Spiritual Assessment in African-Americans: A Review of Measures of Spirituality Used in Health Research

Background A number of instruments have been developed for investigating relationships between spirituality and health, and have been used to assess spirituality in African-Americans. Yet, the cultural appropriateness for African-Americans of these instruments has not been investigated to date. Objectives To evaluate the construct validity and reliability of spirituality measures used in health research from 1982 to 2005. Method Systematic review of the literature. Results Thirty five studies and five measures of spirituality met the inclusion criteria. Most of the spirituality measures were developed in primarily Caucasian-American samples. African-Americans were represented in 71% of the studies (n = 25) using spirituality measures in health research. Distinct cultural attributes of African-American spirituality were omitted in most of the spirituality measures. Two studies were retrieved in which psychometric evaluation was conducted in entirely African-American samples. Discussion Spirituality is a significant cultural experience and belief that influences the health behaviors of African-Americans. The lack of a culturally appropriate measure of African-American spirituality is a major limitation of studies investigating spirituality and health in this population. Development of a culturally appropriate and sensitive measure of spirituality in African-Americans is suggested to strengthen the quality of research in this area.     

Religiousness and College Student Alcohol Use: Examining the Role of Social Support

The purpose of this study was to examine the mediating role of social support in the relationship between religiousness and alcohol use in a sample of college students. Two dimensions of religiousness: religious commitment and religious coping were examined as predictors of alcohol use. Participants were male and female college students (N = 221); the majority of the sample was Christian (73.8%). Emotional social support was tested as a mediator. Both religiousness dimensions and emotional social support were related to less frequent alcohol use; however, mediation was not supported. These findings indicate that religious commitment and dispositional religious coping are protective against alcohol use, yet social support does not account for this relationship.

Influence of Church Attendance and Spirituality in a Randomized Controlled Trial to Increase Mammography Use Among a Low-Income, Tri-Racial, Rural Community

Background The influence of church attendance and spirituality on mammography use was studied among Native American, White, and African American women living in a rural county. Methods A randomized trial was conducted to increase mammography use. Women (n = 851) were randomly assigned to receive either an educational program delivered by a lay health advisor or a physician letter and brochure about cervical cancer screening (control group). Church attendance and spirituality were measured at baseline and mammography use was evaluated 12 months after enrollment using medical record review. Results Almost two-thirds of the women reported that they attended church at least once a week, and less than 4% were classified as having low spirituality. Church attendance (P = 0.299) or spirituality (P = 0.401) did not have a significant impact on mammography use. Conclusions Church attendance and spirituality did not impact mammography use.     

多目标追踪的任务难度对不同类型非目标选择性抑制的影响

采用多目标追踪（MOT）与点探测刺激觉察任务相结合的实验范式,分别通过改变运动与静止非目标数量,考察追踪难度变化对不同类型非目标选择性抑制的影响。实验一通过改变运动非目标数量为4、5、6,发现当运动非目标数量为6时,追踪难度显著增加,静止非目标上的抑制量也显著增加,而运动非目标上的抑制量则不随追踪难度的变化而变化;实验二改变静止非目标数量为4、5、6,同样发现当静止非目标数量为6时,追踪难度显著增加,静止非目标上的抑制量也显著增加,而运动非目标上的抑制量仍不随追踪难度的变化而变化,且当静止非目标数量为6时,静止非目标上的抑制量显著大于运动非目标,出现了反转现象,其原因可能是视野范围内总的对象数量超出了视觉索引容量,被试改变了对静止与运动非目标的抑制策略。综合实验结果表明,静止非目标上的抑制程度随追踪难度的提高而增加;而运动非目标上的抑制程度对追踪难度的变化不敏感,在不同难度水平上保持相对稳定。     

鹖冠子的理想政治论--成鸠氏之治及理论渊源

鹖冠子的理想政治和时局有密切的关系,他对一些大国不能得志于天下,深感痛惜.他深思败亡之由,并藉此提出自己的理想政治论——成鸠氏之治,其家族以“制邑理都”、“啬万物”、“与天地总”、“素皇内帝”等统治方法来统治,结果能统治天下一万八千年.这一理论主要受管子军政改革、《周礼》治官治民、选贤与能、《商君书》等法家严刑峻法等思想所影响.这种理想政治的实施,会统一中国,建立集权的中央政府,四夷宾服.     

