, it is argued that this indirectly provides a second Christological way forward to resolve the problem at hand, particularly when the two types of logoi (that ‘of being’ and that ‘of virtue’) are correctly distinguished. Insofar as the Logos and the logoi, not to mention the notions of participation and deification, were viewed by Maximus through his Cyrilline Chalcedonian lens, his Cyrilline Chalcednonian Christology was ultimately his answer to the theological problem of participation.     

Prescriptive Analysis: Further Individualization of Hypothesis Testing in Brief Experimental Analysis of Reading Fluency

Brief experimental analyses (BEA) have been used to identify effective individualized interventions for improving reading fluency with school-age children. Interventions involving incentives, modeling, repeated reading, and error correction are most often tested in a BEA. However, these interventions are rarely modified according to individual student needs. The current study examined the effects of varied levels of modeling (passage, sentence, word) and varied contingencies (tracking and fluency) on fluency in non-treated high-word overlap passages and general outcome measure passages. BEA-identified interventions were effective for improving reading fluency on non-treated passages for both second grade students and the third grade student. Notably, the effects reversed when intervention was withdrawn with one of the second grade students. Results are discussed in terms of considerations in the application of BEA technology in the schools.     

The influence of rumination and defensiveness on negative affect in response to experimental stress

Previous experiments investigating the influence of rumination on negative affect have often manipulated the timing and content of rumination, which may be problematic as rumination is phenomenologically experienced as uncontrollable. In the present experiment, rumination was not manipulated, but measured as an individual tendency before the experiment. Furthermore, it was tested whether defensiveness would reduce the higher degree of negative affect often associated with rumination. Fifty-six participants completed questionnaires measuring rumination and defensiveness and participated in a phrase completion task, rating negative affect before and after the task. Correlational analyses showed that rumination was positively associated (p < 0.05) with affect responses (r range = 0.35-0.61), whereas defensiveness was negatively associated with affect responses (r range =-0.27-0.32). Four groups of high and low rumination and defensiveness scorers were created using median splits. An ANOVA showed that scoring high on defensiveness did not reduce the negative affect experienced by high ruminating participants.     

Standard errors for the class of orthomax-rotated factor loadings: Some matrix results

The partial derivative matrices of the class of orthomax-rotated factor loadings with respect to the unrotated maximum likelihood factor loadings are derived. The reported results are useful for obtaining standard errors of the orthomax-rotated factor loadings, with or without row normalization (standardization) of the initial factor loading matrix for rotation. Using a numerical example, we verify our analytic formulas by comparing the obtained standard error estimates with that from some existing methods. Some advantages of the current approach are discussed.Authorship is determined by alphabetical order. The authors contributed equally to the research. Kentaro Hayashi is now at the Department of Mathematics, Bucknell University, Lewisburg, PA 17837 (email: khayashi@Bucknell.edu). Yiu-Fai Yung is now at the SAS Institute, Inc., SAS Campus Drive, Cary, NC 27513 (email: yiyung@wnt.sas.com).Part of the research was completed while Yiu-Fai Yung was a visiting scholar at the Department of Psychology, the Ohio State University. The visit was supported in part by grant N4856118101 from the NIMH and the Mason and Linda Stephenson Travel Award from the Department of Psychology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The authors are grateful to Michael Browne who suggested some relevant references and provided valuable comments on the research, and to Robert Cudeck who provided the FAS program for the numerical comparison. The expert comments by the reviewers are deeply appreciated.     

Control and maintenance effects of long-term relaxation training in a case of hypertension

The effects of long-term, varied relaxation in a case of essential hypertension are described. The client's unusual achievement of voluntary control over his blood pressure was discussed in terms of new directions in the search of a relaxation specific factor.     

Attitudinal versus ecological approaches to the characterization of institutional treatment environments

The relational and discriminative properties of attitudinal and ecological measures of environments were examined within the context of a state hospital for mentally retarted clients. Three hypotheses were advanced, and the results gave substantial support for one of these and partial support for a second: (a) that the correlations between attitudinal and ecological measures should not differ significantly from zero, and (b) that differences among hospital treatment programs and living units should be reflected in ecological but not in attitudinal measures. However, the results did not provide clear confirmation for a third hypothesis: that differences among staff demographic characteristics and employment history should be reflected in attitudinal but not in ecological measures. It was suggested that these background variables may not be appropriate measures of personality-linked attributes.     

An examination of learned helplessness among attention-deficit hyperactivity disordered boys

We employed a learned helplessness paradigm to compare the performance of 23 boys with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and a comparable group of 22 nonreferred boys. The boys attempted to solve two different sets of 10 find-a-word puzzles, one set following exposure to solvable puzzles, and one set following exposure to insolvable puzzles. Results revealed that the ADHD boys solved significantly fewer puzzles than did the control boys. In addition, the ADHD boys gave up on significantly more puzzles, and this was especially true following the insolvable condition when it occurred during the second set of puzzles. The ADHD boys also reported being more frustrated by the task than were the control boys. Finally, among the control boys, support was obtained for Diener and Dweck's (1978) distinction between mastery-oriented and helpless children. However, this distinction did not appear to operate in the same fashion for the ADHD boys.The auhors thank Caryn Carlson and William Pelham for their help in creating the task stimuli and Monica Harris and Steven Landau for their helpful comments.     

Ability in perceiving nonnative contrasts: Performance on natural and synthetic speech stimuli

The perception of the distinction between /r/ and /l/ by native speakers of American English and of Japanese was studied using natural and synthetic speech. The American subjects were all nearly perfect at recognizing the natural speech sounds, whereas there was substantial variation among the Japanese subjects in their accuracy of recognizing /r/ and /l/ except in syllable-final position. A logit model, which additively combined the acoustic information conveyed byF1-transition duration and byF3-onset frequency, provided a good fit to the perception of synthetic /r/ and /l/ by the American subjects. There was substantial variation among the Japanese subjects in whether theF1 andF3 cues had a significant effect on their classifications of the synthetic speech. This variation was related to variation in accuracy of recognizing natural /r/ and /l/, such that greater use of both theF1 cue and theF3 cue in classifying the synthetic speech sounds was positively related to accuracy in recognizing the natural sounds. However, multiple regression showed that use of theF1 cue did not account for significant variance in natural speech performance beyond that accounted for by theF3 cue, indicating that theF3 cue is more important than theF1 cue for Japanese speakers learning English. The relation between performance on natural and synthetic speech also provides external validation of the logit model by showing that it predicts performance outside of the domain of data to which it was fit.