Factors that impact the sociocultural adjustment and well-being of Syrian refugees in Stuttgart – Germany

This study investigated the impact of age, gender, language and acculturation choice on the sociocultural adjustment and well-being of Syrian refugees in Stuttgart, Germany. A total of 214 Syrian refugees participated in this study by filling a demographics questionnaire, the Acculturation Attitudes Scale (AAS-16), the Revised Sociocultural Adjustment Scale (R-SCAS), and the Mental Health Inventory (MHI-18). The results showed that the level of German language acquisition significantly correlated with sociocultural adjustment. No significant correlation was found between age and depression level and no significant difference in depression scores were found as a function of gender. Integration significantly correlated with sociocultural adjustment and mental health. Assimilation correlated significantly with sociocultural adjustment, and separation correlated negatively with mental health.     

Graded representations in the acquisition of English and German transitive constructions

English and German children aged 2 years 4 months and 4 years heard both novel and familiar verbs in sentences whose form was grammatical, but which mismatched the event they were watching (e.g., ‘The frog is pushing the lion’, when the lion was actually the ‘agent’ or ‘doer’ of the pushing). These verbs were then elicited in new sentences. All children mostly corrected the familiar verb (i.e., they used the agent as the grammatical subject), but there were cross-linguistic differences among the two-year-olds concerning the novel verb. When English 2-year-olds used the novel verb they mostly corrected. However, their most frequent response was to avoid using the novel verb altogether. German 2-year-olds corrected the novel verb significantly more often than their English counterparts, demonstrating more robust verb-general representations of agent- and patient-marking. These findings provide support for a ‘graded representations’ view of development, which proposes that grammatical representations may be simultaneously abstract but ‘weak’.     

The American Luther

Abstract : This essay introduces important developments in recent Luther scholarship in America and argues for a specific retrieval of Luther for contemporary religious and theological issues, such as the problem of evil and the role of experience in theology. The essay describes how contemporary feminist and liberation theologies have recontextualized Luther in America. Also addressed is the current interest in historical investigations of Luther in relation to medieval thought that aligns with the American reception of Finnish scholarship on Luther. These developments show that the American Luther is moving beyond its fundamental shaping by German Protestantism.     

康有为的古经新解与经学的近代转型

康有为揭橥孔子和经学的旗帜 ,并借用西学对其进行改铸 ,从而把孔子塑造成君主立宪政体的缔造者 ,把经典改造成君主立宪政体理论的载体。康有为之所以能这样做 ,与经学与时俱进的特征、自身学贯中西的知识储备以及现实社会的需要有很大关系。康氏所为 ,开援西入儒之先河 ,拓展了儒家的外王学与内圣学 ,促进了思想的解放 ,对构建当代新文化也具有借鉴意义。     

Grade retention and enrollment in post-secondary education

Students retained in grade have dropout rates three to seven times higher than do their promoted peers, yet little is known about the outcomes for the most persistent of the retained students who graduate high school. The purpose of this research was to examine the post-secondary (PSE) enrollment rates of retained but persistent high school graduates. Ten thousand 1992 high school graduates in the National Education Longitudinal Study (NELS) data base composed the sample. A logistic regression controlling for gender, socio-economic status (SES), race–ethnicity, and achievement yielded odds ratios indicating significantly lower odds of PSE enrollment for retained graduates compared to promoted graduates. Later grade retention generally reduced the odds of PSE enrollment. Findings suggest that retaining students may be related to negative educational outcomes not realized for many years.     

Lexicality, morphological structure, and semantic transparency in the processing of German ver-verbs: The complementarity of on-line and off-line evidence

Two types of experiments investigate the visual on-line and off-line processing of German ver-verbs (e.g., verbittern ‘to embitter'). In Experiments 1 and 2 (morphological priming), latency patterns revealed the existence of facilitation effects for the morphological conditions (BITTER-VERBITTERN and BITTERN-VERBITTERN) as compared to the neutral conditions (SAUBER-VERBITTERN and SÄUBERN-VERBITTERN). In Experiments 3 and 4 (rating tasks) participants had to judge whether the target (VERBITTERN) “comes from,” “contains a form of,” or “contains the meaning of” the root (BITTER) or the root+en substring (BITTERN). Taken together, these studies revealed the combined influence of the three factors of lexicality (real word status), morphological structure, and semantic transparency.     

Unemployment, Social Capital, and Subjective Well-Being

It has been shown in past research that unemployment has a large negative impact on subjective well-being of individuals. In this paper, I explore whether and to what extent people with more social capital are sheltered from the harmful effects of unemployment. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel 1984–2004, I find that social capital is an important predictor of well-being levels, but there is no evidence that it moderates the effect of unemployment on well-being. Possible reasons for these findings are discussed, and suggestions for future research given. This paper was written while I was visiting scholar at the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research in Kalamazoo, MI. I am grateful to the Institute for its hospitality, to Andrew Clark, Andrew Oswald and three anonymous referees for valuable comments, and to the German Socio Economic Panel Study (GSOEP) at the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW), Berlin, for providing the data.     

强迫思维女大学生的箱庭疗法个案研究

探讨箱庭疗法对强迫思维患者的有效性和治疗过程.采用个案研究法,对一名强迫思维女大学生进行12次箱庭治疗,结果发现:来访者的箱庭治疗经历了问题呈现-斗争对抗-转化成长-治愈整合四个阶段;来访者的箱庭作品主题呈现出由"受伤主题"向"治愈主题"的转化.经过箱庭治疗,来访者的强迫症状得以缓解,来访者的内心世界从创伤走向治愈.     

Grammatical Processing of Spoken Language in Child and Adult Language Learners

This article presents a selective overview of studies that have investigated auditory language processing in children and late second-language (L2) learners using online methods such as event-related potentials (ERPs), eye-movement monitoring, or the cross-modal priming paradigm. Two grammatical phenomena are examined in detail, children’s and adults’ processing of German plural inflections (Lück et al. Brain Res 1077:144–152, 2006; Hahne et al. J Cognitive Neurosci 18:121–134, 2006; Clahsen et al. J Child Language 34:601–622, 2007) and language learners’ processing of filler-gap dependencies in English (Felser C, Roberts L Second Language Res 23:9–36, 2007; Roberts et al. J Psycholinguist Res 36:175–188, 2007). The results from these studies reveal clear differences between native and nonnative processing in both domains of grammar, suggesting that nonnative listeners rely less on grammatical parsing routines during processing than either child or adult native listeners. We also argue that factors such as slower processing speed or cognitive resource limitations only provide a partial account of our findings.