Impressions of the Church of Sweden: liberal and catholic with nuances of Lutheranism

The Church of Sweden is difficult to describe or to characterise, whether as a Folk Church, a national church, as catholic or liberal, or as, in some sense, Lutheran. This article refers to aspects of its complex relations with the Roman Catholic Church and with Lutheranism at large. The author detects, from ecumenical agreement and practice, an incipient new communion of churches, based on a common claim to be catholic and also to be open to developments in society. This group includes the Church of Sweden, the Church of England, the Episcopal Church in the USA, the Old Catholic Churches of the Union of Utrecht and the Philippine Independent Church, all of which are in communion with each other. The author's presentation is set out in relation to the Church of Sweden's liturgical and sacramental life, its church–state relations, and in an account of the rather asymmetrical shape of ecumenism in Sweden, in all of which the question of gender plays a role.     

A survey of communicative disorders students' attitudes toward stuttering

Cooper's (1975) Clinician Attitudes Toward Stuttering (CATS) inventories were conpleted by 1,902 speech-language pathology and audiology students from 33 universities, each in a different state. The majority of respondents perceived stutterers as having psychosocial problems and believed that client and parental counseling were essential aspects of treatment. These views were relatively unaffected by student training and clinical exposure. In addition, most of the assumptions of Johnson's diagnosogenic theory of stuttering were held by the majority of the students surveyed. Most of the respondents believed that stuttering was difficult to modify and that speech clinicians were neither adept nor comfortable treating stutterers. These latter attitudes were significantly affected by training, i.e., the more advanced the students' training, the more pessimistic their views on clinician competence. Other professional attitudes and the effect of training on them are also discussed.     

Adolescent Dating Violence: Application of a U.S. Primary Prevention Program in St. Lucia

The purpose of this study was to examine the Choose Respect dating violence prevention program (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2006b , n.d.‐a) with secondary students in St. Lucia. Multivariate analysis of variance results indicated that the Choose Respect program had a positive influence on participants’ attitudes about control in relationships. Significant gender and school effects were found. Implications of these findings for primary prevention efforts targeting dating violence in St. Lucia and limitations of the study are discussed.     

Characteristic patterns of word association responses in institutionalized elderly with and without senile dementia

This study examined the responses of 91 institutionalized elderly persons to the Goldfarb-Halpern Word Association Test (1981), Journal of Speech and Hearing Research, 24, 233–246. Subjects with senile dementia evidenced a characteristic pattern of responses which included marked reduction of paradigmatic responses, no decrease in syntagmatic responses, and a marked increase in unclassifiable and multiword responses not previously reported in the literature. The declines and increases appeared linear and progressive with severity of dementia. The pattern was distinct from that of any other adult group previously tested with this tool. Institutionalized elderly subjects without senile dementia performed similarly to previously tested noninstitutionalized elderly. Theoretical and clinical implications are discussed.     

Experts,Novices, and the St. Petersburg paradox: Is one solution enough?

Although the controversy over the correct solution to the St. Petersburg paradox continues in the decision making literature, few of the solutions have been empirically evaluated. Via the development of alternative versions of the St. Petersburg game, we were able to empirically test some of these solutions. Experts and novices behaved in accordance with Treisman's expectation heuristic when bidding for the right to play the various versions of the St. Petersburg game. When subjects were asked their preferences among the game versions. novices continued to behave in accordance with the expectation heuristic but a plurality of experts seemed to follow another strategy. This preference reversal and its implications and possible causes are thoroughly discussed. An alternative theory which mimicks the expectation heuristic is considered, and generalizations of the expectation heuristic and the St. Petersburg Paradox for z-sided 'coins' (where z is any integer greater than or equal to 2) are presented. It appears that no one solution is yet rich enough for the St. Petersburg paradox.     

Probability learning and coping in dysphoria and obsessive-compulsive tendencies

The processing of stress-relevant categorical events and their contributions to subsequent probability judgments were examined among subjects who were psychometrically categorized as dysphoric, obsessive-compulsive, or “control.” stress-relevant symptomatology of depression was considered to be characterized by a deficit of active counterstress coping activity and obsessive-compulsiveness by ritualistic efforts which have little or no direct effect on stress occurrence. Subjects were presented with a sequence of stressful (loud white noise) and benign (illumination of a green light) events in association with a series of discrete stimuli (alphabetic letters) in three conditions of counterstress activity. Results generally supported the predicted tendency to learn probability information primarily in conditions which reflected the subjects' characteristic ways of responding to stress. Obsessive-compulsives acquired the information primarily in a “ritualistic” context, controls in an active coping context, and dysphorics in both a coping deficit context and unexpectedly in an active coping context. The role of enhanced stressor predicability in maintaining typical stress response patterns of the three groups was discussed.     

The interaction model of anxiety and dental treatment

An empirical test of the interaction model of anxiety was provided by assessing the state anxiety and trait anxiety of 20 female and 7 male dental patients undergoing periodontal surgery. Measures of A-State (PARQ IV), A-Trait (S-R GTA), and perceptions (PSRF) were administered in both a high-stress condition (30 min prior to surgery) and a low-stress condition (4 to 6 days after surgery). It was hypothesized that undergoing periodontal surgery would be perceived as a combination ambiguous/physical danger situation. Accordingly it was predicted that high-ambiguous A-Trait subjects would experience greater decreases in A-State than low-ambiguous A-Trait subjects in proceeding from the high-stress to the low-stress condition. Similarly it was predicted that high-physical danger A-Trait subjects would show greater decreases in A-State than low-physical danger A-Trait subjects. Significant A-Trait × stress condition interactions were not expected to occur for noncongruent A-Trait facets (social evaluation and innocuous). Results indicated that, while the high-stress condition was perceived as an ambiguous/physical danger situation, the A-Trait × stress condition interactions were not significant for ambiguous, physical danger, or innocuous A-Trait facets. Contrary to prediction, a significant interaction was observed between social evaluation A-Trait and stress condition. This finding was explained in terms of the complex relationship between situation perception and situation reaction.     

Purdue pegboard performance of disabled and normal readers: Unimanual versus bimanual differences

Differences between dyslexics and controls in the unimanual and bimanual conditions of the peg placement section of the Purdue Pegboard Test were examined. Twenty-three disabled and twenty-three normal readers were studied. The groups were carefully screened on a neuropsychological battery. The disabled readers were comprised of a relatively homogeneous language-disordered subgroup exhibiting deficits in naming. Significant Group X Condition interactions were obtained for both raw and percentile scores and indicated that disabled readers performed worse than controls in the unimanual compared to bimanual conditions. The dyslexics performed particularly poorly compared with controls on the left hand condition. The implications of these data for hypotheses which argue for left hemisphere dysfunction, as well as those which posit interhemispheric transfer deficits in reading disabled children, are discussed.