Measuring the activity of severely and profoundly mentally-handicapped adults in ordinary housing

Earlier work on the quality of care in settings for severely and profoundly mentally-handicapped adults raised the question whether any useful purpose is served by promoting the extensive use of simple recreational materials to occupy people. Data were collected by direct observation on the activity of 6 adults living in a staffed house organized to promote engagement in household activities. Observations were taken over 5 weekdays from 07.00 to 10.00 and 15.00 to 23.00hr. The results showed that Ss spent between 22 and 67% of available time in purposeful activity. Between 27 and 65% of purposeful activity was engagement in domestic or housework tasks. Even the most handicapped people spent more time engaged in housework than in leisure and recreational tasks. The implications of these data are commented on and measurement issues which arise in ordinary housing as opposed to institutional settings are discussed.     

Becoming No-Thing: Eckhart and Hegel on Identity and Difference

Abstract: My goal in this paper is to draw productively on Meister Eckhart's concept of the ‘no-thing’ in order to illuminate Hegel's ontotheological account of both human and divine kenosis. I advance the view that just as divine kenosis is understood as the outpouring of the divine which includes the death of Christ in its economic activity, human kenosis also requires an engagement with death, namely, a spiritual death to the finite. It is via this species of death which is a becoming ‘no-thing’ that the reconciliation between the human and the divine is disclosed as a unity that relies on the shared identity of the divine and the human while simultaneously respecting the integrity of both. Indeed, it is in and through their parallel activity of kenosis that finite and infinite being achieve their respective transcendence by necessarily engaging with the being of the other. Hence, Hegel's ontotheological work is not reducible to sheer immanentism as some scholars suggest, but instead upholds the genuine transcendence of the divine.     

Gender differences in personality: Biological and/or psychological?

The results of three empirical studies are reported in which the hypothesis is tested that differences in personality variables between the morphophenotype sexes can be explained by psychological sex-role orientation variables. Furthermore, it was expected that normative sex-role orientations (measured with the SRO-S and the AWS-S Scales) and gender-related self-concepts (femininity, masculinity, and androgyny measured with a modified BSRI) explain more variance in personality variables than morphophenotype sex. Besides these sex-role orientation variables, test and questionnaire data on verbal fluency, spatial reasoning, self-concept, anxiety, and aggressiveness were obtained in Study I from 50 young adults and their same-sex parents; in Study II, data on verbal fluency, spatial reasoning, self-concept, anxiety, and neuroticism were obtained from 120 university students; and in Study III, data on anxiety, locus of control, and Machiavellianism were obtained from 226 university students. The results confirm both hypotheses for the two aspects of intelligence studied, domain-specific self-concepts, different aspects of anxiety and aggressiveness, neuroticism, powerful others' externality in locus of control, and Machiavellianism. For all these personality variables the effect sizes of the psychological gender variables were larger than those of morphophenotype sex and reached medium to large values.     

Psychopathic personality traits and temporal perspective: A test of the short time horizon hypothesis

A number of authors have proposed that psychopathic individuals possess an abnormally constricted time horizon (i.e., foreshortened sense of the future). This hypothesis was tested among 101 undergraduates, who were administered a battery of (1) self-report indices of psychopathic personality traits, antisocial behavior, and normal-range personality traits; (2) self-report indices of time perspective; (3) projective tests of time perspective; and (4) laboratory tasks assessing time estimation and capacity for foresight and impulse control. Measures of psychopathy/antisocial behavior tended to be negatively correlated with several self-report indices assessing preoccupation with the future and with a projective task assessing the frequency of thoughts concerning future events, although only one of the correlations with this latter task was significant. In most cases these correlations were not attributable to the variance shared by measures of psychopathy/antisocial behavior and measures of (low) anxiety-proneness, although several correlations decreased substantially after levels of harmavoidance were controlled. In contrast, measures of psychopathy/antisocial behavior were negligibly correlated with laboratory tasks. These results provide mixed support for the short time horizon hypothesis and suggest that further attention to the role of method factors in investigations of future time perspective is warranted.     

Problems and prospects in group psychotherapy research

The scientific basis of psychotherapeutic findings involves a number of difficulties which are above all connected with the insufficient state of basic research in this field. In this situation, significant advances can only be expected on the basis of a systematic long-term investigation and research programme. This applies in particular to the problems of personality and efficiency diagnostics and to group process research. On the basis of some intermediate results, it is shown that by the combined and systematic use of procedures a number of possibilities for the differentiated recording of the complex processes in therapeutic groups can be obtained.