Religious institutions and the prevention of mental illness

It is estimated that fifteen percent of the population is in need of some kind of mental health service at any given time, thus constituting a primary health problem. The President's Commission on Mental Health (PCMH) recognized that religious institutions can help to prevent mental illness by providing support in the community. This paper presents types of programs the PCMH found that were supportive and describes the program of one church to illustrate additional ways that clergy and their congregants, working collaboratively with professionals and agencies, can contribute significantly to the prevention of mental illness.is in the private practice of clinical social work and an M.T.S. student at Wesley Theological Seminary.     

Axiomatising first-order temporal logic: Until and since over linear time

We present an axiomatisation for the first-order temporal logic with connectives Until and Since over the class of all linear flows of time. Completeness of the axiom system is proved.We also add a few axioms to find a sound and complete axiomatisation for the first order temporal logic of Until and Since over rational numbers time.The author would like to thank Dov Gabbay and Ian Hodkinson for helpful discussions on this material. The work was supported by the U.K. Science and Engineering Research Council under the Metatem project (GR/F/28526).Presented by Dov Gabbay     

Stress management at work: With whom,for whom and to what ends?

A critical overview is presented of workplace stress-management interventions. It is suggested that they have so far failed to deliver what they have promised. Evaluation studies fail to distinguish between the aims and objectives of primary prevention interventions, such as stress-management training, where potential benefits can only be assessed in terms of long-term outcomes, and secondary and tertiary interventions, such as counselling, where existing disorders are treated. Stress-management interventions are based on inadequate and oversimplistic theories which obscure the many conflicting interests of employees, employers and researchers, and ignore empirical evidence which suggests that individual well-being, attitudes to work, and work behaviours are minimally linked. It is suggested that alleviating the problems that people experience at work will remain elusive unless the conceptual problems in occupational stress are more fully acknowledged.     

A Career Assistance Program for Elite Athletes

A program to assist elite athletes in coping with the transition out of active sport competition is presented. A life span development framework is used to describe the formulation of the program. An outline of the program is presented, and implications for counselors are discussed.     

Kant: The Audacity of Judgement

In the legal judgement reason demands that it extend itself beyond the mere subjective limits of the self in order that it might fashion a judgement that speaks for the other. This is the universal necessity of the judgement. No claim of truth or the moral law can guarantee that others will agree with this judgement: thus disputation is the risk which reason takes in order to judge at all. The author examines this audacity of judgement by reference to Kant's autonomy of reason, which risks itself in the thought that thinks. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Cognitive Processing and Self-Report of Lateral Preference

Our knowledge of the human brain has increased more during the past 40 years than at any other time in history. Of particular interest have been the findings of a correspondence between cognitive functions and individual structures of the brain. Similar from a gross anatomical point of view, the hemispheres of the brain have been shown to serve specialized cognitive functions. This work offers an overview of the cognitive aspects of cerebral lateralization as a context for considering this issue, followed by a review of specific self-report techniques in the appraisal of lateral preference.     

Temporally spaced responding by pigeons: development and effects of deprivation and extinction

In the first five or six sessions on a DRL 20-sec schedule of reinforcement there developed a stable performance characterized by a relatively constant conditional probability of occurrence (IRTs/op) of interresponse times (IRTs) of durations greater than 5 or 6 sec. Extinction and the level of deprivation changed both the overall rate of responding and the form of the function relating the duration of an IRT to its value of IRTs/op. The value of IRTs/op decreased more rapidly for short than for longer IRTs, resulting in the emergence of a finer discrimination of IRT duration.     

Operant extinction near zero

Extinction in the presence of each of two stimuli reduces the rate of pecking in the presence of each of them to zero or near zero. When, however, pecking a third stimulus is reinforced, responding is resumed under the other stimuli, and more responses are made to the stimulus least associated with extinction.     

Some limitations on behavioral contrast and induction during successive discrimination

A pigeon's rate of pecking on a red key, reinforced at a constant frequency, may be changed by increasing or decreasing the frequency of reinforcement of pecking on a successively presented green key. The changes in the rate of pecking on red, called interactions, are of two types: contrast, in which the changes in the rates of pecking on the two colors are in opposite directions; and, induction, in which the changes in the rates are in the same direction. In previous data, a change in the frequency of reinforcement associated with the green key produced a corresponding change in the rate of pecking the green key and an opposite change (contrast) in the rate of pecking on the red key. The present data suggest that the magnitude of contrast is very small if pecking on the red key is reinforced at a high enough frequency (about 40 reinforcements per hr in the present experiment). Also, given that interactions occur, induction rather than contrast may result from small changes in a low frequency of reinforcement associated with green.