WALKER PERCY,LANGUAGE, AND HOMO SINGULARIS

The novelist Walker Percy argued that modern science has a tremendous blind spot in its view of human nature. Unlike purely physical phenomena, which can be explained by the interaction of dyadic relationships, human beings must also be understood in terms of triadic relationships brought into being by symbolic language. The self brought into being by symbolic language is nonmaterial but real, and operates by different “laws” than those that govern dyadic relations. In making this case, Percy drew a sharp line between human and nonhuman language, a line that more recent developments in science has challenged. However, Percy's central point, that the agent of symbolic language cannot be understood within a materialist framework, remains valid.     

Question-begging and infinite regress

InMetaphysics , Ch. 4, Aristotle speaks of both infinite regress and question-begging, but does not explicitly relate them. We get the impression that he thinks that to use one of these arguments to avoid the other is to jump from the frying-pan into the fire. This relationship is illustrated in terms of the ignorant belief that everything can be proved, and of attempts to prove the Law of Noncontradiction.     

Christian Couple Counseling by Professional,Pastoral, and Lay Counselors from a Protestant Perspective: A Nationwide Survey

Couple counseling is widely practiced by Christian counselors, but there are almost no empirical data investigating it. The present study presents data from a national web-based survey of counselors from the American Association of Christian Counselors (AACC). We describe the nature of Christian couple counseling, as well as counselors' religiousness and their attitudes toward integrating religion and spirituality into couple counseling. Christian couple counselors were highly religious and their personal religiosity affected their attitude toward incorporating religion in counseling. There were differences between professional, pastoral, and lay counselors suggesting that each be treated separately rather than be lumped generically as Christian couple counseling.     

Relational Knowing and Epistemic Injustice: Toward a Theory of Willful Hermeneutical Ignorance

I distinguish between two senses in which feminists have argued that the knower is social: 1. situated or socially positioned and 2. interdependent. I argue that these two aspects of the knower work in cooperation with each other in a way that can produce willful hermeneutical ignorance, a type of epistemic injustice absent from Miranda Fricker's Epistemic Injustice. Analyzing the limitations of Fricker's analysis of the trial of Tom Robinson in Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird with attention to the way in which situatedness and interdependence work in tandem, I develop an understanding of willful hermeneutical ignorance, which occurs when dominantly situated knowers refuse to acknowledge epistemic tools developed from the experienced world of those situated marginally. Such refusals allow dominantly situated knowers to misunderstand, misinterpret, and/or ignore whole parts of the world.     

The Effect of Embodied Temperature on Perceptions of Global Warming

Recent research has established that individuals?? perception of global warming is malleable such that individuals report that it is a more serious problem when they experience higher outdoor or indoor temperatures (Li et al. Psychological Science, 22(4), 454?C459, 2011; Risen and Critcher Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 100(5), 777?C793, 2011). We extend these findings on the experience of actual temperature by testing whether the embodied experience of temperature, manipulated by participants chewing cinnamon or mint gum, can activate the concept of temperature and influence perception of global warming. As predicted, compared to those who did not chew gum, those experiencing embodied temperature through chewing gum reported greater concern for global warming, but not other social problems, and were more likely to volunteer for a global warming group on campus. This suggests that the physical experience of tasting cinnamon or mint gum activated the larger conceptual system of temperature changes that subsequently influenced beliefs about global warming.     

Improving Working Memory in Children with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder: The Separate and Combined Effects of Incentives and Stimulant Medication

Working memory (WM) is considered a core deficit in Attention-Deficit/ Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), with numerous studies demonstrating impaired WM among children with ADHD. We tested the degree to which WM in children with ADHD was improved by performance-based incentives, an analog of behavioral intervention. In two studies, WM performance was assessed using a visuo-spatial n-back task. Study 1 compared children (ages 9-12?years) with ADHD-Combined type (n?=?24) to a group of typically developing (TD) children (n?=?32). Study 1 replicated WM deficits among children with ADHD. Incentives improved WM, particularly among children with ADHD. The provision of incentives reduced the ADHD-control group difference by approximately half but did not normalize WM. Study 2 examined the separate and combined effects of incentives and stimulant medication among 17 children with ADHD-Combined type. Both incentives and a moderate dose of long-acting methylphenidate (MPH; ~0.3?mg/kg t.i.d. equivalent) robustly improved WM relative to the no-incentive, placebo condition. The combination of incentives and medication improved WM significantly more than either incentives or MPH alone. These studies indicate that contingencies markedly improve WM among children with ADHD-Combined type, with effect sizes comparable to a moderate dose of stimulant medication. More broadly, this work calls attention to the role of motivation in studying cognitive deficits in ADHD and in testing multifactorial models of ADHD.     

Test-retest reliability of an emotion maintenance task

Research on working memory has suggested domain-specific components for visual, verbal, and spatial information, and more recently for emotion. Affective working memory has been proposed as the set of processes involved in the maintenance of emotions to guide behaviour. The current study examined the reliability of an emotion maintenance/affective working memory task over two experimental sessions separated by one week. Subjective accuracy based on individual ratings was found to correlate over time and was highest for negatively valenced pictures. Results suggest that this paradigm is a reliable measure of emotion maintenance, underscoring the utility of this measure as an assessment tool for normative and clinical populations.     

Interference due to shared features between action plans is influenced by working memory span

In this study, we examined the interactions between the action plans that we hold in memory and the actions that we carry out, asking whether the interference due to shared features between action plans is due to selection demands imposed on working memory. Individuals with low and high working memory spans learned arbitrary motor actions in response to two different visual events (A and B), presented in a serial order. They planned a response to the first event (A) and while maintaining this action plan in memory they then executed a speeded response to the second event (B). Afterward, they executed the action plan for the first event (A) maintained in memory. Speeded responses to the second event (B) were delayed when it shared an action feature (feature overlap) with the first event (A), relative to when it did not (no feature overlap). The size of the feature-overlap delay was greater for low-span than for high-span participants. This indicates that interference due to overlapping action plans is greater when fewer working memory resources are available, suggesting that this interference is due to selection demands imposed on working memory. Thus, working memory plays an important role in managing current and upcoming action plans, at least for newly learned tasks. Also, managing multiple action plans is compromised in individuals who have low versus high working memory spans.