Coping With Strain (CWS) course – its effects on depressive symptoms: A four‐year longitudinal randomized controlled trial

The Coping With Strain (CWS) course is a modification of the Coping With Depression (CWD) course. CWD is by far the most studied psycho‐educational intervention to reduce and prevent depression, but CWD has never been tested in a randomized controlled trial in the workplace. This study seeks to examine the extent to which CWS, on a short‐term and a long‐term basis, reduces depressive symptoms in employees. After advertising at workplaces, 119 employees were randomized into Intervention Group I (IG1), which immediately participated in CWS, or Intervention Group II (IG2), which functioned as a control group for six months until its participation in CWS. The follow up period lasted for four years in both IG1 and IG2. Linear mixed models were fitted to the data. Depressive symptoms were significantly reduced during the course. The reduction of depressive symptoms was maintained over a period of four years in both IG1 and IG2, although there is a slight increase towards the end of the follow‐up period. CWS is effective in reducing depressive symptoms among employees. The effects are long lasting and may be maintained over a period of four years.     

Dissociative Experiences and Trauma Exposure Among Newly Arrived and Settled Young War Refugees

War-traumatized refugee adolescents are a vulnerable and understudied group. This study of two different groups of war-traumatized youth (N = 77) resettled in Sweden (newly arrived refugee adolescents, n = 42, 13–19 years, and settled students with childhood war experiences, n = 35, 11–18 years) evaluated their war experiences, refugee journey, general trauma exposure, posttraumatic stress symptoms, and dissociative experiences. Both groups had experienced many traumas and a substantial proportion reported levels consistent with posttraumatic stress (71% in the newly arrived group and 34% among the settled students) and dissociation (36% and 23%, respectively). The study also provides information about the type of adverse events experienced by war-refugee adolescents, including their own subjective appraisals of the worst events. The results show that the extent of trauma exposure and posttraumatic and dissociative symptomatology among refugee adolescents are considerable even after a period of resettlement, a finding that has educational, clinical, and social implications.     

From Compassion to Obedience: Gender and Emotion in Two Danish Prayer Books

Drawing from recent scholarship on prayer, identity formation and the history and sociology of emotion, this article explores the intersection of gender and emotion in two Danish prayer books dating from before and after the Lutheran Reformation in 1536. It is argued that the introduction of Lutheranism in Denmark resulted in a more strictly gendered understanding of family prayer. In this, the social and emotional ideal of obedience to paternal authority came to eclipse the expression of compassion with the suffering Christ that was a characteristic feature of late-medieval prayer.     

Konzeption zum Umgang mit rückfallgef?hrdeten Sexualstraft?tern (KURS NRW)

The concept of the management of sexual offenders at risk for recidivism in Northrhine-Wesfalia (Konzeption zumUmgang mitrückfallgef?hrdetenSexualstraft?tern in Nordrhein-Westfalen, KURS NRW) came into effect on February 1, 2010 with a joint circular of the Ministries of Justice, Health and the Interior. Thereby Northrhine-Westfalia has created a systematic for monitoring sexual offenders at risk for recidivism, comparable to those already or in the meantime developed in other federal states in Germany. This article initially describes the procedural nature underlying the KURS concept, regarding mutual information routing and collaboration between the parties involved, i.e. justice, hospital order treatment, police and if necessary others as well. In addition, the framework in which KURS is ingrained, will be shown. Based on case reports this article will finally explain how actions and reactions will be specified in case conferences. Within the systematic KURS it is important that all participants reach all relevant information expeditiously, thus being able to react within their own jurisdiction. When planning actions it is essential to carefully consider the individual case parameters. Within the case conferences it remains a strength of the KURS concept that different perspectives of the case and the offender are bundled together. Ideally this and the case-specific actions will help to avoid similar offences to those committed previously.     

