Action and emotion in everyday life

This study of naturally occurring behaviour employed a "beeper technique" to investigate the actions carried out by 152 subjects in eight different groups, viz. adult students, employed students who were also parents, unemployed, art students, doctoral students, alcoholics, retired people and a control group. Actions were sampled for seven subsequent days, five times per day between 8 a.m. and 10 p.m. at randomly selected occasions. Each action was rated on a number of variables, shortly after it was sampled (median delay approximately 10 min). Some of the findings were: Time allocation corresponded well with national estimates. Being under situational control was highly aversive. Instrumental and consummatory orientations correlated positively. The background variables were, on the whole, only rather weakly related to action ratings, but it was found that women and retired persons tended to report a higher level of well-being.     

Documentary Bioethics: Visual Narratives for Generations X and Y

Narrative bioethics is primarily understood to involve storytelling through the use of literature. This article suggests that other forms of media are necessary to convey stories of an ethical nature to an audience broader than one being trained as medical professionals. "Documentary bioethics" is a manner to present and interpret stories of an ethical nature using forms of popular electronic media in a reality-based documentary style to society at large, specifically Generations X and Y.     

Adolescents' relationships to siblings and mothers: a multivariate genetic analysis.

Research has consistently demonstrated that children's behavior toward their siblings tends to resemble interactions occurring in the parent-child relationship. This study examined the relative contributions of genetic and environmental influences to the covariation between sibling relationships and mother-adolescent relationships. Reported and observed family interactions were assessed for 719 same-sex sibling pairs of varying degrees of genetic relatedness. The covariance between mother-adolescent and sibling interactions was decomposed into genetic, shared, and nonshared environmental components. The overlapping effects of shared environment on the two relationship subsystems explained most of the covariance. Smaller but significant genetic and nonshared environmental effects were also found. The consistency of these findings with family processes, such as modeling, is discussed.     

A new look at time and eternity

In his Systematic Theology, Vol. III, Wolfhart Pannenberg argues that God as eternal comprehends the different moments of time simultaneously and orders them to constitute a whole or totality. The author contends that this approach to time and eternity might solve the logical tension between the classical notion of divine sovereignty and the common sense belief in creaturely spontaneity/human freedom. For, if the existence of the events constituting a temporal sequence is primarily due to the spontaneous decisions of creatures, and if their being ordered into a totality or meaningful whole is primarily due to the superordinate activity of God, then both God and creatures play indispensable but nevertheless distinct roles in the cosmic process.     

Church and Culture: Protestant and CatholicModernities

This article reviews the church and culture relationship developed in Gaudium et Spes and Lumen Gentium and proposes a Catholic account of modernity as a way in which the contemporary mission of the church in today's culture can be creatively and faithfully carried forward. After an initial outlining of the definitions of church and culture proposed by the Vatican documents, I then go on to position my proposal of a Catholic modernity in relation to some important current accounts of the church and culture relationship that tend towards a rejection of secular culture. I argue that Protestant accounts of modernity have dominated in philosophical and sociological theories and draw on my previous work on Max Weber to illustrate the significance of this for developing a Catholic account of modernity. I conclude by sketching some of the important issues which would need to be addressed in formulating a systematic account of a Catholic modernity.     

The importance of shared environmental influences in explaining the overlap between mother's parenting and sibling relationships: reply to Neale (1999)

This article addresses concerns raised by M. C. Neale (1999) in his commentary on the D. A. Bussell et al. (1999) Nonshared Environment in Adolescent Development (NEAD) study. These concerns fall into two categories: (a) model assumptions and sample design and (b) testing of alternative models. The validity of the assumptions of quantitative genetic models is a concern for all researchers in this area. Discussion of those assumptions in this reply is brief and focuses on those most relevant to the NEAD sample. The two alternative models proposed by Neale were designed to provide alternatives to the large shared environmental effect found in the original report of Bussell et al. Because these alternative models did not provide a better fit, the appropriateness of Bussell et al.'s basic model and the importance of shared environmental influences for explaining the association among family subsystems are supported.