Εὐφραινέσθωσαν οἱ οὐρανοί, ‘Let the heavens rejoice’: an Anglican reflection on the 2014 Agreed Statement on Christology between the Anglican Communion and the Oriental Orthodox Churches

After acknowledging the importance of the Anglican–Oriental Orthodox Agreed Statement on Christology (2014) and explaining the perspective of this article, the rationale of Christology as confession and interpretation is explained and explored: its development of the fundamental theme of Christ the eternal Son, by his double solidarity in incarnation with humanity and Godhead relating and re-bonding Godhead and humanity. This theme, inherent in Peter’s confession of Jesus as Messiah, is essentially repeated by Paul and continuously interpreted in the Church’s unfolding self-understanding. Criticism of this process is mentioned and briefly countered. The continuity of the theme in the debates of the fourth and fifth centuries, its basis in principles of human relevance and divine commitment and its adequate expression in the Statement are indicated and affirmed. The prudent silence of the Agreement on technical refinements and definitions of Councils is noted. Finally, brief suggestions are offered in explanation of the continuance of the issue in ancient times and reflections on its relevance to modern Christology.     

Syntactic agreement attraction reflects working memory processes

Does producing syntactic agreement rely on syntactic or memory-based retrieval processes? The present study investigated the extent to which syntactic processing deficits and working memory (WM) deficits predict susceptibility to agreement attraction [Bock, K., &; Miller, C. A. (1991). Broken agreement. Cognitive Psychology, 23, 45–93], where speakers tend to erroneously produce plural agreement for a singular subject when another noun in the sentence is grammatically plural. Four brain-injured patients with varying degrees of grammatical and WM deficits completed sentences with local nouns that matched or mismatched in number with the head noun, and that were plausible or implausible subjects. Both aspects of grammatical deficits and the extent of WM deficits predicted the extent of agreement attraction effects. These data are consistent with the proposal that producing an agreeing verb involves a cue-based search in WM for an appropriate controlling noun, which is subject to interference from other elements in memory with similar properties [cf. Badecker, W., &; Kuminiak, F. (2007). Morphology, agreement and working memory retrieval in sentence production: Evidence from gender and case in Slovak. Journal of Memory and Language, 56(1), 65–85. doi:10.1016/j.jml.2006.08.004].     

Judgments of moderator variables of agreement in person perception: A comparison of two cultures

Three moderators of agreement in person perception, behavioral consistency, observability and social desirability, were studied. The major hypothesis is that the moderators can be estimated using the standing of targets on traits; that is, that as targets vary on a given trait, they vary on how they are seen as on the moderators. Using Korean ( N  = 135) and US ( N  = 81) samples, we tested this approach for 80 traits. Analyses revealed that moderators varied by the combination of trait and target standing in different ways for the two samples. In judgment of behavioral consistency over target standings, linear and curvilinear trends were stronger for the US sample than for the Korean sample. For observability, judgments were similar, although curvilinear trends were larger for the Korean sample. Furthermore, being extremely positive was perceived as less desirable for the Korean judges. These findings were discussed in terms of cultural differences. Moreover, a new approach to the study of moderators was proposed.     

Mother–Child Agreement on Reports of Internalizing Symptoms Among Children Referred for Evaluation of ADHD

The effects of maternal (bias), child (age, severity of behavior problems), and measurement characteristics (similarity of parent and child measures; types of internalizing symptoms) on mother–child agreement on reports of children's internalizing symptoms were examined for 65 children referred for evaluation of ADHD. Agreement was low and did not improve when parents and children completed parallel measures. Mothers and children were more likely to agree on severity of internalizing symptoms rated as behavioral than those rated as ideational. The majority of discordant reports were of the type that mothers, but not children, reported clinically elevated symptoms. This type of discordance appeared to be a function of maternal negative bias rather than underreporting of symptoms by children.     

Evaluating the evaluator: The effects of the valence,sequence and target of evaluations on the perception of the evaluator

People commonly want to be perceived as intelligent, as well as be liked by others. Previous research has demonstrated that people who wish to appear intelligent tend to criticise others, and that criticising others indeed leads to the perception of high intelligence. In the current research we hypothesised and found that this is not the case when (a) the criticism is targeted towards the people who form the impression, and (b) the criticism is targeted towards those with whom the people who form the impression have just interacted. In both cases, participants in our study liked evaluators less when they used criticism than when they used praise. Moreover, they perceived the evaluators as less intelligent. We also demonstrated that in cases of mixing praise with criticism, the sequence of the evaluation interacted with the target of the evaluation in influencing liking. We found a greater liking for evaluators whose evaluation changed from negative to positive rather than vice versa, but only when the perceiver was the target of the evaluation. The discussion centres on the potential underlying mechanisms for these results, as well as on the practical applications of the results and directions for future research.     

Interrater agreement on behavioral executive function measures in adolescents with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder

Background/ObjectiveThough most children with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) show difficulties in behavioral measures of executive functions (EF), few studies have examined interrater agreement in these measures.Objective: To analyze the agreement between parents, teachers and self-reports of behavioral EF in adolescents with ADHD and controls. Method: A sample of 118 adolescents (75 with ADHD and 43 controls) was rated by parents, teachers and the adolescents themselves using the Comprehensive Executive Function Inventory. The intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) and Bland and Altman methods were used to evaluate agreement. Results: The ICC between parents, teachers and self-report was poor or moderate in the group with ADHD; in the control group the agreement was fair to good. The Bland and Altman graphs show that, in the control group, most of the scores are below to the clinical cut-off point, while in the group with ADHD they are above. Conclusions: Agreement between all raters was low. Parents, teachers and adolescents agreed on the absence of deficits in behavioral EF in the control group, and on the presence of deficits in the group with ADHD, although they did not agree on the frequency of these deficits.     

Extensive Philosophical Agreement and Progress

This article argues, first, that there is plenty of agreement among philosophers on philosophically substantive claims, which fall into three categories: reasons for or against certain views, elementary truths regarding fundamental notions, and highly conditionalized claims. This agreement suggests that there is important philosophical progress. It then argues that although it's easy to list several potential kinds of philosophical progress, it is much harder to determine whether the potential is actual. Then the article attempts to articulate the truth that the deniers of philosophical progress are latching on to. Finally, it comments on the significance of the agreement and (potential) progress.     

Perception of speech reflects optimal use of probabilistic speech cues

Listeners are exquisitely sensitive to fine-grained acoustic detail within phonetic categories for sounds and words. Here we show that this sensitivity is optimal given the probabilistic nature of speech cues. We manipulated the probability distribution of one probabilistic cue, voice onset time (VOT), which differentiates word initial labial stops in English (e.g., "beach" and "peach"). Participants categorized words from distributions of VOT with wide or narrow variances. Uncertainty about word identity was measured by four-alternative forced-choice judgments and by the probability of looks to pictures. Both measures closely reflected the posterior probability of the word given the likelihood distributions of VOT, suggesting that listeners are sensitive to these distributions.