When God Smites: Talking with Students about the Violence of God in Scripture

This article emphasizes the need for religious educators to address the issue of divine violence in Scripture with students, and it offers various pedagogical strategies for doing so. The focus is on violent Old Testament texts, with special attention given to the issue of Canaanite genocide. A general framework for structuring class time around divine violence in Scripture is proposed which includes (1) encouraging students to encounter violent biblical texts firsthand, (2) helping them understand why people find these passages problematic, and (3) offering various options for dealing with the potential problems these passages raise. In the second half of the article, significant attention is devoted to a number of practical considerations that should be taken into account when talking about this sensitive issue in class. A brief word about assessment is offered at the end.     

100 Years of Trauma: the Armenian Genocide and Intergenerational Cultural Trauma

The events of the Armenian Genocide of 1915, during which more than 1.5 million Armenians were massacred by the Ottoman Turkish Empire, has left a deep, painful scar on this small but prominent culture. Those who lived through the Armenian Genocide survived death marches, rapes, drownings, physical mutilation, and other such heinous crimes. As they have passed, it is being recognized that subsequent generations continue to fight for justice, manifesting their ancestral pain, sadness, and mourning for the loss of their family members. As sociocultural trauma has a multigenerational impact within families and communities and affects the feeling of membership and belonging within that community, understanding how previous traumas shape future generations of that group is important for clinicians. This article reviews the scarce research on intergenerational trauma in the Armenian community within the United States after the Armenian Genocide, using the constructivist self-development theory to provide clinical implications and suggestions.     

The two‐sided nature of individual and intragroup experiences in the aftermath of collective victimization: Findings from four diaspora groups

Most social psychological research on collective victimhood has examined its consequences for intergroup relations. Less attention has been paid to individual and intragroup processes associated with collective victimization, which the present study aimed to examine. We conducted eight focus group interviews among four diaspora communities (Armenian Americans, Burundian refugees, Jewish Americans, Nepali‐speaking Bhutanese refugees) with historical or more recent experiences of collective victimization. Thematic analysis revealed three major foci shared across communities (but with different emphases within each focus), which included juxtaposed themes that highlight the two‐sided nature of experiencing and coping with collective victimization and its aftermath: Vulnerability and struggle versus resilience and strength, loss versus continuity and renewal, and silence about versus transmission of knowledge about ingroup victimization. These findings illustrate how groups integrate seemingly opposite poles of collective victimization that characterize this complex and multifaceted experience, which has important theoretical implications.     

Spinoza: une lecture d'Aristote

Does (affirmative) judgement have a logical dual, negative judgement? Whether there is such a logical dualism was hotly debated at the beginning of the twentieth century. Frege argued in ‘Negation’ (1918/9) that logic can dispense with negative judgement. Frege's arguments shaped the views of later generations of analytic philosophers, but they will not have convinced such opponents as Brentano or Windelband. These philosophers believed in negative judgement for psychological, not logical, reasons. Reinach's ‘On the Theory of Negative Judgement’ (1911) spoke to the concerns of these philosophers. While Frege took the distinction between affirmative and negative judgement to be logically redundant, Reinach argued that it is the result of confusing judgement with a different mental act. In this article, I present Reinach's arguments against the ‘old logical dualism’ in context, analyse them and discuss Reinach's innovative use of the notion of focus in the theory of judgement. Recently, there has been a revival of the view that sentential negation is grounded in a prior mental act of rejection. In the final section, I argue that Reinach's analysis of rejection poses a challenge for the revivalists.     

Dual frames for causal induction: the normative and the heuristic

Causal induction in the real world often has to be quick and efficient as well as accurate. We propose that people use two different frames to achieve these goals. The A-frame consists of heuristic processes that presuppose rarity and can detect causally relevant factors quickly. The B-frame consists of analytic processes that can be highly accurate in detecting actual causes. Our dual frame theory implies that several factors affect whether people use the A-frame or the B-frame in causal induction: among these are symmetrical negation, intervention and commitment. This theory is tested and sustained in two experiments. The results also provide broad support for dual process accounts of human thinking in general.     

The life instinct

In psychoanalytic writing an oversimplified interpretation of Freud's concept of the life and death instincts sometimes colours the presentation. Roughly, there is an implication that the life instinct is 'good' and the death instinct 'bad'. Freud however is clear that: "Neither of these instincts is any less essential than the other; the phenomena of life arise from the concurrent or mutually opposing action of both"(1933b, p. 209). In this paper I look in detail at the characteristics of the life instinct as conceptualized by Freud, and draw on Bion's work 'on linking' to elaborate Freud's view that binding is the life instinct's key characteristic. I suggest that there are pathological forms of both the life and death instinct if defused (separated off) from the other, and I explore a pathological variation of the life instinct in which binding is without the negation, rest, limit or end provided by the 'opposing action' of the death instinct. I consider an instance of the kind that any analyst might meet clinically, in which an inhibited patient experiences severe anxiety that life-giving connections threaten to proliferate indiscriminately and to an overwhelming intensity and size.     

