Kierkegaard's accounts of faith: Their relative centrality

This article is an attempt to clarify the concept of apatheia as it appears in the Praktikos of Evagrius of Pontus. The condition (katastasis) of apatheia is central to the Evagrian understanding of the goal of monastic life, and the Praktikos is the treatise in the writings of Evagrius which deals most thoroughly with apatheia. The thesis of the article is that apatheia should be understood in terms of the Platonic distinction between stability and movement, and apatheia, thus, appears to be two different kinds of conditions, namely imperfect apatheia, related to the daily ascetic struggle of the monks against the demons and the thoughts, and perfect apatheia, related to the peaceful condition of undisturbed prayer, in which the mind contemplates the holy Trinity.     

Rich contexts do not always enrich the accuracy of personality judgments

We test the common assumption that information ‘rich’ contexts lead to more accurate personality judgments than information ‘lean’ contexts. Pairs of unacquainted students rendered judgments of one another's personalities after interacting in one of three, increasingly rich, contexts: Internet ‘chat’, telephone, or face-to-face. Accuracy was assessed by correlating participants' judgments with a measure of targets' personalities that averaged self and informant ratings. As predicted, the visible traits of extraversion and conscientiousness were judged more accurately than the less visible traits of neuroticism and openness. However, judgment accuracy also depended on context. Judgments of extraversion and neuroticism improved as context richness increased (i.e., from Internet ‘chat’ to face-to-face), whereas judgments of conscientiousness and openness improved as context richness decreased (i.e., from face-to-face to Internet ‘chat’). Our findings suggest that context richness shapes not only the availability of personality cues but also the relevance of cues in any given context.     

Deductive temporal reasoning with constraints

When modelling realistic systems, physical constraints on the resources available are often required. For example, we might say that at most N processes can access a particular resource at any moment, exactly M participants are needed for an agreement, or an agent can be in exactly one mode at any moment. Such situations are concisely modelled where literals are constrained such that at most N, or exactly M, can hold at any moment in time. In this paper we consider a logic which is a combination of standard propositional linear time temporal logic with cardinality constraints restricting the numbers of literals that can be satisfied at any moment in time. We present the logic and show how to represent a number of case studies using this logic. We propose a tableau-like algorithm for checking the satisfiability of formulae in this logic, provide details of a prototype implementation and present experimental results using the prover.     

The Use of a Child-Based Acceptance and Commitment Therapy Curriculum to Increase Attention

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) is a treatment that integrates mindfulness and acceptance training with behavior change processes. One of the core processes in ACT is contact with the present moment which involves shifting attention to what is happening here and now, contacting both internal and external stimuli. An experimental and control group were used to determine the impact ACT had on attention. ACT participants (M?=?5.4, SD?=?9.8) showed fewer inaccuracies on the CPT-X task compared to the control group (M?=?19.75, SD?=?16.1) at posttest F(1, 38)?=?11.49, p?=?.02, ηp²?=?.232. Results of the current study demonstrate participation in the use of an ACT curriculum for children to help increase attention outcomes.     

Parent-Led Exposure Therapy: A Pilot Study of a Brief Behavioral Treatment for Anxiety in Young Children

Despite prevalence rates as high as 9.4%, few studies have examined the applicability of cognitive-behavioral therapy for treatment of anxiety disorders in very young children (i.e., below the age of 7 years). The present study examined the preliminary efficacy of a parent-led exposure therapy protocol (PLET) designed for young children with anxiety disorders. Twenty-two youth aged 4–7 years and their parents participated in this pilot randomized control trial. Families of youth with significant anxiety concerns were randomized to either PLET (n?=?12), a 10 session/5-week family-based exposure therapy program designed to target anxiety in young children, or treatment as usual (TAU; n?=?10). Children in the PLET condition demonstrated a greater reduction in anxiety symptoms compared to TAU (d?=?3.18), with 90.91% of PLET participants (active condition) being classified as treatment responders at post-treatment as opposed to 0 in the TAU condition. Gains were maintained at 1 month-follow-up. Although pilot in nature, these data suggest in a preliminary fashion that a parent led exposure therapy protocol that is adapted appropriately for developmental age and incorporates an active coaching component for parents may be efficacious for the treatment of young children with anxiety disorders. This clinical trial was registered through clinicaltrials.gov under the following identifier: NCT02051192.     

