Hartshorne’s Dipolar Theism and the Mystery of God

Anselm said that God is that than which nothing greater can be conceived, but he believed that it followed that God is greater than can be conceived. The second formula—essential to sound theology—points to the mystery of God. The usual way of preserving divine mystery is the via negativa, as one finds in Aquinas. I formalize Hartshorne’s central argument against negative theology in the simplest modal system T. I end with a defense of Hartshorne’s way of preserving the mystery of God, which he locates in the actuality of God rather than in the divine existence or essence. This paper was delivered during the APA Pacific 2007 Mini-Conference on Models of God.     

Reputation as a moderator of political behavior-work outcomes relationships: a two-study investigation with convergent results

Personal reputation has been acknowledged to have an important influence on work outcomes. However, substantive research has been relatively scarce to date. The 2-study research plan reported here supports reputation's role as a moderator of the relationships between political behavior and the work outcomes of uncertainty, emotional exhaustion, and job performance ratings (i.e., self- and supervisor report). The 1st investigation contained both a pilot study, which was undertaken to demonstrate the consistency of self- and others' perceptions of reputation, and a test of the substantive relationships. The 2nd study served as a constructive replication of the hypothesized relationships. Supporting prior research, Study 1 demonstrated that self-reports of personal reputation were significantly related to peer report. In each study, political behavior was associated with decreased uncertainty and emotional exhaustion and increased job performance ratings for individuals with a favorable reputation. Conversely, political behavior predicted increased uncertainty and emotional exhaustion and decreased job performance ratings for individuals with an unfavorable reputation. Implications of these results, strengths and limitations, and directions for future research are discussed.     

How Do Children Stigmatize People With Mental Illness?

A way to promote eliminating stigma surrounding mental illnesses is targeting the phenomenon in children. This study's purpose is to validate models of mental illness stigma on children in Grades 6–8. Children completed the revised Attribution Questionnaire in a pretest of a larger study on a mental health education program. Data from this study permitted testing of roles of demographics in these social cognitive models. Subsequent analyses using manifest model structural equations were mixed, but mostly showed adequate fit for multiple versions of the models. These results suggest that models of blame and dangerousness are relevant to the way 10 to 13-year-olds stigmatize mental illness. Demographics were not found to fit these models satisfactorily. Implications of these findings for stigma-change agenda are discussed.     

Embedding an identity-matching task within a prompting hierarchy to facilitate acquisition of conditional discriminations in children with autism

Least-to-most prompting hierarchies (e.g., progressing from verbal to modeled to physical prompts until the target response occurs) may be ineffective when the prompts do not cue the individual to attend to the relevant stimulus dimensions. In such cases, emission of the target response persistently requires one or more of the higher level prompts, a condition called prompt dependence (Clark & Green, 2004). Reinforcement of differential observing responses (DORs) has sometimes been used to ensure that participants attend to the relevant stimulus dimensions in matching-to-sample (MTS) tasks (e.g., Dube & McIlvane, 1999). For 2 participants with autism, we embedded an identity-matching task within a prompting hierarchy as a DOR to increase the likelihood that the participants attended to and discriminated the relevant features of the comparison stimuli in an MTS task. This procedure was compared with a traditional least-to-most prompting hierarchy and a no-reinforcement control condition in a multielement design. Results for both participants indicated that mastery-level acquisition of spoken-word-to-picture relations occurred only under the identity-matching condition. Findings are discussed relative to the use of DORs to facilitate acquisition of conditional discriminations in persons with autism or other conditions who do not attend to the comparison stimuli.     

Conditioned Inhibition of Cyclophosphamide-Induced Taste Aversion

Rats in an experimental group received trials during which 1 flavor (saccharin) was always followed by cyclophosphamide, an immunosuppressive drug, but another (vanilla) was not. An unconditioned stimulus-only group served as a control. Flavor-preference tests revealed that conditioned excitation and conditioned inhibition occurred in the conditioned group subjects but not in the control group subjects. This demonstration suggests that a conditioned inhibitor might be used to modify conditioned and unconditioned immune system functions, for example, natural killer-cell activity.