Persistence in seminary and in ministry

A follow-up study of 672 seminary students from 14 seminaries who took the Theological School Inventory in 1962 and 574 from 10 seminaries who took it in 1973 investigated factors involved in persistence in seminary and in ministry. Among those found were definiteness of decision, interest in parish ministry, a supportive spouse, unambivalent resolution of the authority problem, good role models in father and ministers. Motivations included redemptive outreach, pastoral care, Christian insight and scholarship, the encouragement of other people and a sense of effectiveness in ministry.Dr. Cardwell is Assistant Professor of Psychology and Counseling at Christian Theological Seminary, 1000 W. 42nd St., Indianapolis, Indiana 46208. This study was the basis for her Ph.D. dissertation, Indiana University, June, 1978. TSI data for the 1973 subjects were made available by Richard A. Hunt, Ph.D., Professor of Psychology, Southern Methodist University, and Director of Ministry Inventories, P.O. Box 8265, Dallas, Texas 75205. TSI data for the 1962 subjects were coded and made available by Edgar W. Mills. Ph.D., presently visiting Associate Professor of Sociology, University of Texas, San Antonio, formerly Director, Ministry Studies Board. Special credit is due the 16 seminaries who cooperated by furnishing follow-up data.     

How do group meetings make a community Therapeutic?

Summary Following an abrupt shift from a therapeutic community with emphasis on group meetings to a hierarchical medical model on a mental hospital floor, disturbed patients required extensive individual nursing care. This increased work load for the nursing staff resulted in admissions having to be limited to the rare cases who needed little or no nursing care. As patients were discharged, the vacancy rate went up to approximately 20% for a week and remained high for another two weeks. Nursing staff-patient relations deteriorated.Subsequently, it was possible to resume the emphasis on the groups of a therapeutic community and to observe the contrast. The experience showed how groups can effect and support a therapeutic community. It clarified some of the mechanisms by which groups positively affected disturbed patients. Some mechanisms by which the staff, community, and group meetings favorably influenced the nursing staff-patient relationship and intrastaff communications became clear also.     

Measurement of head movement during auditory localization

Head movement can have a significant effect on the ability to locate the direction of a sound source. A system has been designed to track the head movement in response to sound originating at different azimuth locations with respect to the head. A videotape record is made of a light approximating a point source carried on a lightweight “beanie” mounted on the listener’s head. Movement of the light is monitored by the video camera and recorded on tape, along with the sound stimulus and information concerning loudspeaker location and time. The horizontal and vertical coordinates of the light-spot image are determined in relation to the video synch pulses defining the field borders. Synch signals are available from a video monitor either in real-time or from tape replay to define each TV frame and horizontal scan line. The circuitry interfaces to a computer programmed to take the information, apply a calibration, and process the data into records of time-varying head position and velocity. Examples of both digital and graphic printouts of head movement are given. The system is capable of expansion to three-axis operation.     

Correction to: Suicidal Mental Imagery in Psychiatrically Hospitalized Adolescents

Research on Child and Adolescent Psychopathology - A correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10802-021-00827-8     

Moral Responsibility and Unavoidable Action

The principle of alternate possibilities (PAP), making the ability to do otherwise a necessary condition for moral responsibility, is supposed by Harry Frankfurt, John Fischer, and others to succumb to a peculiar kind of counterexample. The paper reviews the main problems with the counterexample that have surfaced over the years, and shows how most can be addressed within the terms of the current debate. But one problem seems ineliminable: because Frankfurt's example relies on a counterfactual intervener to preclude alternatives to the person's action, it is not possible for it to preclude all alternatives (intervention that is contingent upon a trigger cannot bring it about that the trigger never occurred). This makes it possible for the determined PAPist to maintain that some pre-intervention deviation is always available to ground moral responsibility.In reply, the critic of PAP can examine all the candidate deviations and argue their irrelevance to moral responsibility (a daunting prospect); or the critic can dispense with counterfactual intervention altogether. The paper pursues the second of these strategies, developing three examples of noncounterfactual intervention in which (i) the agent has no alternatives (and a fortiori no morally relevant alternatives), yet (ii) there is just as much reason to think that the agent is morally responsible as there was in Frankfurt's original example. The new counterexamples do suffer from one liability, but this is insufficient in the end to repair PAP's conceptual connection between moral responsibility and alternate possibilities.     

The influence of distinctive processing on retrieval-induced forgetting

Recall of a portion of a previously experienced list benefits subsequent recall of that portion of the list but leads to poorer recall of nonpracticed items from the same set (Anderson, Bjork, & Bjork, 1994). One explanation for this retrieval-induced forgetting is that during practice of part of a set, the non-practiced items compete for recall and are suppressed; this suppression process inhibits later recall of the nonpracticed items. Two experiments were conducted to investigate the relationship between distinctive processing of the original set and retrieval-induced forgetting, on the assumption that distinctive processing reduces response competition. In the first experiment, distinctive processing induced by difference judgments among the studied items did reduce forgetting relative to a standard encoding task and a similarity judgment task. In fact, the difference judgment task completely eliminated retrieval-induced forgetting. In the second experiment, the similarity judgment task was analyzed in relation to a task assumed to foster associative integration (Anderson & McCulloch, 1999). Even though the similarity judgment met the requirements for associative integration, retrieval-induced forgetting persisted following similarity judgment. The results are consistent with the view that distinctive processing benefits memory within an organizational context (Hunt & McDaniel, 1993; Smith & Hunt, in press).