The Wiseman and the Sage:Metaphysics as Wisdom in Aristotle and the Neo-Confucian School of Principle

Among scholars of classical philosophy in the West, it is not uncommon to hesitate about the existence of metaphysics in non-Western philosophical traditions. At times, the dilemma seems due to culture-specific ideas or standards about what metaphysics is or how it should be done. Other times the problem seems to lie in a general lack of awareness about the methods and approaches of divergent philosophical traditions. This article explores an often ignored Aristotelian notion of metaphysics: That it is wisdom. If we acknowledge wisdom to be a common value or ideal found in different cultures, then characterizing metaphysics as wisdom promises to be more inclusive than prevalent ideas about it, being broad enough to allow for the appreciation of metaphysical insights and achievements in non-Western schools. I first examine Aristotle’s account of what wisdom consists of. I shall then test the inclusivity of this conception of metaphysics by showing how its characteristic features are manifest in the Neo-Confucian ideal of sagely learning.     

Girls Study Girls Inc.: Engaging Girls in Evaluation Through Participatory Action Research

Between 2004 and 2007, Girls Incorporated^® conducted research about the experience of five affiliates from different parts of the United States as they engaged with girls in Girls Study Girls Inc., a participatory evaluation project that explored the meaning and impact of Girls Inc. environments and uncovered ways such environments can be improved. We describe the context and motivation for using participatory action research [PAR] in Girls Inc. environments and discuss the relevance and importance of PAR for organizations that empower girls and young women. We explain the process of training and engaging Girls Inc. members in research, discuss the effectiveness of Girls Study Girls Inc. as an evaluation strategy, and conclude this article with lessons learned and recommendations for using PAR in evaluating youth development programs.     

Prenatal Cocaine Exposure and Infant Sleep at 7 Months of age: The Influence of the Caregiving Environment

The primary goal of this study was to examine sleep problems in a sample of cocaine-exposed 7-month-old infants and to determine if maternal psychopathology mediated any existing association between substance exposure and sleep behaviors. We also examined the differences in sleep behaviors of cocaine-exposed infants in parental custody and cocaine-exposed infants in nonparental custody. Participants were 65 cocaine-exposed and 53 nonexposed infants and their primary caregivers who were recruited at delivery and assessed at 7 months of infant age. As expected, women who used cocaine during pregnancy had more psychiatric symptoms than nonusers. Prenatal exposure to heavier amounts of cocaine was significantly related to more severe sleep difficulties, and maternal anxiety mediated this association. Approximately 28% of cocaine mothers lost custody of their infants by 7 months of age. Nonmaternal caregivers had significantly fewer symptoms of psychopathology than the cocaine-using women who retained custody of their children. Infants who were in nonparental care at 7 months of age also had less severe sleep problems than did infants who remained in parental care.     

Knowing hatred2,3

Hatred is known to be a common phenomenon and a lot has been written about this affect. However, the author believes that the more we read and write about hate the further away we find ourselves from a real sense of understanding of this so familiar and yet so elusive experience. She feels that using a single concept to describe ‘hatred’ seems to be a simplification of the matter, since it consists of a chain of affects that does not lend itself to easy theoretical or experiential distinction. In this paper the author aims at ‘knowing’ the experience of hatred as the individual's reaction to an unbearable existential excess, that is, as the psychic attempt to handle an emotional profusion in the context of human relation and in relation to it. The emotional abundance that the psyche cannot contain and process by itself is dealt with by the defensive use of simplification, detachment and distancing. An attempt is made to understand the relation between psychic existing and hatred, between craving, desiring and hate, between passionate aliveness‐or a passion to live‐ and the difficulty in containing the excessive dimension of it. The author illustrates her thesis through a reading of Tolstoy's ‘Kreutzer sonata’ as a monologue of hatred.     

Transition Within Tradition: Women's Participation in Restoring Afghanistan

The eyes of the world focused on Afghanistan: our global consciousness was awakened to the plight of a population in turmoil. The subjugation of women served as part of a call to arms, another reason used to justify armed conflict half a world away. Images of women in burkas, kept from education, health care, and meaningful work, their myriad talents and skills wasted, helped mobilize the coalition that joined in defeating the Taliban.     

