An Exploratory Study of HIV+ Adolescents’ Spirituality: Will You Pray with Me?

The aims of the study were (1) to determine whether adolescents find it acceptable to have physicians explore their spiritual beliefs as part of their medical care, (2) to characterize the role of spirituality and religious beliefs in adolescents with and without HIV, and (3) to examine associations between spirituality/religion and quality of life. Adolescents receiving their medical care at an urban Adolescent Health Clinic completed a study-specific questionnaire about spiritual inquiry by their physician, the Brief Multidimensional Measurement of Religiousness/Spirituality, and the Pediatric Quality of Life Inventory 4.0. Chi-squared analysis, Fischer’s exact test, and t tests were used to assess associations. A total of 45 participants enrolled: 19 HIV+ (53% vertical transmission) and 26 HIV?; mean age 17.2 years; 80% African American. Four out of 45 (9%) had ever been asked by their doctor about their spiritual/religious beliefs, and only 8 (18%) had ever shared these beliefs with their healthcare provider. Most teens wanted their provider to ask them about their spiritual beliefs during some visits, especially when dealing with death/dying or chronic illness (67%). Those with HIV were more likely to endorse wanting their doctors to pray with them (42% vs. 15%), feeling “God’s presence” (Mean = 3.95 vs. 2.83), being “part of a larger force” (Mean = 2.58 vs. 1.69), and feeling “God had abandoned them” (Mean = 1.63 vs. 1.15). There are certain circumstances in which healthcare providers should include a spiritual history with teenage patients. Few differences emerged in the teens studied with and without HIV.     

Memory for emotional faces in major depression following judgement of physical facial characteristics at encoding

The aim of the present study was to establish if patients with major depression (MD) exhibit a memory bias for sad faces, relative to happy and neutral, when the affective element of the faces is not explicitly processed at encoding. To this end, 16 psychiatric out-patients with MD and 18 healthy, never-depressed controls (HC) were presented with a series of emotional faces and were required to identify the gender of the individuals featured in the photographs. Participants were subsequently given a recognition memory test for these faces. At encoding, patients with MD exhibited a non-significant tendency towards slower gender identification (GI) times, relative to HC, for happy faces. However, the GI times of the two groups did not differ for sad or neutral faces. At memory testing, patients with MD did not exhibit the expected memory bias for sad faces. Similarly, HC did not demonstrate enhanced memory for happy faces. Overall, patients with MD were impaired in their memory for the faces relative to the HC. The current findings are consistent with the proposal that mood-congruent memory biases are contingent upon explicit processing of the emotional element of the to-be-remembered material at encoding.     

Fostering At-Risk Kindergarten Children's Number Sense

A 9-month training experiment evaluated whether computer-assisted discovery learning of arithmetic regularities can facilitate kindergartners’ fluency with the easiest sums. After a pretest, kindergartners with at least one risk factor (n = 28) were randomly assigned to either a structured add-0/1 training condition, which focused on recognizing the n + 0/0 + n = n and the n + 1/1 + n = the number-after-n rules, or an active control group. Using pretest fluency as the covariate, ANCOVAs revealed that the structured add-0/1 group significantly outperformed the control group on both practiced and unpracticed (transfer) n + 0/0 + n and n + 1/1 + n items at the delayed posttest and had significantly larger gains in mathematics achievement. Key instructional implications include: Early intervention that targets discovering rules for adding with 0 and 1 and family-specific developmental prerequisites is feasible and more effective than typical classroom instruction in promoting fluency with such basic sums. Such rules may be a critically important bridge between informal and formal mathematics.     

Fitting the world to constructs: The role of activity in meaning making

Abstract

The authors underscore that construing is not simply a matter of passively anticipating events. Meaning making is understood more fully as a dialectic involving anticipation as well as participation, accommodation as well as assimilation. Factors that may obscure this more active view of the meaning-making process are discussed, and illustrations of the role of activity in construing are presented.     

Teaching with Complicating Views: Beyond the Survey,Behind the Pro and Con

In this article I propose a method of selecting and assigning readings in the religious studies or theology classroom, such that these readings complicate one another, rather than standing in opposition or as simple alternatives. Such a strategy emulates key pedagogical insights of twelfth‐century sentence collection, an activity at the very heart of the earliest universities in Europe. It also draws support from the theories of intellectual development advanced by William G. Perry, Jr. and the Women's Ways of Knowing Collaborative. Both precedents suggest a principle of “complicating views” that can be flexibly employed in a variety of ways and diverse pedagogical contexts, as illustrated by examples from several classes. Such strategies aim to avoid reinforcing intellectual patterns of dualism or undifferentiated relativism; instead, they attempt to promote students' ability to integrate discordant voices and to appreciate diverse points of view, while also staking their own claims relative to them.     

Natural Doubts: Williams's Diagnosis Of Scepticism

Michael Williams believes that scepticism about the externalworld seems compelling only because the considerations that underpin it are thoughtto be ``mere platitudes' about e.g., the nature and source of human knowledge, and hence,that if it shown through a ``theoretical diagnosis' that it does not rest upon suchplatitudes, but contentious theoretical considerations that we are no means bound toaccept, we can simply dismiss the absurd sceptical conclusion. Williams argues thatscepticism does presuppose two extremely contentious doctrines, however, he admits thatif these doctrines are themselves motivated by ``platitudes' then scepticism follows. Iaddress Williams's arguments for thinking scepticism must presuppose these doctrines,and argue that he overlooks a way that they can be seen as motivated by mere platitudes.Thus, I conclude that William's novel rejection of scepticism fails.     

Psychotic dream-related aggression: A critical review and proposal

The relationship among parasomnias, sleep-related violence (SRV), and psychosis has neither been reported nor studied. The authors introduce the phenomenon of psychotic dream-related aggression (PDRA) and, through a review of the research on manifest dreams, the continuity of thinking across the sleep–wake cycle, and SRV, argue for its inclusion alongside the parasomnias of DSM-IV. Five cases are presented that illustrate this phenomenon, usually a male diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia whose violent act toward another was closely associated with the manifest content of his nocturnal dreams and his inability to test reality. Differential diagnostic criteria are proposed to separate PDRA from other parasomnias that may be related to violence. Treatment and forensic implications are discussed.     

A framework for understanding the allocation of attention in location-precued discrimination

The effects of attention on visual perception are assessed in the location-precuing paradigm. First, we present a review of some current metaphors for attention and relevant data. Then, a framework is suggested that provides an interpretation of the temporal sequence of external and assumed internal processes within a location-cuing trial. Cases when a precue correctly indicates the target location (valid trials) are compared to cases when the precue directs attention to the wrong location (invalid trials) with the cue location either at fixation or peripheral to the target location. Several specific hypotheses are suggested; these concern decrements in performance on invalid trials and effects of the location of a precue. For the most part, these hypotheses are supported by data in the literature and in some new studies. A gradient-filter metaphor for attention, which includes a synthesis of ideas from the gradient model and the attention gate model, is more consistent with the data than is a spotlight metaphor.