The legacy of Trinitarian cosmology in the Anthropocene

If our perception and concept of nature changes, also our image of God and our beliefs will change. Since the 1970s theology and religious studies have established a dynamic field of studies of religion and the environment, and a mobilisation of ecotheology has taken place in academic and pastoral theology as well as in the ecumenical movement. Ongoing discourses on climatic change and the Anthropocene are catalysing this development further. This article explores how the interpretation of late antiquity Cappadocian theology in this context can produce constructive insights for a contemporary reconstruction of late modern belief in the Creator and the tension of creation and salvation.     

Hand preference for writing and associations with selected demographic and behavioral variables in 255,100 subjects: the BBC internet study

In an Internet study unrelated to handedness, 134,317 female and 120,783 male participants answered a graded question as to which hand they preferred for writing. This allowed determination of hand preference patterns across 7 ethnic groups. Sex differences in left-handedness were found in 4 ethnic groups, favoring males, while no significant sex differences were found in three of the groups. Prevalence of left-handedness in the largest of the ethnic groups (self-labelled as "White") was comparable to contemporary hand preference data for this group [Gilbert, A. N., & Wysocki, C. J. (1992). Hand preference and age in the United states. Neuropsychologia, 30, 601-608] but the prevalence of left-handedness in individuals >70 years of age was considerably higher in the present study. Individuals who indicated "either" hand for writing preference had significantly lower spatial performance (mental rotation task) and significantly higher prevalence of hyperactivity, dyslexia, asthma than individuals who had clear left or right hand preferences, in support of Crow et al. [Crow, T., Crow, L., Done, D., & Leask, S. (1998). Relative hand skill predicts academic ability: global deficits at the point of hemispheric indecision. Neuropsychologia, 36, 1275-1282]. Similarly, an association of writing hand preference and non-heterosexual orientation was clearest for individuals with "either" writing hand responses. We conclude that contradictions in the literature as to whether or not these variables are linked to handedness stem largely from different definitions of hand preference. Due to a lack of statistical power in most studies in the literature, the "either" hand writing preference group that yielded the most salient results in this study is not normally available for analysis.     

TEACHING SELF-ADMINSTRATION OF NASOGASTRIC TUBE INSERTION TO AN ADOLESCENT WITH CROHN DISEASE

We examined the effectiveness of simulation training to teach an adolescent male with Crohn disease to self-administer nasogastric tube insertion. Nasogastric tube insertion was taught using simulation training, after which self-insertion skills were assessed. Results across skill components indicated that this subject was able to self-administer insertion of the nasogastric tube.     

Psychometric properties of a four-component Norwegian Organizational Justice Scale

Organizational justice has attracted attention as a predictor of employees' mental and physical health as well as commitment and work outcomes. The lack of a Norwegian translation of an organizational justice scale has precluded its use in Norway. Four dimensions of the organizational justice construct were examined in a Norwegian military context, including facet measures of distributional, interpersonal, and informational justice developed by Colquitt in 2001, in addition to procedural justice developed by Moorman in 1991. Confirmatory factor analyses supported a four-dimensional structure with good internal consistency. Follow-up analyses have suggested that the four dimensions were nested beneath a general, latent organizational justice factor. A positive relationship between organizational justice and self-sacrificial behavior was found, indicating satisfactory construct validity. The results demonstrate that the Norwegian Organizational Justice Scale is a reliable and construct-valid measure of organizational justice in a Norwegian setting.     

On the Stability of Psychological Hardiness: A Three-Year Longitudinal Study

More than 30 years of research has established psychological hardiness as an important individual resiliency resource. One important question still remaining is whether psychological hardiness can be trained. The present study explored this question longitudinally within the context of a 3-year military academy training program. Cadets from 3 different Norwegian military academies (N = 293) completed hardiness questionnaires during the first week of their training, and then again at the end of each year, resulting in a total of 4 waves of data. Using hierarchical linear modeling, no statistically significant effect of time on hardiness scores was found. The nonsignificant growth parameter was examined further using Bayesian statistics as an indicator of the relative evidence for the null hypothesis of no change over time versus the alternative hypothesis of change. The resulting Bayes factor provided substantial support in our data for the null hypothesis of no hardiness development during the 3-year officer training programs.     

Transculturality and tradition - renewing the continuous in late modernity

The status and sovereignty of Jerusalem remains one of the most difficult, not to say the most difficult issue to be resolved before a lasting peace can arrive to the Middle East region. This article assumes that any solution to the Jerusalem-issue should be strongly accompanied by a shared vision of it among Jews, Christians and Muslims. In order to explore and elucidate the religious importance and reconciliatory potential of Jerusalem, selected writings by the British scholar and Anglican bishop Kenneth Cragg are examined in light of metaphorical theory (Lakoff &; Johnson). The article demonstrates how the theological and interreligious elasticity of Cragg's approach related to core issues within Christian teaching, and in conversation with the Jewish and Islamic tradition, exhibits an attempt at negotiation and expansion of the meaning of Jerusalem. Such attempts are surely needed if this central metaphor is to be shared among people and traditions with high stakes in the Holy City.     

Tests of the ratio rule in categorization.

Many theories of learning and memory (e.g., connectionist, associative, rational, exemplar based) produce psychological magnitude terms as output (i.e., numbers representing the momentary level of some subjective property). Many theories assume that these numbers may be translated into choice probabilities via the ratio rule, also known as the choice axiom (Luce, 1959) or the constant-ratio rule (Clarke, 1957). We present two categorization experiments employing artificial, visual, prototype-structured stimuli constructed from 12 symbols positioned on a grid. The ratio rule is shown to be incorrect for these experiments, given the assumption that the magnitude terms for each category are univariate functions of the number of category-appropriate symbols contained in the presented stimulus. A connectionist winner-take-all model of categorical decision (Wills & McLaren, 1997) is shown to account for our data given the same assumption. The central feature underlying the success of this model is the assumption that categorical decisions are based on a Thurstonian choice process (Thurstone, 1927, Case V) whose noise distribution is not double exponential in form.     

How incidental values from the environment affect decisions about money, risk, and delay

How different are ￡0.50 and ￡1.50, "a small chance" and "a good chance," or "three months" and "nine months"? Our studies show that people behave as if the differences between these values are altered by incidental everyday experiences. Preference for a ￡1.50 lottery rather than a ￡0.50 lottery was stronger among individuals exposed to intermediate supermarket prices than among those exposed to lower or higher prices. Preference for "a good chance" rather than "a small chance" of winning a lottery was stronger among participants who predicted intermediate probabilities of rain than among those who predicted lower or higher chances of rain. Preference for consumption in "three months" rather than "nine months" was stronger among participants who planned for an intermediate birthday than among participants who planned for a sooner or later birthday. These fluctuations directly challenge economic accounts that translate monies, risks, and delays into subjective equivalents with stable functions. The decision-by-sampling model-in which subjective values are rank positions constructed from comparisons with samples-predicts these effects and indicates a primary role for sampling in decision making.