A Family Physician in an Ultraorthodox Jewish Village

The ultraorthodox Jewish community of Kfar Habbad Village is a special minority community in the Israeli context, one with particular needs because of its special religious and social commitments. This paper gives a personal account of a family physician's work in treating this population. It emphasizes the unique role of the doctor in her ongoing interaction with the rabbis of the Village and the doctor's use of community resources in order to meet the special needs of the group.     

Confidence judgments in studies of individual differences

This paper examines psychometric properties of scores derived from calibration curves (overconfidence, calibration, resolution, and slope) and an analogue of overconfidence that is based on a posttest estimate of the proportion of correctly solved items. Four tests from the theory of fluid and crystallized intelligence were used, and two of these tests employed both sequential and simultaneous methods of item presentation. The results indicate that the overconfidence score not only has the highest reliability, but is the only score with a reliability normally considered adequate for use in individual differences research. There is some, albeit weak, difference in subjects' level of overconfidence between sequential and simultaneous methods of item presentation. Correlational evidence confirms our previous findings that overconfidence scores from perceptual and ‘knowledge’ tasks define the same factor. In agreement with the results of Gigerenzer, Hoffrage and Kleinbolting (1991), subjects' post-test estimates of their performance showed lower levels of overconfidence than did the traditional measures based on subjects' confidence judgment responses to individual items. Also, after controlling for the actual test performances, the post-test performance estimates and average confidence ratings were only slightly positively correlated, suggesting that different psychological processes may underlie these two measures. Finally, our results suggest that average confidence over all items in the test may be a more useful measure in individual differences research than scores derived from calibration curves.     

A change of mind: The Conners Abbreviated Rating Scales Reconsidered

A cutoff score of 15 on the Conners 10-item Abbreviated Teacher Rating Scale (ATRS), based on a study from this laboratory, has been widely used by investigators for diagnosis of the syndrome known now as Attention Deficit Disorder with or without Hyperactivity. A replication of the original research employing a larger norm sample indicates that the suggested score of 15 is too low. Comparing the norm sample with hyperactive subjects selected by cutoff of 15 on the ATRS showed that the groups differed greatly on hyperactivity but not on inattention. The abbreviated form of the Conners scale does not effectively select children with attention deficits. Numerous problems with both the 39-item teacher scale and the abbreviated form suggest strongly that they be abandoned as research tools.This research was supported in part by research grant No. MH18909 from the National Institute of Mental Health.     

Lay Conceptualizations of Spirituality and Religiousness Among Jewish Israeli Men and Women

In order to clarify the lay conceptualization of spirituality and the overlap between the constructs of spirituality and religiousness, the relations between a multidimensional measure of spirituality and overall measures of spirituality and religiousness were examined. A total of 111 Israeli Jewish men and women responded to the Spiritual Orientation Inventory (SOI), a multidimensional measure of humanistic spirituality, and to single-item overall measures of spirituality and religiousness. For both men and women, all SOI sub-scales were significantly related to spirituality. In contrast, three SOI sub-scales—Altruism, Idealism, and Awareness of the tragic—were not related to religiousness. Regression analysis indicated that for men, spirituality is a more one-dimensional construct strongly associated with the experiential aspects of spirituality. In comparison, women demonstrated a more complex perception of spirituality associated with a variety of intrinsic spiritual values. In addition, for men the overlap between religiousness and spirituality centers on life coherency whereas for women the overlap appears to be more general.     

The Role of Individual Differences in the Accuracy of Confidence Judgments

Generally, self-assessment of accuracy in the cognitive domain produces overconfidence, whereas self-assessment of visual perceptual judgments results in under-confidence. Despite contrary empirical evidence, in models attempting to explain those phenomena, individual differences have often been disregarded. The authors report on 2 studies in which that shortcoming was addressed. In Experiment 1, participants (N = 520) completed a large number of cognitive-ability tests. Results indicated that individual differences provide a meaningful source of overconfidence and that a metacognitive trait might mediate that effect. In further analysis, there was only a relatively small correlation between test accuracy and confidence bias. In Experiment 2 (N = 107 participants), both perceptual and cognitive ability tests were included, along with measures of personality. Results again indicated the presence of a confidence factor that transcended the nature of the testing vehicle. Furthermore, a small relationship was found between that factor and some self-reported personality measures. Thus, personality traits and cognitive ability appeared to play only a small role in determining the accuracy of self-assessment. Collectively, the present results suggest that there are multiple causes of miscalibration, which current models of over- and underconfidence fail to encompass.