A Critical Evaluation of Hal Childs' The Myth of the Historical Jesus and the Evolution of Consciousness

The purpose of Childs' book an is integration of historical criticism and analytical psychology. I share Childs' interest in analytical psychology and his concern about the way historical criticism is practiced within the Jesus Seminar. However, I consider his proposed integration to be neither necessary nor desirable, particularly if integration really means amalgamation. Rather than adopting the concerns of analytical psychology, the historical critic would do well to emulate the procedures and rules of evidence of the secular historian.     

A review of the déjà vu experience

For more than a century, the déjà vu experience has been examined through retrospective surveys, prospective surveys, and case studies. About 60% of the population has experienced déjà vu, and its frequency decreases with age. Déjà vu appears to be associated with stress and fatigue, and it shows a positive relationship with socioeconomic level and education. Scientific explanations of déjà vu fall into 4 categories: dual processing (2 cognitive processes momentarily out of synchrony), neurological (seizure, disruption in neuronal transmission), memory (implicit familiarity of unrecognized stimuli),and attentional (unattended perception followed by attended perception). Systematic research is needed on the prevalence and etiology of this culturally familiar cognitive experience, and several laboratory models may help clarify this illusion of recognition.     

Providing social support may be more beneficial than receiving it: results from a prospective study of mortality

This study examines the relative contributions of giving versus receiving support to longevity in a sample of older married adults. Baseline indicators of giving and receiving support were used to predict mortality status over a 5-year period in the Changing Lives of Older Couples sample. Results from logistic regression analyses indicated that mortality was significantly reduced for individuals who reported providing instrumental support to friends, relatives, and neighbors, and individuals who reported providing emotional support to their spouse. Receiving support had no effect on mortality once giving support was taken into consideration. This pattern of findings was obtained after controlling for demographic, personality, health, mental health, and marital-relationship variables. These results have implications for understanding how social contact influences health and longevity.     

Constructing a short form of the Smoking Consequences Questionnaire with adolescents and young adults

The goal of the present studies was to construct and validate a short form of the 50-item Smoking Consequences Questionnaire (SCQ; T.H. Brandon & T. B. Baker, 1991), a measure of smoking outcome expectancies. In Study 1, a 21-item short form (S-SCQ) was derived from a sample of 107 young adults previously treated for substance abuse. In Study 2, the measure was cross-validated on 125 adolescents in treatment for substance abuse. Confirmatory factor analyses revealed good model fit and factorial invariance for the 4 S-SCQ subscales across both samples. Validation analyses on each sample found that subscale scores generally correlated significantly with smoking-related variables. The present studies provide initial evidence for the utility of the S-SCQ when used with young adults and adolescents.     

Diagnostic differences in social anhedonia: a longitudinal study of schizophrenia and major depressive disorder

This study examined the hypothesis that, in schizophrenia, elevated trait social anhedonia (SA) is a stable individual difference, whereas in depression, increased SA is a reflection of a current clinical state that will diminish with recovery. Differences in trait Negative Affect (NA) and Positive Affect (PA) were also examined. Individuals with schizophrenia (n = 55) and depression (n = 34) were evaluated at baseline during hospitalization and compared with nonpsychiatric control participants (n = 41). Participants were assessed again at a 1-year follow-up. At baseline, compared with control participants, individuals with schizophrenia and depression were both characterized by elevated SA, greater NA, and lower PA. In schizophrenic individuals, elevated SA remained stable over the follow-up. However, in recovered depressed patients, SA declined over the follow-up period. Group differences remained in NA and PA over the 1-year follow-up. These results support the view that elevated SA is enduring in schizophrenia but that elevated SA is transiently related to clinical status in depression.     

A step towards ending the isolation of behavior analysis: A common language with evolutionary science

In spite of repeated efforts to explain itself to a wider audience, behavior analysis remains a largely misunderstood and isolated discipline. In this article we argue that this situation is in part due to the terms we use in our technical discussions. In particular, reinforcement and punishment, with their vernacular associations of reward and retribution, are a source of much misunderstanding. Although contemporary thinking within behavior analysis holds that reinforcement and punishment are Darwinian processes whereby behavioral variants are selected and deselected by their consequences, the continued use of the terms reinforcement and punishment to account for behavioral evolution obscures this fact. To clarify and simplify matters, we propose replacing the terms reinforcement and punishment with selection and deselection, respectively. These changes would provide a terminological meeting point with other selectionist sciences, thereby increasing the likelihood that behavior analysis will contribute to Darwinian science.     

Logic and Aggregation

Paraconsistent logic is an area of philosophical logic that has yet to find acceptance from a wider audience. The area remains, in a word, disreputable. In this essay, we try to reassure potential consumers that it is not necessary to become a radical in order to use paraconsistent logic. According to the radicals, the problem is the absurd classical account of contradiction: Classically inconsistent sets explode only because bourgeois classical semantics holds, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that both A and A cannot simultaneously be true! We suggest (more modestly) that there is, at least sometimes, something else worth preserving, even in an inconsistent, unsatisfiable premise set. In this paper we present, in a new guise, a very general version of this preservationist approach to paraconsistency.