Knowing through the felt-sense: a gesture of openness to the other

In the discussion of children’s spirituality and education, David Hay and Brendan Hyde place emphasis on the felt-sense. Originally identified by the psychotherapist Eugene Gendlin, the felt-sense is a way of knowing that involves attentiveness to the body and body wisdom. Although emphasised by Hay and Hyde, the felt-sense does not feature strongly in the academic discussion of children’s spiritual education. This article compares Gendlin’s use of the term ‘felt-sense’ with that of Hay and Hyde, and discusses understandings of the felt-sense and body wisdom gathered through interviews with focusing, shiatsu and yoga practitioners, and through the author’s encounters with these practices. The article considers synergies between the notions of ‘felt-sense’ and ‘bildung’, as described by Gadamer, and concludes that their shared openness to the other points to ‘a way of being’ for the educator which may hold the greatest value for spiritual education, given the complexity of post-secular spiritual identity.     

Aggregation, acquiescence, and the assessment of trait affectivity

General affect ratings are subject to problems that lessen their validity. Some critics therefore have argued that aggregated on-line ratings provide better measures of trait affectivity. However, aggregated mood ratings suffer from two significant problems. First, correlations among same-valenced affects are substantially higher, indicating poorer discriminant validity. Second, cross-valence correlations are much weaker, reflecting a virtual absence of bipolarity. We show how both of these effects are due to an inflated acquiescence component in aggregated data. We also demonstrate that (a) these effects are a direct result of the aggregation process itself and (b) controlling for acquiescence counteracts these effects. These results indicate that the validity of aggregated mood ratings is lessened by an augmented acquiescence component.     

Theologia Incurvata In Se Ipse?: One Feminist Theologian’s Reading of Eberhard Jüngel’s Theology

Books reviewed in this article:
Eberhard Jüngel, Justification: The Heart of the Christian Faith
Eberhard Jüngel, God's Being is in Becoming: The Trinitarian Being of God in the Theology of Karl Barth. A Paraphrase     

Self‐Priming in Production: Evidence for a Hybrid Model of Syntactic Priming

Syntactic priming in language production is the increased likelihood of using a recently encountered syntactic structure. In this paper, we examine two theories of why speakers can be primed: error‐driven learning accounts (Bock, Dell, Chang, & Onishi, 2007; Chang, Dell, & Bock, 2006) and activation‐based accounts (Pickering & Branigan, 1999; Reitter, Keller, & Moore, 2011). Both theories predict that speakers should be primed by the syntactic choices of others, but only activation‐based accounts predict that speakers should be able to prime themselves. Here we test whether speakers can be primed by their own productions in three behavioral experiments and find evidence of structural persistence following both comprehension and speakers’ own productions. We also find that comprehension‐based priming effects are larger for rarer syntactic structures than for more common ones, which is most consistent with error‐driven accounts. Because neither error‐driven accounts nor activation‐based accounts fully explain the data, we propose a hybrid model.