Characteristics of a French African Caribbean Epidemiological Psychiatric Sample with a History of Suicide Attempt

Research on vulnerability factors among ethnic groups, independent of primary psychiatric diagnosis, may help to identify groups at risk of suicidal behavior. French African Caribbean general psychiatric patients (N = 362) were recruited consecutively and independently of the primary psychiatric diagnosis. Demographic and clinical characteristics and lifetime history of suicide attempts were recorded. Sixty‐five patients (18%) had a history of at least one suicide attempt. Presence of professional qualifications, children, poor social contacts, treatment with benzodiazepine at inclusion, and poor treatment compliance were all associated with a lifetime history of suicide attempts.     

Beyond Political Theology and its Liquidation: From Theopolitical Monotheism to Trinitarianism

One of the central theological challenges facing Erik Peterson was to help the mid‐twentieth century Catholic Church define its relationship with the wider world. He responded by advancing a distinctive understanding of the ‘polis.’ In this essay, I critically analyze Peterson's central and perhaps best known proposal about how the Church ought to negotiate the modern world — encapsulated in his expression, the ‘liquidation of political theology.’ I contend that Peterson's proposal is not congruent with a right understanding of patristic trinitarian monarchy, although a view that stands in sharp contrast to that of Carl Schmitt. Notwithstanding the effectiveness of Peterson's critique of Schmitt's political theology, I argue that Peterson nonetheless fails in his exposition of the thought of Gregory of Nazianzus and therefore in his interpretation of the role of the Church in what we have learned to call the ‘political’ and the ‘social.’ I conclude by outlining several ways that the Church today might take up the challenge of regaining a truly political thought, a new ekklesioteia, nourished by the monarchy of the triune God.     

Information Integration in Modulation of Pragmatic Inferences During Online Language Comprehension

Upon hearing a scalar adjective in a definite referring expression such as “the big…,” listeners typically make anticipatory eye movements to an item in a contrast set, such as a big glass in the context of a smaller glass. Recent studies have suggested that this rapid, contrastive interpretation of scalar adjectives is malleable and calibrated to the speaker's pragmatic competence. In a series of eye‐tracking experiments, we explore the nature of the evidence necessary for the modulation of pragmatic inferences in language comprehension, focusing on the complementary roles of top–down information ‐ (knowledge about the particular speaker's pragmatic competence)  and bottom‐up cues  (distributional information about the use of scalar adjectives in the environment). We find that bottom‐up evidence alone (e.g., the speaker says “the big dog” in a context with one dog), in large quantities, can be sufficient to trigger modulation of the listener's contrastive inferences, with or without top‐down cues to support this adaptation. Further, these findings suggest that listeners track and flexibly combine multiple sources of information in service of efficient pragmatic communication.     

The Role of Situational Interviews in Fostering Positive Reactions to Selection Decisions

We investigated the effect of interview format and employment equity program strength on perceptions of fairness. We used job seekers and vignettes to test the hypotheses. The participants reported lukewarm support for employment equity programs. The use of a situational interview in the selection process of an organisation that had adopted an employment equity program contributed to higher perceptions of fairness vis‐à‐vis the use of an unstructured interview. The results also showed that the inclusion of a situational interview in the selection process mitigated negative reactions to the selection decision when a strong employment equity program was in place as well as when a female visible minority was hired. Nous avons évalué l'impact sur la perception de justice du style d'entretien et de la rigueur d'une charte d'équité relative à l'emploi. On a fait appel à des demandeurs d'emploi et utilisé un test de jugement situationnel pour éprouver les hypothèses. Les répondants se sont montrés peu enthousiastes en ce qui concerne les chartes d'équité relatives à l'emploi. Le choix d'un entretien structuré dans le processus de sélection d'une organisation qui avait adopté une charte d'équité relative à l'emploi a amélioré la perception de justice portant sur un entretien ordinaire. Il apparaît aussi que la présence d'un entretien structuré dans le processus de sélection atténuait les réactions négatives consécutives au résultat de la sélection quand existait une sérieuse charte d'équité relative à l'emploi et quand était embauchée une minorité féminine non négligeable.     

Anxiety and depression in women with advanced cancer: Implications for counselling

Fifty-three patients with advanced cancer were studied prospectively for 6 months to assess whether the site and method of chemotherapy administration influence levels of anxiety and depression. Patients received chemotherapy either at home or in hospital. Cases of clinical anxiety (36%) and depression (27%) were highest in the hospital treated group during the middle period of therapy. Patients treated at home had a lower psychiatric morbidity for anxiety (21%) and depression (21%) at the same period. There was no statistically significant difference in the mean scores on anxiety and depression between the groups. Overall, anxiety was more prevalent than depression. This study indicates that a minority of patients with advanced cancer treated by chemotherapy experience measureable psychiatric morbidity. Counselling services should be provided for these women throughout treatment, not just at the outset.     

A Muslim response to Harnack

Mohamed Ali, an Indian Muslim political activist of the 1920s, hoped to articulate an empowering perspective for his generation of Indian Muslims. He found Harnack's critique of the history of Christian dogma a suggestive basis for a new image of the relation of Islam to the religious life of the centuries before the Prophet Muhammad. He wanted to create a scheme for a ‘Federation of Faiths’ which would enable Indian Muslims to co‐operate in the new India with persons of other traditions. The article explains the context of Mohamed Ali's thought. Although his perspective lost momentum in India after the collapse of the non‐cooperation and Khilaft movements, it may be that a reconsideration of his ideas would be useful in the context of inter‐religious dialogue.     

Prosodic form and parsing commitments

This paper examines the question of whether there are effects of prosody on the syntactic parsing of temporarily ambiguous sentences containing complement verbs. It reports the results of five experiments employing cross-modal response tasks where the visually presented target word was either an appropriate or an inappropriate continuation in terms of the prosodic form of the preceeding auditory sentence fragment. Two experiments employing cross-modal naming only showed indications of sensitivity to syntactic and appropriateness manipulations when coupled with a simultaneous appropriateness judgment task. In contrast, the experiments employing cross-modal lexical decision showed greater sensitivity to syntactic and appropriateness effects. However, while the results from these studies replicated our earlier auditory parsing results and provided support for the suggestion that there are differences in visual and auditory parsing processes and for a constituent-based, minimal commitment type auditory parser, none of the studies demonstrated an effect of prosodic form on the parsing process.