Historical Knowledge: A Response to Hal Childs

In his book,The Myth of the Historical Jesus and the Evolution of Consciousness, Hal Childs undertakes to do something which is probably impossible. He wishes to show that my reconstruction of the historical Jesus is positivistic without becoming positivistic himself in his own reconstruction of the historical Crossan, a work which, unfortunately for him but fortunately for me, is still very much in process. Here I only use, as he does, publications up to 1995. That means, for example, that I do not cite either The Birth of Christianity or my recent memoir A Long Way from Tipperary. I discuss Hal's dissertation under three headings, moving from the less to the more fundamentally important.     

From psychosocial equilibrium to catastrophic breakdown: Cyprus 1955–1974

The recent history of Cyprus presents an example of a society in which a centuries-long peaceful coexistence of diverse populations gave way to violence and murderous hate, with devastating end results. This paper tries to understand and describe the process by which Cypriot society slid from a position of psychosocial equilibrium and integration towards one of disintegration, fragmentation and catastrophic breakdown. This paper draws from work by social anthropologists, sociologists, historians and others, and from my own personal experience. To these I applied insights afforded by psychoanalysis to identify and explore the psychic processes and states of mind that characterized a psychosocial disintegrative process. I came to see external political events and internal psychological processes as inseparably intertwined and dynamically interdependent, each emanating from and catalysing the other. The factual details of the process described are of course unique in their local specificity, but the psychic phenomena that characterized it are not: at both the individual and group levels they are replicated in other societies undergoing similar processes of self-destruction.     

Tomasello关于语言获得的建构观

Michael Tomasello提出的用法建构语言获得理论认为儿童语言获得是一个以用法为基础、以功能为引导的逐步建构过程,而个体语言获得又以种系遗传的生物基础和文化历史积淀下来的语言环境为前提。本文在皮亚杰经典建构主义的框架下探讨Tomasello关于语言获得的建构观。     

Accuracy of Basic Knowledge of Traumatic Historical Events: The Armenian Genocide

This research assumes that accuracy of shared historical knowledge of genocide might help new generations cope with the trauma lived by previous generations, while the longer the denial of a genocide the more fragmented the macronarrative and the longer the collective trauma. The Armenian genocide (1915) is generally represented in opposite ways by the Turks and Armenians. The study explores the knowledge accuracy of the 1915 events before and after the centennial commemoration of the genocide and uses convenience samples from Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Croatia, Romania, United States, Venezuela, and a representative sample (Romania, N = 1231). The major findings suggest a very low basic knowledge of genocide, with a few exceptions, despite a significant increase of this knowledge after the 100-year commemoration.     

Is dispositional optimism or dispositional pessimism predictive of ideal cardiovascular health? The Young Finns Study

Objective: We examined the independent association between dispositional optimism compared to dispositional pessimism and ideal cardiovascular health (defined by the American Heart Association).

Design: A prospective design with a study sample of 1113 participants aged 24–39 years from the longitudinal Young Finns Study.

Main outcome measures: Ideal cardiovascular health (comprised of seven ideal cardiovascular health metrics) was measured in 2001. The ideal cardiovascular health metrics were reassessed in 2007.

Results: Low pessimism rather than high optimism was a better predictor of ideal cardiovascular health in 2007. When examining the association between optimism and pessimism and the seven ideal cardiovascular health metrics in 2007 (BMI, diet, physical activity, smoking status, blood pressure, total cholesterol and plasma glucose), low pessimism predicted non-smoking status, ideal physical activity and eating a healthy diet, while high optimism was associated with eating a healthy diet.

Conclusion: Our findings suggest that low pessimism rather than high optimism is associated with ideal cardiovascular health, especially with health behaviours such as not smoking, being physically active and eating a healthy diet. Socio-economic status was the potential mediating or confounding factor. Future studies should examine the differential meaning of the optimism/pessimism concepts to further clarify their relation to health outcomes.     

White Psychologists and African Americans’ Historical Trauma: Implications for Practice

This article reviews and synthesizes literature on the historical trauma of African Americans with an emphasis on how White psychologists can integrate awareness of historical trauma into clinical practice. Research supports that African Americans are affected by White racism in ways that parallel the effects of other interpersonal traumas. How African Americans are affected by racism depends on the individual, although the effects on the individual also occur within a shared cultural context. In addition to negative impacts, the literature also identifies African Americans’ core strengths and coping strategies that have a similarly historical basis. These strengths and coping strategies are discussed in their implications for White psychologists’ role in African Americans’ trauma recovery process.