Child’s Play: Anatomically Correct Dolls and Embodiment

Anatomically detailed dolls have been used to elicit testimony from children in sex abuse cases. However, studies have shown they often provide false accounts in young, preschool-age children. Typically this problem is seen as a cognitive one: with age, children can correctly map their bodies onto a doll due to greater intellectual ability to represent themselves. I argue, along with the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, that although cognitive developments aid in the ability to represent one’s own body, a discussion of embodiment is required in order to understand the use and abuse of anatomical dolls in forensic interviews. This paper examines these issues and maintains that a better understanding of embodied perception in both adults and children helps show how phenomenology can provide a more nuanced understanding to a troubling ethical and legal problem.

Beneficial academic orientations and self-actualization of college students

This study tested the prediction that individual differences in self-actualization would be associated with six academic orientations which influence college students' adjustment to their studies. Volunteer undergraduates, solicited from courses in the sciences and liberal arts and invited to complete internet measures of the academic orientations and self-actualization were 137 men and 311 women (M age=21.1, SD=4.8). Statistically significant bivariate correlations obtained between scores on self-actualization with all six orientations: creative expression, reading for pleasure, academic efficacy, and, inversely, structure dependence, academic apathy, and mistrust of instructors. Regression analysis showed that four orientations were independently related to self-actualization scores. The role of these four orientations in actualizing students' adjustment was discussed, and implications were drawn about the interpretation of scores on the four orientations.     

Illness, disease and sin: the connection between genetics and spirituality.

The New Testament, while rejecting any superficial connection between illness and sin, does not reject a possible connection between illness and a person's relationship with God. An example can be seen in the story of the young blind man who was healed (St. John 9:3). His blindness does not result from any fault he or his parents had committed but apparently from God's wish to reveal his own healing power. The inner blindness of the Pharisees is a different type of blindness far more difficult to heal. The blind young man was actually healed, not only in body but also in soul. Such miraculous healings are rare nowadays. However, if one takes a closer look at modern genetics and psycho-neuro-immunological findings, one may come to a better understanding of how miracle healings are linked to man's inner life and therefore also to his religiousness. Many diseases have genetic backgrounds. Defective genes, however, do not necessarily lead to subsequent illness. Genes have to be switched on or off. Only activated genes trigger pathological change. The human brain and all of man's thinking and feeling are intimately connected with such activations. We may thus conclude that both inner life and religious outlook on life are relevant to the origin and development of diseases.     

Is the delay discounting paradigm useful in understanding social anxiety?

The delay discounting paradigm was used to examine its utility in understanding motivational factors among socially anxious individuals. Participants (n=88) who reported high and low levels of social anxiety were randomly assigned to either a social threat or non-threat condition and their subsequent rates of discounting were examined. A significant difference in rates of discounting was found between the high and low social anxiety groups within the non-threat condition, with high social anxiety participants showing increased discounting. This study suggests that a modified version of the delay discounting paradigm may be useful in understanding motivational factors in social anxiety.     

Back to the self and the future

The thought-experiment presented by Bernard Williams in ‘The self and the future’ continues to draw the attention of writers in the debate about personal identity. While few of them agree on what implications it has for the debate, almost all agree that those implications are significant ones. Some have even claimed that it has consequences not only for personal identity, but also concerning the viability of thought-experiment as a method. This paper surveys what these consequences might be at both levels—as a substantive contribution to the debate on identity, and as to what it shows about the usefulness of thought-experiments. It argues ultimately that thought-experiments like Williams's do provide a useful philosophical tool as long as we temper our expectations of them, and that it offers some support to a view of personal identity but one which is at odds with Williams's own view.     

Conditional Reasoning and Emotional Experience: A Review of the Development of Counterfactual Thinking

What do human beings use conditional reasoning for? A psychological consequence of counterfactual conditional reasoning is emotional experience, in particular, regret and relief. Adults’ thoughts about what might have been influence their evaluations of reality. We discuss recent psychological experiments that chart the relationship between children’s ability to engage in conditional reasoning and their experience of counterfactual emotions. Relative to conditional reasoning, counterfactual emotions are late developing. This suggests that children need not only competence in conditional reasoning, but also to engage in this thinking spontaneously. Developments in domain general cognitive processing (the executive functions) allow children to develop from conditional reasoning to reasoning with counterfactual content and, eventually, to experiencing counterfactual emotions.