Evaluation and training of Executive Functions in genocide survivors. The case of Yazidi children

Executive Functions (EFs) development is critically affected by stress and trauma, as well as the socioeconomic context in which children grow up (Welsh, Nix, Blair, Bierman, & Nelson, 2010, Journal of Educational Psychology, 102 , 43–53). Research in this field is surprisingly lacking in relation to war contexts. This study represents a first attempt at addressing this topic by evaluating EFs in Yazidi children. The Yazidi community is an ethnic and religious minority living in Iraq. From August 2014 onwards, the Yazidi community has been the target of several atrocities perpetrated by ISIS and described as genocide by the international community at large. The University of Trieste, thanks to a program financed by the Friuli Venezia Giulia Region, developed a study aimed at (a) evaluating hot and cool EFs in children living in a war context and (b) developing a specific training method to enhance hot and cool EFs in Yazidi children of preschool age (N = 53). Data related to this group of children were compared with a sample of typically developing Italian children randomly assigned to either an EFs training group (N = 55) or a passive control group (N = 51). Results indicate different baselines in EFs in Yazidi and Italian samples and a significant effect of the program on both trained groups, especially in tasks measuring hot EFs. Data are discussed in terms of hot and cool EFs in children growing in adverse environments, as well as the evaluation of educational and developmental opportunities to prevent children who survived genocide from becoming a ‘lost generation’. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at https://youtu.be/7t_08TbxR_8 .     

“没有”为什么隐含着“消极情绪”?——否定加工中的情绪表征

采用情感错误归因范式(AMP)和经典情感启动范式(BFP), 在汉语双音节中性名词的前面加上否定或肯定词, 构成“没有/有XX”短语, 作为启动材料, 以中性俄语词或汉语情绪词为目标材料, 探讨了汉语否定加工的情绪表征。在实验1的AMP范式中, 刺激反应不同步(SOA)时间为200 ms和500 ms, 结果显示, 否定短语比肯定短语有显著高的消极反应概率; 在实验2的BFP范式中, 否定短语比肯定短语同样启动了更高的消极反应概率。实验结果表明, 否定本身具有消极效价, 否定加工通过消极情绪实现具身化。     

强弱语义语境下的否定句加工机制

2个眼动实验分别探讨强弱语义语境下的否定句加工机制, 以便考察语言理解是命题表征的过程还是经验模拟的过程, 抑或是二者兼具。在实验中, 被试首先听句子(强语义语境：如“胳膊不是弯曲的”的备择选项为“伸直的胳膊”, 其中“弯曲−伸直”为具有反义关系的强语义连接关系; 弱语义语境：如加工“裙子不是蓝色的”的备择选项为“黑色的裙子”, “蓝色−黑色”为弱语义连接关系), 然后会看到4张同时呈现的图片, 被试的任务是按键选择与句子描述匹配的图片。结果发现, 在强语义语境条件下, 被试在早期(201~600 ms时窗)对描述事件否定状态的图片(弯曲的胳膊)与描述事件实际状态的图片(伸直的胳膊)的注视概率没有差别, 晚期(601 ms后)仅对描述事件实际状态的图片的注视概率更高; 弱语义语境条件下, 被试在早期(401~600 ms)仅对描述事件否定状态的图片(蓝裙子)注视概率更高, 晚期(801 ms后)仅对描述事件实际状态的图片(黑色裙子)注视概率更高; 并且, 都对描述事件否定状态的图片的注视概率低于随机水平。结果支持符号依存假设和抑制假设。     

Constructive Logic with Strong Negation is a Substructural Logic. II

The goal of this two-part series of papers is to show that constructive logic with strong negation N is definitionally equivalent to a certain axiomatic extension NFL _ew of the substructural logic FL _ew . The main result of Part I of this series [41] shows that the equivalent variety semantics of N (namely, the variety of Nelson algebras) and the equivalent variety semantics of NFL _ew (namely, a certain variety of FL _ew -algebras) are term equivalent. In this paper, the term equivalence result of Part I [41] is lifted to the setting of deductive systems to establish the definitional equivalence of the logics N and NFL _ew . It follows from the definitional equivalence of these systems that constructive logic with strong negation is a substructural logic. Presented by Heinrich Wansing