CHRISTIAN REALISM FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

Christian realism has provided a theological understanding of politics that identifies the limits within which all political choices are made. Those limits are set by a theological understanding of judgment, which reserves the ultimate meaning of history to divine judgment, and by a theological understanding of responsibility, which gives proximate meaning to the choices between greater and lesser goods that are available to human politics. The assessments of global politics offered by Reinhold Niebuhr and other Christian realists during the Second World War and the Cold War which followed owe their influence partly to an astute and historically informed reading of events, but primarily, their influence is due to this basic theological understanding of politics. While the world has changed in ways that clearly reveal limitations in the original formulations of Christian realism, the theological principles of judgment and responsibility continue to provide an understanding of global politics adequate to the new realities of the twenty-first century.     

论价值规范

价值规范既是社会生活意义与秩序的表现形式，又是社会资源控制和利益分配的约束条件。当它从古代习俗走向现代国家意识形态时，它自身不仅成为了公共利益的抽象符号，而且还成为了个体自我认识的知识形式。作为一种社会化的公共实践话语，它日益同国家权力和技术系统相结合，并渗透在系统整合的诸多方面，由此便引出值得思考的问题。     

Moral judgments and ethical constructs in clinical psychology doctoral students

ABSTRACT

This cross-sectional study compared the moral reasoning of first-year and third-year doctoral students in clinical psychology. Nineteen first-year and 20 third-year students were recruited from 17 doctoral training programs in the UK. Most adopted a sophisticated approach to moral judgments, as assessed by the Defining Issues Test, although, surprisingly, more experienced students had significantly less sophisticated schemata. In their moral judgments, less experienced students relied more heavily on their personal, and more experienced students on their professional, constructs, as assessed by repertory grid technique. Integration between personal and professional constructs was higher in more experienced students.     

The temporal-relevance temporal-uncertainty model of prospective duration judgment

A model aimed at explaining prospective duration judgments in real life settings (as well as in the laboratory) is presented. The model is based on the assumption that situational meaning is continuously being extracted by humans’ perceptual and cognitive information processing systems. Time is one of the important dimensions of situational meaning. Based on the situational meaning, a value for Temporal Relevance is set. Temporal Relevance reflects the importance of temporal aspects for enabling adaptive behavior in a specific moment in time. When Temporal Relevance is above a certain threshold a prospective duration judgment process is evoked automatically. In addition, a search for relevant temporal information is taking place and its outcomes determine the level of Temporal Uncertainty which reflects the degree of knowledge one has regarding temporal aspects of the task to be performed. The levels of Temporal Relevance and Temporal Uncertainty determine the amount of attentional resources allocated for timing by the executive system. The merit of the model is in connecting timing processes with the ongoing general information processing stream. The model rests on findings in various domains which indicate that cognitive-relevance and self-relevance are powerful determinants of resource allocation policy. The feasibility of the model is demonstrated by analyzing various temporal phenomena. Suggestions for further empirical validation of the model are presented.     

Construct validity of global life-satisfaction judgments: A look into the black box of self–informant agreement

Life-satisfaction judgments are ubiquitously used as indicators of wellbeing. The construct validity of these judgments relies heavily on self–informant agreement. However, agreement is necessary, but not sufficient to claim that life-satisfaction judgments are valid. In addition, self–informant agreement should be based on the use of valid information about satisfaction with important life domains. An alternative possibility is that agreement is based on impressions about personality traits. We tested these two hypotheses in a model that predicted self-ratings and informant ratings of life satisfaction from shared perceptions of personality and satisfaction with life domains. In a round-robin study of families, we found that life-domains were the key predictor of self–informant agreement. However, the Depressiveness facet of Neuroticism had a small direct effect. In addition, it was indirectly related to self–informant agreement because it predicts lower satisfaction in important life-domains that were used to form life-satisfaction judgments.     

Perceptual fluency effects in judgments of creativity and beauty: creative objects are perceived fluently yet they are visually complex

ABSTRACT

Perceptual fluency typically has a positive influence on aesthetic evaluations of beauty, but few studies have examined its influence on creativity evaluations. Creativity has two facets, originality and quality. If creativity judgments involve estimating product originality, such judgments may be associated with perceptual disfluency, while product quality may be associated with perceptual fluency. We examined the relationship between perceptual fluency and judgments of creativity and beauty across seven experiments. Creativity judgments were affected by most perceptual fluencysources. We observed a highly-fluent-is-beautiful-and-creative relation when testing repeated exposure and figure-ground contrast. Prototypicality displayed a high-fluency–is-beautiful relation, with creativity judgments unaffected. Visual complexity displayed a consistent disfluent-is-creative effect, with mixed results for beauty. For creativity (but not beauty) evaluations, increased saliency of visual complexity led to discounting fluent-is-creative effects, supporting the hypothesis that there are at least two fluency pathways to creativity judgments that take both originality and quality into account.