To read two pages,I need 5 minutes,but give me 5 minutes and I will read four: how to change productivity estimates by inverting the question

Past research has shown that people underestimate the time they need to complete large tasks, whereas completion times for smaller tasks are often overestimated, suggesting higher productivity estimates for larger than for smaller tasks. By replacing the traditional question about how much time a given work will take with a question about how much work can be completed within a given amount of time, we also found the opposite pattern. Both trends could reflect a general tendency to underestimate large amounts (of work as well as time) relatively to small ones. This ‘magnitude bias’ was explored in two studies where students estimated reading tasks, a third where IT‐professionals estimated software projects, and a fourth where participants imagined a familiar walk, divided into time segments or part distances of varying lengths. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Difficult but Necessary: Conditions of a Contemporary Theology of Love

Abstract : Nørager takes his point of departure in the observation that in modernity “love” has increasingly and undisputedly acquired the status as the fundamental attribute of God. This in turn, however, has made a theology of love vulnerable to the critique leveled by Ludwig Feuerbach, who argued forcefully that God's love in reality was nothing but humanity's ideal of perfect love. Briefly rehearsing two of the most important solutions to this conundrum (Søren Kierkegaard and Anders Nygren), Nørager finds both of them unduly polemical toward “natural” love, leaving us with the idea of a dichotomy or inner opposition between human and divine love. Instead, Nørager points toward a new theology of love where eros and agape are recognized as differing aspects within a continuum of love, and where human and divine love are perceived as mirroring one another.     

Ordinary experience and the epoché: Husserl and Heidegger versus Rosen (and Cavell)

In various publications, Stanley Cavell and Stanley Rosen have emphasized the philosophical importance of what they both call “the ordinary.” They both contrast their recovery of “the ordinary” with traditional philosophy, including the phenomenological philosophy of Edmund Husserl. In this paper, I address Rosen’s claims in particular. I argue that Rosen turns the real situation on its head. Contra Rosen, it is not the case that the employment of Husserl’s epoché distorts the authentic voice of “the” ordinary—a voice that is clearly audible only from within everyday life. For (pace both Cavell and Rosen) there is no single “voice” of the ordinary: There are many such “voices,” not all of which are to be relied upon. Therefore, if we want to achieve an adequate grasp of ordinary experience, and Rosen does want this, we precisely need the epoché to curtail the misleading messages of certain other “voices of the ordinary.” Moreover, and somewhat surprisingly, this positive evaluation of the Husserlian epoché finds support in Heidegger’s writings from the twenties. I argue that Heidegger, too, believed that the epoché was an indispensable tool for the philosophical attempt to capture ordinary experience.     

Auditory verbal hallucinations: Dialoguing between the cognitive sciences and phenomenology

Auditory verbal hallucinations (AVHs) are a highly complex and rich phenomena, and this has a number of important clinical, theoretical and methodological implications. However, until recently, this fact has not always been incorporated into the experimental designs and theoretical paradigms used by researchers within the cognitive sciences. In this paper, we will briefly outline two recent examples of phenomenologically informed approaches to the study of AVHs taken from a cognitive science perspective. In the first example, based on Larøi and Woodward (Harv Rev Psychiatry 15:109–117, 2007), it is argued that reality monitoring studies examining the cognitive underpinnings of hallucinations have not reflected the phenomenological complexity of AVHs in their experimental designs and theoretical framework. The second example, based on Jones (Schizophr Bull, in press, 2010), involves a critical examination of the phenomenology of AVHs in the context of two other prominent cognitive models: inner speech and intrusions from memory. It will be shown that, for both examples, the integration of a phenomenological analysis provides important improvements both on a methodological, theoretical and clinical level. This will be followed by insights and critiques from philosophy and clinical psychiatry—both of which offer a phenomenological alternative to the empiricist–rationalist conceptualisation of AVHs inherent to the cognitive sciences approach. Finally, the paper will conclude with ideas as to how the cognitive sciences may integrate these latter perspectives into their methodological and theoretical programmes.