Happy Family Kitchen: Behavioral Outcomes of a Brief Community-Based Family Intervention in Hong Kong

Positive psychology interventions commonly involve behavioral exercises to improve psychosocial well-being. Intervention effect on behavior is unclear. The Happy Family Kitchen project, one of the community-based brief intervention projects under The FAMILY: A Jockey Club Initiative for a Harmonious Society, was conducted in Hong Kong to develop and evaluate the effectiveness of a positive psychology family intervention. We have previously reported positive intervention effects on family communication, family well-being, and subjective happiness. This paper aims to explore the effectiveness of the intervention on behavioral outcomes and their associations with psychosocial well-being. A total of 23 social service units organized and conducted intervention programs for 1419 individuals from 612 families in Hong Kong. Each intervention was developed with emphasis on one of five positive psychology themes: gratitude, flow, happiness, health, and savoring. Intervention outcomes were assessed at pre-intervention, immediate post-intervention, and 6 weeks and 12 weeks post-intervention. Results showed that family communication time and frequency of meal preparation with family members increased with sustainable small effects up to 12 weeks. Theme-specific behavior change was observed in the gratitude, flow, and happiness interventions, respectively. Family communication time, frequency of eating with family members, and theme-specific behaviors, including gratitude, flow, happiness behavior, health attitude, and health behavior, were positively associated with psychosocial well-being. Qualitative data provided additional evidence of effectiveness with in-depth insights into behavior change. The positive associations between target behaviors and well-being suggest that improvements in well-being as a function of the intervention may be associated with behavior change.     

Singaporean kindergartners' phonological awareness and English writing skills

This article describes the phonological awareness and English writing skills among a sample of 297 Singaporean kindergarten children, stratified by ethnicity (Chinese, Malay, and Indian), and examines the relationship between oral language and writing skills in this multilingual population. Overall, Singaporean kindergartners, nearly all of whom were bilingual, scored higher on English writing but lower on English oral language skills than U.S. norms. Despite literacy instruction that emphasized whole-word memorization, phonological awareness statistically significantly predicted English writing scores, controlling for English vocabulary, ethnicity, sex, and an interaction between English vocabulary and sex. The current study's findings highlight the possibility of developing high literacy skills among bilingual learners with low oral language skills. In addition, the study demonstrates children's development of phonological awareness in the absence of phonological awareness or phonics instruction and supports the theory that both alphabetic (phonological) processes and logographic (whole-word) processes contribute to successful English literacy achievement.     

Derived transformation of children's pregambling game playing

Contemporary behavior-analytic perspectives on gambling emphasize the impact of verbal relations, or derived relational responding and the transformation of stimulus functions, on the initiation and maintenance of gambling. Approached in this way, it is possible to undertake experimental analysis of the role of verbal/mediational variables in gambling behavior. The present study therefore sought to demonstrate the ways new stimuli could come to have functions relevant to gambling without those functions being trained directly. Following a successful derived-equivalence-relations test, a simulated board game established high- and low-roll functions for two concurrently presented dice labelled with members of the derived relations. During the test for derived transformation, children were reexposed to the board game with dice labelled with indirectly related stimuli. All participants except 1 who passed the equivalence relations test selected the die that was indirectly related to the trained high-roll die more often than the die that was indirectly related to low-roll die, despite the absence of differential outcomes. All participants except 3 also gave the derived high-roll die higher liking ratings than the derived low-roll die. The implications of the findings for behavior-analytic research on gambling and the development of verbally-based interventions for disordered gambling are discussed.     

Effect of Representational Distance Between Meanings on Recognition of Ambiguous Spoken Words

Previous research indicates that mental representations of word meanings are distributed along both semantic and syntactic dimensions such that nouns and verbs are relatively distinct from one another. Two experiments examined the effect of representational distance between meanings on recognition of ambiguous spoken words by comparing recognition of unambiguous words, noun–verb homonyms, and noun–noun homonyms. In Experiment 1, auditory lexical decision was fastest for unambiguous words, slower for noun–verb homonyms, and slowest for noun–noun homonyms. In Experiment 2, response times for matching spoken words to pictures followed the same pattern and eye fixation time courses revealed converging, gradual time course differences between conditions. These results indicate greater competition between meanings of ambiguous words when the meanings are from the same grammatical class (noun–noun homonyms) than when they are from different grammatical classes (noun–verb homonyms).     

Fortid,Nutid, Fremtid (Past,Present, Future): Professional Counseling in Denmark

In this article, the authors offer a comprehensive overview of the counseling profession in Denmark. The history and development of counseling is considered, followed by a review of the current state of Danish professional counseling. Finally, impressions of the future of professional counseling in Denmark are presented based on the past and current trends.