Examining the State-Trait Anxiety Relationship: A Behavioural Genetic Approach

State and trait anxiety define different aspects of anxiety, and may represent environmentally and genetically mediated components of this phenotype. Furthermore their relationship, where trait anxiety is expressed through levels of state anxiety under threatening circumstances, may represent a process of interplay between a genetic vulnerability factor and an environmental stressor. To test these hypotheses, we explored genetic and environmental influences on measures of state and trait anxiety in a sample of 1058 twins (521 males and 537 females) aged 8–16. The results were consistent with these hypotheses. State anxiety is largely influenced by environmental factors in males and females whereas trait anxiety shows moderate genetic effects and substantial non-shared environment effects. Their association was accounted for by non-shared environmental effects, with modest genetic and shared environmental inputs. The implications of these results for vulnerability mechanisms involving stress reactivity on anxiety are discussed.     

Advances in Behaviorism: It's Not What It Used to Be

Behaviorism has changed over the past half century and its modern form is not familiar to many educators and other applied professionals. Put briefly, behaviorism has changed from the molecular and absolutist form of years past, when basic researchers, therapists and educators sought to modify isolated target behaviors. Modern behaviorism is relativistic and molar and the articles included in this issue are meant to illustrate this changed emphasis. The first article shows how the matching law has redefined the old law of effect and how that affects application. The second shows how relational frames provide a behavioral treatment of cognitive variables that dispels the stereotyped view of behavior modification. The third treats molar classes of behaviors as traits, and individual behaviors as states, applying that distinction to aspects of the relative frequencies of behaviors of children at home and at school. Finally, the last article shows specifically how behavioral methods have been (and are) applied to the behavior of autistic children, in a program that has been extremely successful over the past few years.     

On cross-cultural conflict and pediatric intervention

A critical examination of Richard Miller's position in his recent Children, Ethics, and Modern Medicine on how to handle pediatric interventions in cases of cross-cultural conflict between parents and doctors with respect to treating young children. Particular emphasis is placed on Miller's interpretation of and arguments about a Hmong case extensively researched by Anne Fadiman in her The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down. The conclusion drawn is that Miller's position requires further nuance and development, and some recommendations are made toward that end.     

Events in Branching Time

The concept of event is one of the key notions of many theories dealing with causality or agency. In this paper we study different approaches to events that share the basic assumption that events can be analyzed fruitfully in branching-time structures. The terminological framework developed thereby may be helpful for further analyses in the fields of causality and agency and also in those fields of computational semantics, where similar concepts are considered.     

儒家哲学的现代转型及其在21世纪的价值

面对各种挑战,儒家哲学的现代转型问题仍需要作切实的严肃的思考。儒学已不可能恢复其历史上的“独尊”地位,但它要恢复其活力,成为现代社会多元哲学中的“一元”,就必须完成其现代转型,成为一种现代的“合乎理性的完备性学说”．承担起“人类各种价值的总协调”这一哲学使命。新儒学需要与其他学说进行积极的对话和良性的互动,不仅在“正德”方面突出其价值,而且在“利用”(经济)、“厚生”(生活)、“致知”(科学)和“立制”(政治)等方面与其他学说逐渐达成“重叠的共识”。人类在21世纪将更加提升“交往理性”,更加重视“正德”．儒学在2l世纪将彰显其价值。     

论民族道德与国家道德

在民族国家特别是多民族国家中,如何看待并处理好民族道德与国家道德的关系,是一个事关民族利益和国家利益的大问题。从民族道德与国家道德的关系看,民族道德统一于国家道德,民族利己主义是为国家道德所不容的,民族道德与国家道德的最高原则是无产阶级国际主义。必须用前瞻性的战略眼光来看待并认识这一问题,因为它事关民族与国家的长远利益,对构建和谐民族、和谐国家、和谐社会均具有重要的理论意义和现实意义。     

Discarding the Barthian Spectacles: Part I, Recent Scholarship on the History of Early 20th Century German Protestant Theology

Abstract :  This essay introduces "the veritable renaissance" of scholarly attention devoted to the theologies of the early twentieth century. This "renaissance" challenges us to discard the "Barthian spectacles" through which we have been reading the theological history of this time and to examine more closely the complex context—social, political, churchly, cultural—in which theology was done.     

"Us" and "Them":

Abstract: In the Aristotelian tradition, politics is a matter of public deliberation over questions of justice and injustice. The Bush administration's response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, has been uniformly hostile to this notion, and it has instead promoted a jingoistic politics of self‐assertion by an America largely identified with the executive branch of its government. This is doubly disturbing, as the executive branch has sought to free itself from international law, multinational commitments, and domestic judicial regulation, even as it has sought to validate itself by demonizing its enemies. This essay draws out the disturbing echoes here of Carl Schmitt's work of the 1920s, in particular of Schmitt's conception of the sovereign as the ungrounded ground of the law and the political as the site of mortal conflict between friend and enemy. The essay argues that Schmitt's position in the twenties, for all of its evident problems, is superior to that of Bush, Wolfowitz, and Ashcroft in at least two senses: Schmitt condemns the idea of waging war for profit and recognizes that such wars will often be disguised as moral crusades waged against the “inhuman”; and he acknowledges that claiming to fight a war for humanity denies one's enemies their humanity, leaving them open to torture and even extermination.     

Object Relations Psychoanalysis as Political Theory

This article examines the political contents of object relations psychoanalysis, a theory that perceives dependence as the natural state of all humans. Unlike the views advanced by the classical state-of-nature models of Locke, Hobbes, and Rousseau, object relations perceives humans in their original state as already grouped and driven by an urge to associate. Company (rather than privacy, property, or political participation) stands out as the basic right, and all the other rights follow on it as instruments for fulfilling it. The primacy of care lends itself to the justification of distributive measures meant to bolster family cohesion and individual confidence at the expense of the open market. The theory is therefore compatible with the premises of the social-democratic welfare state.