BEWILDERMENT AND THEREAFTER: Some Reflections in Response to Lee Yearley

The following reflections were originally an oral response to issues raised in Lee Yearley's presentation in May 2009 at Harvard Divinity School. As written here, they follow upon his oral and now written comments, highlighting key issues and points for development, drawing on this respondent's expertise in comparative and Hindu studies.     

Ethnic pride and self-control related to protective and risk factors: test of the theoretical model for the strong African American families program.

OBJECTIVE: To test a theoretical model of how ethnic pride and self-control are related to risk and protective factors. DESIGN: A community sample of 670 African American youth (mean age = 11.2 years) were interviewed in households. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Measures of cigarette smoking, alcohol use, and sexual behavior (lifetime to past month). RESULTS: Structural modeling analyses indicated parenting was related to self-control and self-esteem, and racial socialization was related to ethnic pride. Self-control and self-esteem variables were related to levels of deviance-prone attitudes and to perceptions of engagers in, or abstainers from, substance use and sexual behavior. The proximal factors (behavioral willingness, resistance efficacy, and peer behavior) had substantial relations to the criterion variables. Participant gender and parental education also had several paths in the model. Results were generally similar for the 2 outcome behaviors. CONCLUSIONS: In this population, self-esteem and self-control are related to parenting approaches and have pathways to attitudes and social perceptions that are significant factors for predisposing to, or protecting against, early involvement in substance use and sexual behavior.     

Overanxious disorder: An examination of developmental differences

Differences between a clinical sample of younger (ages 5 to 11) and older (ages 12 to 19) children meeting DSM-III criteria for overanxious disorder (OAD) were examined. Younger and older children were compared in terms of (1) the rates of OAD diagnoses occurring in the two age groups, (2) sociodemographic characteristics, (3) symptom expression, (4) association with other forms of maladjustment, and (5) self-reported anxiety and depression. The prevalence of OAD diagnoses and sociodemographic characteristics did not differ. Although younger and older OAD children showed similar rates of most specific DSM-III OAD symptoms, older children presented with a higher total number of overanxious symptoms than younger children. Older children more frequently exhibited a concurrent major depression or simple phobia, whereas younger OAD children more commonly had coexisting separation anxiety or attention deficit disorders. Older OAD children reported significantly higher levels of anxiety and depression on self-report measures. Findings indicated that the expression of OAD varies by developmental level.     

Attitudes toward sex, arousal, and the retention of contraceptive information

Previous research has suggested that women with a negative emotional orientation toward sexuality (i.e., erotophobia) have difficulty learning and retaining sexually relevant material such as contraceptive information. It has been hypothesized that these women become aroused by this material and that this arousal interferes with their ability to learn it. The importance of this issue led us to conduct the current study. Erotophobic and erotophilic women viewed presentations about contraception while their physiological responses were being monitored. In addition, they were tested on the information contained in the presentation before, immediately after, and again 4-6 weeks after the presentation. The results indicated that the erotophobic women knew less contraceptive information before the presentation and were more aroused by the presentation. This arousal, however, did not interfere with retention of the material. These results are discussed in terms of individual differences in reactions to sexual material and the ability to learn, retain, and use contraceptive information.     

Expert knowledge as mnemonic cues

It is proposed that expert knowledge can operate as a cognitive cueing structure for the acquisition and retention of new information in memory. Two experiments are reported which demonstrate that expert knowledge about football and clothing can act as mnemonic cues for the recall of information newly associated with that knowledge. In Experiment 1 expert terms from the domains of football and clothing and those neutral nouns paired with them were both better recalled by experts than by non-experts. In Experiment 2 passages containing information contrary to factual knowledge about football and clothing were recalled better by experts than by non-experts, in spite of the fact that information in the passages contradicted what the experts already knew. The results of the two experiments were interpreted as showing that expert knowledge provides mental cues that have desirable mnemonic properties such as constructibility, associability, discriminability and invertibility. Also, the interpretation of expert knowledge as a cognitive cueing structure is compared to Ausubel's ideas regarding advance organizers.     

Visually perceived eye level: changes induced by a pitched-from-vertical 2-line visual field.

The physical elevation corresponding to visually perceived eye level (VPEL) changes linearly with the pitch of a visual field. Deviations from true eye level average more than 0.5 times the angle of pitch over a 65 degrees pitch range. A visual field consisting of 2 dim, isolated vertical lines in darkness is more than 4/5 as effective as that of a complexly structured visual field; 2 horizontal lines have a small and inconsistent effect. Differences in influence on VPEL between pitched-from-vertical and horizontal lines were predicted from an analysis that extracted differences in retinal perspective resulting from changes in pitch. The Great Circle Model (GCM), based on a spherical approximation to the erect, stationary eye, predicts the present results and results of 8 other sets of experiments. The model treats the influence of a single line on VPEL as systematically related to the elevation of the intersection between the great circle containing the image of the line and the central vertical retinal meridian; generalized GCM combines visual inputs with inputs from the body-referenced mechanism and maps onto the central nervous system.     

A PRESCRIPTION FOR GENERATING A NEW PARADIGM IN THE CONTEXT OF SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY

Abstract. Many centers are now active in the study of the interaction between science on the one hand and theology on the other. Suggestions are made as to how such study might be furthered. The central proposal in this paper is based on the author's experience in founding and, over many years, operating the Neurosciences Research Program (NRP). The "faculty" of this group were highly competent in many fields of science and were able to deal with many of the major issues. It is here further suggested that if an NRP-like organization were established, capable of productively interacting with both science and theology, it might well generate new concepts and possibly a new paradigm in this context.     

Cocaine-induced brainstem seizures and behavior.

A variety of abnormal sensory/motor behaviors associated with electrical discharges recorded from the bilateral brainstem were induced in adult WKY rats by mechanical (electrode implants) and DC electrical current stimulations and by acute and chronic administration of cocaine. The electrode implant implicated one side or the other of the reticular system of the brainstem but subjects were not incapacitated by the stimulations. Cocaine (40 mg/kg) was injected subcutaneously for an acute experiment and subsequent 20 mg/kg doses twice daily for 3 days in a chronic study. Cocaine generated more abnormal behaviors in the brainstem perturbation group, especially the electrically perturbated subjects. The abnormal behaviors were yawning, retrocollis, hyperactivity, hypersensitivity, "beating drum" behavior, squealing, head bobbing, circling, sniffing, abnormal posturing, and facial twitching. Shifts in the power frequency spectra of the discharge patterns were noted between quiet and pacing behavioral states. Hypersensitivity to various auditory, tactile, and visual stimulation was present and shifts in the brainstem ambient power spectral frequency occurred in response to tactile stimulation. These findings suggest that the brainstem generates and propagates pathological discharges that can be elicited by mechanical and DC electrical perturbation. Cocaine was found to activate the discharge system and thus induce abnormal behaviors that are generated at the discharge site and at distant sites to which the discharge propagates. Cognitive functions may also be involved since dopaminergic and serotonergic cellular elements at the brainstem level are also implicated.     

Development of perceived adolescent relationship scale

The purpose of the present study was to develop an easily administered scale to assess adolescents' perceptions of both their own social competence and social participation in relationships. Six items were used to generate two factors that accounted for about 68% of the variance.