Attempted suppression of social threat thoughts: Differential effects for social phobia and healthy controls?

Thought suppression research in the area of social phobia provides conflicting evidence regarding whether individuals demonstrate a general deficit or successful suppression. This paper reports the outcome of two studies using an online thought suppression paradigm measuring activation of target thoughts. Study 1 examined the effects of suppressing social threat stimuli with a healthy control group. Surprisingly, the results showed that participants demonstrated non-suppression of this stimuli class. Study 2 compared individuals with social phobia to a control group using the same stimuli as Study 1. Results revealed that following instructions to suppress social threat stimuli, individuals with social phobia demonstrated successful suppression, whilst the control group, as in Study 1, did not. The lack of suppression of social threat information by the control group may reflect functional impression-management of social threat stimuli. Whereas, successful suppression of these stimuli by individuals with social phobia, may contribute to diminished habituation to such information.     

论孙中山民主主义的服务道德

孙中山在其三民主义的政治基础上,形成了他的民主主义的伦理思想,突出特色是他所倡导的“服务道德”。其要点是,以民主平等取代等级特权制度,这是服务道德的政治前提;实行人道主义、维护人的尊严,这是服务道德的基本要求;铲除皇帝思想、树立公仆观念,这是实践服务道德的基本途径。孙中山的伦理思想有明显的历史局限性,但是,他的“服务道德”思想仍然是值得借鉴的。     

A New Methodology for Reporting the Status of Community Health Improvement in the United States

Objective To assure that Healthy Communities are achieved, a tracking methodology is proposed using four health improvement categories. Methods Counties are classified as having met or not met nine HP2010 mortality targets and as improving or not improving, creating four categories of community health improvement – static, progressing, exemplary, and maintaining. Results Exemplary counties make up 1.7%32.7% of counties, counties have both improved and met the HP2010 target during the period. Across all indicators, a large proportion remains of counties that have neither met the HP2010 target nor improved (33.572.8%). Conclusions Understanding why, how, and in what ways communities move from static to maintaining categories is necessary to guiding every local public health system to community health improvement.     

Early Muslim Scholarship in Religionwissenchaft: A Study of Muhammad ‘Abd Al-Karīm Al-Shahrastānī's On the Concept of the People of a Dubious Book (Ahl Shubhat Kitāb)

The issue of the People of the Book has long been of central significance to Islam and later to the study of comparative religion. Many Muslim and European scholars have hence taken close heed of the People of the Book and their role as the holders of sacred books. The question of the People of the Book becomes more crucial when Muhammad ‘Abd al-Karīm al-Shahrastānī (d.548/1153) develops another category identified as “Man Lahu Shubhat Kitāb,” (those who possess doubtful sacred scrolls) or “Ahl Shubhat Kitāb” (the People of a Dubious Book), the term that may be considered similar to that of al-Shahrastānī. The question of the People of a Dubious Book remains vague or confusing for many people. This confusion occurs not only among lay Muslims, but also among the Jews and Christians. In effect, the condition of these groups has not yet been systematized properly, although they have been treated in several major works of theology as well as in Qur’ānic commentary. The present analysis is an attempt to evaluate the nature of the People of a Dubious Book as exclusively developed by al-Shahrastānī. Considering the fact that some of the Muslim scholars have considered these groups as belonging either to People of the Book or Polytheists, a critical study shall be attempted to investigate why al-Shahrastānī exclusively expands this concept in Islamic Religious Tradition. It is hoped that the study will provide a preliminary yet clear understanding of the People of a Dubious Book, which hopefully can inspire further investigation leading to a critical study on these groups of peoples.     

Selection of Decision Strategies After Conscious and Unconscious Thought

It is commonly assumed that the use of simple, non‐compensatory strategies is especially pronounced in memory‐based decisions, where information costs are high. At the same time, there is evidence that in memory‐based decisions, a compensatory processing of attributes is facilitated when the processing occurs unconsciously rather than consciously. We applied a strategy classification approach—developed in research on non‐compensatory heuristics—to test two key tenets of unconscious thought theory: the capacity principle and the weighting principle. Participants memorized attribute information about cars and were subsequently either directed to or diverted from thinking consciously about their preferences between the cars (conscious versus unconscious thought). Then, participants indicated in pair‐wise choices which car they would prefer and were classified (based on their choices) as using either one of two compensatory strategies (equal weight or weighted additive) or a non‐compensatory strategy (lexicographic heuristic). In line with the capacity principle, the number of participants best described by a compensatory strategy (the equal‐weight strategy) tended to be higher after unconscious thought than after conscious thought, whereas the number of participants best described by the lexicographic heuristic tended to be lower. Inconsistent with the weighting principle, participants in the unconscious thought condition were better described by the equal‐weight strategy than by the weighted‐additive strategy. In Experiment 2, in which participants were not instructed to form an impression while learning the attribute information, the use of the equal‐weight strategy was not more prevalent after unconscious thought. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Playing for time: A psychotherapist's experience of counselling young people

This article describes the experience of a psychotherapist working for several years with adolescents and young adults at a centre offering weekly psychoanalytic psychotherapy. It describes some of the pressures placed on the therapist by young people engaging in considerable degrees of acting out and the difficulties in holding on to a sense of valuable work in the face of different attacks.     

Fostering young children's representation, planning, and reflection: A focus in three current early childhood models

Many educators and developmental psychologists have pointed to the development of symbolic thought and representational abilities as a set of fundamental capacities that underlie the development of self-regulation, problem solving, planning, and higher level thought processes. While many early childhood programs value children's development of symbolic capacities, three approaches, High/Scope, Tools of the Mind, and Reggio Emilia, were analyzed in terms of one context from the array of strategies and experiences that characterizes the approach in order to examine the distinctive way that three different preschool programs apply the theoretical construct of representational development to pedagogical strategies.