CAN NATURE TRULY BE OUR FRIEND?

Abstract. The question of whether nature can embody love or be considered in this sense as "friend" is a thorny problem for Christian theology. The doctrines of finitude and sin argue against nature as a realm of love, whereas the doctrine of creation out of nothing, which links God and the creation so forcefully, would seem to argue for such a view of nature. This paper explores the thesis that Western culture has not offered a concept of nature rich enough to allow for an understanding of it as a domain of gracious-ness. From pre-Socratic times through the Enlightenment and the rise of modern science, nature was conceived of as a realm of defect or lacking in creative possibilities. Christian theology has consistently spoken of nature in terms that defy the limitations of the authorized views proposed by the ambient Western cultures. The present times, under the influence of the sciences, have furnished for the first time an authorized concept of nature that is large enough and dynamic enough to entertain the dimension of grace. Consequently, ours is a time of great promise for developing a more adequate theology of nature.     

A Family’s Coming Out Process: Systemic Change and Multiple Realities

The paucity of investigative studies exploring the coming out process of families was the impetus for this case study with a six member family-of-choice. In-depth interviews highlight the complexities of negotiating family rules, journey with the family as they struggled with their new identity, and reveal how the reflexive process contributed to the family’s co-creation of new stories. The four themes that emerged (embracing gay identity, integrating as a family, building social networks, and social awakening), offer details of how the family reconfigured from the rubble of confusion to become more cohesive, awakened and empowered. Implications for clinical practice with families with gay members are addressed.     

变革型领导对下属进谏行为的影响：组织心理所有权与传统性的作用

以373对上级-下属配对数据为样本, 分析了上级的变革型领导对下属进谏行为的影响以及组织心理所有权的中介效应和传统性的调节效应。结果发现：变革型领导对下属进谏上司和进谏同事均有积极影响; 变革型领导通过组织心理所有权的中介效应影响下属进谏上司、进谏同事; 传统性对组织心理所有权与进谏上司、进谏同事之间的关系具有调节效应, 员工的传统性越高, 组织心理所有权对进谏上司、进谏同事的影响越小。     

Effects of delayed time‐out on problem behavior of preschool children

Time‐out is a common negative punishment procedure in home and school settings. Although prior studies have shown time‐out is effective, more research is needed on its effects when implementation is imperfect. We evaluated delays to time‐out with 4 preschool children who engaged in some combination of aggression, property destruction, and rule breaking. Target behavior decreased for all subjects exposed to delayed time‐out, with 3 of 4 subjects displaying low levels of target behavior even when time‐out was delayed by 90‐120 s. These data suggest delayed time‐out might be effective in situations in which a caregiver or teacher cannot implement time‐out immediately.     

The Double Cohort retention and academic success comparison: are students in the new Ontario secondary school program disadvantaged?

In September 2003, Ontario universities accepted a double cohort of new students resulting from the Ontario government’s decision to eliminate Grade 13. The admission to university of two categories of students distinguished by their age and high school program raised a number of questions, not only in terms of admission infrastructure but mostly in what concerns the sum of student retention, academic success, and graduation. Factors associated with success and with the maintenance of university studies are numerous: stress, socioeconomic status, parents’ education, intellectual capacities, motivation, social abilities, and social support (Olds & Papalia, 2000). Therefore, the objectives of this study were: (1) to test the hypothesis of a double cohort effect on student academic success during the first year of university, (2) to verify the hypothesis that high school academic history, socioeconomic variables related to stress and perceived stress predict academic success and retention at the end of first year university. In September 2003, 300 first year students answered questionnaires inquiring about their high school program and high school GPA, their socioeconomic characteristics, and their perceived stress. These measures were then used to predict drop out, final GPA, number of credits attempted, passed and failed in June 2004. Results showed that school persistence and first year university academic achievement are mostly predicted by gender, high school GPA, type of financial resources, and number of hours worked at a paid job. Although not significant, we have found a higher proportion of Grade 12 students who dropped out during first year at university, suggesting a possible long-term effect of high school program on academic achievement.     

Performance as annihilation or integration?1

What happens when the analyst has the impression of being annihilated by the patient? Analysts have a tendency to use more general, i.e. simplifying, constructions such as destructiveness, psychosis or death instinct as explanatory models. In the authors' view, these constructions in the end evade rather than mirror clinical reality. More recent research points to promising possibilities of differentiation, e.g. psychotic mechanisms which are‐as yet undiscussed‐based on Freud's notion of the partial ‘rent in the relation between ego and external world’. These findings emphasize the restitutive function of a symptom or disturbance, i.e. destruction of a relationship which hinders the therapeutic process and which is not understood initially, instead of solely stressing the destructive meaning in a tabooing gesture. The concept of performance attempts to replace simplifying models with a discriminant process, and will be preliminarily defined and explained in delineation to terms already in use such as acting out, enactment, and role responsiveness. The authors explore the question of how the perception of unthought certainty in the performance can either be recognized as a blueprint, i.e. organizing activity, or as the destruction of the relationship so that a new one can emerge. The evidence from a detailed clinical example shows that many treatments can fail at this point and demonstrates how an understanding of performance in this sense offers a chance for integrating processes that otherwise impede treatment.     

Reconstructing Distances among Objects from Their Discriminability

We describe a principled way of imposing a metric representing dissimilarities on any discrete set of stimuli (symbols, handwritings, consumer products, X-ray films, etc.), given the probabilities with which they are discriminated from each other by a perceiving system, such as an organism, person, group of experts, neuronal structure, technical device, or even an abstract computational algorithm. In this procedure one does not have to assume that discrimination probabilities are monotonically related to distances, or that the distances belong to a predefined class of metrics, such as Minkowski. Discrimination probabilities do not have to be symmetric, the probability of discriminating an object from itself need not be a constant, and discrimination probabilities are allowed to be 0’s and 1’s. The only requirement that has to be satisfied is Regular Minimality, a principle we consider the defining property of discrimination: for ordered stimulus pairs (a,b), b is least frequently discriminated from a if and only if a is least frequently discriminated from b. Regular Minimality generalizes one of the weak consequences of the assumption that discrimination probabilities are monotonically related to distances: the probability of discriminating a from a should be less than that of discriminating a from any other object. This special form of Regular Minimality also underlies such traditional analyses of discrimination probabilities as Multidimensional Scaling and Cluster Analysis. This research was supported by the NSF grant SES 0318010 (E.D.), Humboldt Research Award (E.D.), Humboldt Foundation grant DEU/1038348 (H.C. & E.D.), and DFG grant Co 94/5 (H.C.).     

Is conscious perception gradual or dichotomous? A comparison of report methodologies during a visual task

In a recent article, [Sergent, C. &; Dehaene, S. (2004). Is consciousness a gradual phenomenon? Evidence for an all-or-none bifurcation during the attentional blink, Psychological Science, 15(11), 720–729] claim to give experimental support to the thesis that there is a clear transition between conscious and unconscious perception. This idea is opposed to theoretical arguments that we should think of conscious perception as a continuum of clarity, with e.g., fringe conscious states [Mangan, B. (2001). Sensation’s ghost—the non-sensory “fringe” of consciousness, Psyche, 7, 18]. In the experimental study described in this article, we find support for this opposite notion that we should have a parsimonious account of conscious perception. Our reported finding relates to the hypothesis that there is more than one perceptual threshold [Merikle, P.M., Smilek, D. &; Eastwood, J.D. (2001). Perception without awareness: perspectives from cognitive psychology, Cognition, 79, 115–134], but goes further to argue that there are different “levels” of conscious perception.