Estimating the effect of emotional intelligence in wellbeing among priests

Background/Objective: Emotional intelligence is a variable which has been the subject of significantly increased research in recent years. Relationships have been shown with both physical and psychological problems. The aim of this study is to analyse the direct and indirect effect that emotional intelligence exerts over the manifestation of physical and psychological clinical symptomatology and to severe disorders such as burnout syndrome in a professional group in which social function is fundamental. Method: So that, 881 Latin-American catholic priests (M_age = 45.89; SD_age = 11.58) were evaluated using the Trait Meta-Mood Scale-24, the Maslach Burnout Inventory-22 and the General Health Questionnaire-28. Results: Using path analysis, emotional intelligence, especially Attention and Emotional Clarity, shows a high effect on psychological and somatic issues. Conclusions: Thus, both specific disorders and general well-being are related to emotional intelligence. Providing effective emotional intelligence training sessions seems to be able to reduce possible physical and emotional disorders.     

Religion and action control: Faith-specific modulation of the Simon effect but not Stop-Signal performance

Previous findings suggest that religion has a specific impact on attentional processes. Here we show that religion also affects action control. Experiment 1 compared Dutch Calvinists and Dutch atheists, matched for age, sex, intelligence, education, and cultural and socio-economic background, and Experiment 2 compared Italian Catholics with matched Italian seculars. As expected, Calvinists showed a smaller and Catholics a larger Simon effect than nonbelievers, while performance of the groups was comparable in the Stop-Signal task. This pattern suggests that religions emphasizing individualism or collectivism affects action control in specific ways, presumably by inducing chronic biases towards a more “exclusive” or “inclusive” style of decision-making. Interestingly, there was no evidence that religious practice affects inhibitory skills.     

Stuttering, cluttering, and phonological complexity: case studies

The phonological complexity of dysfluencies in those who clutter and/or stutter may help us better understand phonetic factors in these two types of fluency disorders. In this preliminary investigation, cases were three 14-year-old males, diagnosed as a Stutterer, a Clutterer, and a Stutterer–Clutterer. Spontaneous speech samples were transcribed, coded for dysfluent words which were then matched to fluent words on grammatical class (i.e., function vs. content), number of syllables and word familiarity. An Index of Phonological Complexity was determined per word, and word frequency, density and phonological neighborhood frequency were derived from an online database. Results showed that compared to fluent words, dysfluent words were more phonologically complex and ‘sparser’, implying that they have fewer phonological neighbors or words in which a single phoneme is added, deleted or substituted. Interpretations and future directions for research regarding phonological complexity in stuttering and cluttering are offered.Educational objectives: 1. The reader can list three key symptoms of cluttering. 2. The reader will define phonological neighborhood density and neighborhood frequency. 3. The reader can calculate the Index of Phonological Complexity (IPC) for a given word. 4. The reader can state two findings from the current study and how each relates to other studies of phonological complexity and fluency disorders.     

The centrality of the female body in Brazilian culture: Evangelical and Muslim responses

This article aims to analyse how both Evangelical and Islamic religions deal with a central aspect of the construction of the Brazilian national identity: the body. The Brazilian religious field is exposed to this cultural value and reacts to it in different ways. While Islam preaches female modesty, involving the ‘concealment’ of the body and its forms, Evangelicals reinforce part of the Brazilian culture of appreciation and care for physical attributes, albeit using the rhetoric of doing so with moderation and modesty. The data presented here were collected through interviews with religious leaders and through participant observation in the Baptist Church of Lagoinha, in Belo Horizonte, and the Islamic Youth League, in São Paulo, Brazil.     

Index tracking based on deep neural network

Deep learning has a strong ability to extract feature representations from data, since it has a great advantage in processing nonlinear and non-stationary data and reflecting nonlinear interactive relationship. This paper proposes to apply deep learning algorithms including deep neural network and deep autoencoder to track index performance and introduces a dynamic weight calculation method to measure the direct effects of the stocks on index. The empirical study takes historical data of Hang Seng Index (HSI) and its constituents to analyze the effectiveness and practicability of the index tracking method. The results show that the index tracking method based on deep neural network has a smaller tracking error, and thus can effectively track the index.