Practices and the New Ecclesiology: Misplaced Concreteness?

Abstract: Recent writing in ecclesiology has often focused on church practices and less on dogmatic accounts. Whilst welcoming this renewed awareness, there are problems in its development, demonstrated here through an analysis of the concept of ‘a practice’, and through readings of two examples of this tendency: Hütter's Suffering Divine Things and Hauerwas's With the Grain of the Universe. Resources from Thomas Aquinas are offered that might help the development of ecclesiology in this vein.     

Methodological Overview of the Parents Matter! Program

We present an overview of the methodology employed in the Parents Matter! Program. Information on the following aspects of the program is presented: participant eligibility and recruitment; consenting procedures and administration of assessments; development and utilization of measures in the assessments; study design; intervention procedures; facilitator characteristics and training; procedures to assess treatment fidelity assessment; and procedures utilized to enhance retention of study participants.     

Perspective taking in children and adults: Equivalent egocentrism but differential correction

Children generally behave more egocentrically than adults when assessing another's perspective. We argue that this difference does not, however, indicate that adults process information less egocentrically than children, but rather that adults are better able to subsequently correct an initial egocentric interpretation. An experiment tracking participants' eye movements during a referential communication task indicated that children and adults were equally quick to interpret a spoken instruction egocentrically but differed in the speed with which they corrected that interpretation and looked at the intended (i.e., non-egocentric) object. The existing differences in egocentrism between children and adults therefore seems less a product of where people start in their perspective taking process than where they stop, with lingering egocentric biases among adults produced by insufficient correction of an automatic moment of egocentrism. We suggest that this pattern of similarity in automatic, but not controlled, processes may explain between-group differences in a variety of dual-process judgments.     

Meno’s paradox and medicine

The measurement of diagnostic accuracy is an important aspect of the evaluation of diagnostic tests. Sometimes, medical researchers try to discover the set of observations that are most accurate of all by directly inspecting diseased and not-diseased patients. This method is perhaps intuitively appealing, as it seems a straightforward empirical way of discovering how to identify diseased patients, which amounts to trying to correlate the results of diagnostic tests with disease status. I present three examples of researchers who try to produce definitive diagnostic criteria by directly inspecting diseased and not diseased patients. Despite this method’s intuitive appeal, I will argue that it is impossible to carry out. Before researchers can inspect these patients to discover definitive diagnostic criteria, they must be able to distinguish diseased and not-diseased patients; and they do not know how to do this, because this is what they are trying to discover. I suspect the intuitive appeal of directly inspecting patients makes this difficult to appreciate. To counter this difficulty, I present this problem as a manifestation of ‘Meno’s paradox’, which was described in classical antiquity, and of ‘the problem of nomic measurement’, described more recently. Considering these philosophical problems may help researchers address the methodological issues they face when evaluating diagnostic tests.

     

Phillips on Unconscious Perception and Overflow

Philosophia - Phillips (Philosophy & Phenomenological Research, 93, 419–451, p. 433, 2016a) argues that Block faces a “serious internal challenge” in defending the claim...     

Managing Frustration for Children (MFC) Group Intervention for ADHD: An Open Trial of a Novel Group Intervention for Deficient Emotion Regulation

Deficient emotion regulation is a common and impairing area of difficulty among children with ADHD. Few interventions specifically address deficient emotion regulation. The Managing Frustration for Children With ADHD (MFC) group treatment was developed to specifically target deficient emotion regulation deficits common to children with ADHD. The MFC was developed as a 12-week multisystemic intervention for emotion regulation deficits among children with ADHD. An open trial assessed the effectiveness of the MFC as an adjunctive treatment for deficient emotion regulation among children with ADHD. Fifty-two children with ADHD ages 9–11 (42 boys, 10 girls) were enrolled in the MFC, with 44 completing treatment. The majority (71.2%) of participants had at least one comorbid internalizing, externalizing, or learning disorder. Intent-to-treat repeated-measures ANCOVA suggested significant decreases in emotion regulation deficits, mood difficulties, and externalizing difficulties following completion of treatment. More than half (53%) of children who completed treatment experienced reliable and clinically significant improvement in at least one area of functioning. The MFC demonstrated promising initial effectiveness in addressing the emotion regulation deficits of children with ADHD.     

Interactive effects of life experience and situational cues on aggression: The weapons priming effect in hunters and nonhunters

Recent research (Anderson, Benjamin, & Bartholow, 1998) indicates that the presence of guns increases the accessibility of aggressive thoughts via automatic priming. Our research examined whether this “weapons priming effect” differs depending on the structure of an individual's knowledge about guns, and if so, whether that difference results in corresponding differences in aggressive behavior. Experiment 1 revealed that individuals with prior gun experience (hunters) have more detailed and specific information about guns than do individuals with no direct gun experience (nonhunters), and that hunting experience interacts with gun type (hunting versus assault) in predicting affective and cognitive reactions to guns. Experiment 2 revealed that pictures of hunting guns were more likely to prime aggressive thoughts among nonhunters, whereas pictures of assault guns were more likely to prime aggressive thoughts among hunters. Experiment 3 showed differences in aggressive behavior following gun primes that correspond to differences in affective and cognitive responses to gun cues. Our findings are discussed in light of the General Aggression Model.     

Classification of domestic cat (Felis catus) vocalizations by naive and experienced human listeners

To test for possible functional referentiality in a common domestic cat (Felis catus) vocalization, the authors conducted 2 experiments to examine whether human participants could classify meow sounds recorded from 12 different cats in 5 behavioral contexts. In Experiment 1, participants heard singlecalls, whereas in Experiment 2, bouts of calls were presented. In both cases, classification accuracy was significantly above chance, but modestly so. Accuracy for bouts exceeded that for single calls. Overall, participants performed better in classifying individual calls if they had lived with, interacted with, and had a general affinity for cats. These results provide little evidence of referentiality suggesting instead that meows are nonspecific, somewhat negatively toned stimuli that attract attention from humans. With experience, human listeners can become more proficient at inferring positive-affect states from cat meows.