General education,cultural diversity,and identity

The issue of this paper is cultural plurality as a problem for public, general education and for (personal) identity. In order to examine this question, one needs to be clear about the meaning of the concepts of general education, on the one hand, and cultural diversity on the other. In the first section, we will fix the meaning of these concepts. A conceptual distinction between cultural diversity and cultural pluralism will be introduced. In the second section, it will be argued that open pluralism can only be maintained if there is a basic common culture apart from the cultural diversity that pluralism affirms. Therefore, there is yet an indispensable role for general education in an open, pluralistic society. In the third section we will look at two metaphors that give an opposite significance to the relation between identity and diversity: the conversational metaphor and the food metaphor mishmash. The final section expands on the conversational metaphor by way of an exposition of Ricoeur's hermeneutics of the self. It supplies us with a promising concept of identity that is not in complete opposition to diversity.     

Is community necessary? Quasi-philosophical ruminations

In responding to and examining Mary Anne Raywid's (1989) adoption of community building as an aim for schools, I survey a number of types of communities, including recreational, intentional and language communities. In considering all these communities, I try to show both the power of communities in our personal lives and some idea of why we might be of two minds about promoting community as an ideal in the modern world and in schools in particular.     

When More is Better than Less; Three Theories of Psychosis—Projection, Double Bind, and Possession

Three psychological theories of psychosis are described, each of which has standing in psychiatry. Defined by the terms projection, double bind, and possession, they initially appear to have little or nothing in common to explain psychosis, but converge at four points: (1) A high degree of anxiety precipitated by a dilemma or conflict perceived to be unsolvable by the person; (2) the anxiety triggers a shift from one thought or motive in the direction of its opposite, because the original was believed too antagonistic to the wishes of significant others; (3) the opposite, in order to remain opposite, requires that the original thought or motive be forgotten, (4) a singular means to produce and reinforce forgetting is the interposition of psychiatric symptoms. In psychiatry today treatment would fit more consistently with the three theories taken as a whole rather than any one, and a rationale for this viewpoint is elaborated.     

TEACHING ELEMENTARY STUDENTS WITH DEVELOPMENTAL DISABILITIES TO RECRUIT TEACHER ATTENTION IN A GENERAL EDUCATION CLASSROOM: EFFECTS ON TEACHER PRAISE AND ACADEMIC PRODUCTIVITY

Four fourth graders with developmental disabilities were trained to recruit teacher attention while they worked on spelling assignments in a general education classroom. The students were taught to show their work to the teacher two to three times per session and to make statements such as, “How am I doing?” or “Look, I'm all finished!” Training was conducted in the special education classroom and consisted of modeling, role playing, error correction, and praise. A multiple baseline across students design showed that recruitment training increased (a) the frequency of students' recruiting, (b) the frequency of teacher praise received by the students, (c) the percentage of worksheet items completed, and (d) the accuracy with which the students completed the spelling assignments.     

Understanding environments: The key to improving social processes and program outcomes

The contributions to this Special Issue illustrate research on several important types of environmental units, including psychiatric and substance abuse treatment programs, neighborhood block groups, and entire communities. They also exemplify alternative methodologies, such as assessing environments by relying on participants' appraisals, external observers' ratings, historical archives, and direct observation. I draw on these contributions and some of my own work to discuss four recurrent issues: (a) how to conceptualize environmental domains and dimensions; (b) how to understand environmental dynamics, that is, the interplay of environmental factors both within one setting and across settings; (c) how to comprehend the processes that link environmental factors to outcomes, especially with respect to the power and evanescence of environmental influence; and (d) how to use information about environments to monitor and improve them. Increased knowledge in these four areas is essential to help fulfill a major aim of community psychology: to understand social processes and improve intervention program outcomes.     

Effects of diagnostic classification systems on clinical hypothesis-generation

In this study it was determined whether (a) classification as opposed to absence of classification has an effect on the quality of clinical hypotheses (b) the DSM-III-R and the CBCL have a different effect on the quality of clinical hypotheses, and (c) the potential difference between the DSM-III-R and the CBCL is moderated by the different number of syndromes identified by these systems. To investigate these questions, an experiment was conducted in which 86 clinicians generated hypotheses for six cases. The clinicians were divided into a DSM-III-R, a CBCL, and a control group. Of the six cases, two were classified by both classification systems as one syndrome, two were classified as one syndrome by the DSM-III-R but as two syndromes by the CBCL, and two were classified as two syndromes by the DSM-III-R but as one syndrome by the CBCL. The quality of the hypotheses was determined by means of four dependent variables selected from an overview of qualitative criteria: explanatory value, redundancy, possibility of operationalization, and specificity. No differences between the CBCL and the control groups were found. The DSM group performed better than the control group regarding explanatory value and redundancy. The DSM-III-R group also scored better than the CBCL group regarding explanatory value, particularly when the number of identified syndromes was two for the CBCL and one for the DSM-III-R.     

Consider the source: One step in assessing premise acceptability

Premise acceptability is conceptually connected to presumption. To say that a premise is acceptable just when there is a presumption in its favor is to give a first approximation to this connection. A number of popular principles of presumption suggest that whether there is a presumption for a premise, belief, or claim depends on the sources which vouch for it. Sources consist of internal belief-generating mechanisms and external testimony. Alvin Plantinga's notion of warrant lays down four conditions upon a source for the belief which it generates to be warranted. We argue that there is a presumption for a premise, belief, or claim if and only if there is a presumption of warrant for that premise,belief or claim. This amounts to the thesis that there is a presumption for a belief from a challenger's point of view if and only if there is a presumption from that person's point of view that her cognitive faculties which have generated the belief have been functioning properly, in an appropriate cognitive environment, in accord with a segment of her design plan aimed at the truth, and that these faculties are reliable. In light of our argument for this thesis, we may legitimately claim that one way to determine that there is a presumption for a belief is to determine that there is a presumption of warrant for that belief, and thus that in determining whether there is a presumption for a belief or premise, we may consider the source.     

Competing interests: The need to control conflict of interests in biomedical research

Individual and institutional conflict of interests in biomedical research have becomes matters of increasing concern in recent years. In the United States, the growth in relationships — sponsored research agreements, consultancies, memberships on boards, licensing agreements, and equity ownership — between for-profit corporations and research universities and their scientists has made the problem of conflicts, particularly financial conflicts, more acute. Conflicts can interfere with or compromise important principles and obligations of researchers and their institutions, e.g., adherence to accepted research norms, duty of care to patients, and open exchange of information. Disclosure is a key component of a successful conflict policy. Commitments which conflict with a faculty member's primary obligations to teaching, research, administrative responsibilities, or patient care also need attention. Institutional conflict of interests present different problems, some of which are discussed in an analysis of an actual problem posed by two proposed clinical trials. This paper is adapted from a lecture presented to a Symposium on Scientific Integrity, Warsaw, Poland, 23 November 1995. Daniel Steiner was Vice-President and General Counsel of Harvard University (1972–92) and in that capacity became familiar with conflict of interest issues. He is currently Counsel to the Boston law firm. Ropes and Gray, and is Adjunct Lecturer in Public Policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government. Harvard University.     

中国传统情绪疗法及其应用

系统地探讨了中国传统情绪疗法：情志相胜疗法,相反情绪疗法,激情刺激疗法,与感觉刺激有关的情绪疗法,与别人有关的情绪疗法,顺情从欲疗法,抑情顺理疗法,移情易性疗法,情志导引疗法,七情合参疗法。这些中国传统心理疗法在现代仍有实用价值。