Christ-Centred Solidarity in a Time of Pandemic

The article proposes a reading of Colossians 1:15-20 for the time of COVID-19, arguing that the assertion that all things “hold together” in the incarnate Christ should lead Christians not only to practise solidarity with those most at risk, but also to evaluate societal and systemic responses to COVID-19 in the light of their effects on the most vulnerable members of society. The article considers the use and misuse of the rhetoric of self-sacrificial love or loving self-sacrifice, and the use and misuse of the image of warfare – arguing that in both of these areas, Christian communities offer urgent challenges and correctives on the basis of their traditions of Christ-centred solidarity.     

记忆训练对改善少年、青年和老年人认知功能的作用

本工作采用“位置法”(method of loci)对24例少年、24例青年和22例老年被试进行了记忆训练研究。以毕生发展的观点比较认知训练对改善不同年龄人记忆的作用,进而探讨发展的认知功能储备能量的年龄差异和训练的迁移效应。结果表明认知干预措施可在一定程度上改善老年人的记忆,同时也显示了在发展的储能和对图形的迁移效应方面,老年人明显不如青、少年,而青年与少年则彼此相近。     

Influential observations in principal factor analysis

We propose a method for detecting influential observations in iterative principal factor analysis. For this purpose we derive the influence functionsI(x; LL ^T ) andI(x; ) for the common variance matrixT =LL ^T and the unique variance matrix , respectively, in the common factor decomposition =LL ^T + . A numerical example is given for illustration.The authors are grateful to Tomoyuki Tarumi and Atsuhiro Hayashi for their kind permission to use their software Seto/B for drawing Figures 1 and 2 and to anonymous reviewers for comments on the paper.     

The pathological left-handedness syndrome

A clinical syndrome of pathological left-handedness (PLH) is proposed to identify the pattern of correlative changes in lateral development associated with early brain injury in some manifest left-handers. This syndrome is believed to be caused by a hemispheric lesion that is predominantly left-sided (or bilateral asymmetric), which onsets before Age 6, and which encroaches upon the critical speech zones of the frontotemporal/frontoparietal cortex. The pattern of changes may include any or all of the following features: shifts in manual dominance, trophic changes in the extremities, transfer of hemispheric speech, and/or intrahemispheric reorganization of visuospatial cognitive functions. Although some of these correlates of PLH have long been known, they have not been recognized as an interrelated pattern of traits that constitute a clinical syndrome. Identification of these individuals, all manifest left-handers, will be shown to have implications for diagnosis/remediation and for models of recovery of function.     

Primary-school stutterers: Have attitudes changed?

How concerned are primary-school-aged stuttering children about their communication problem? What are the clinical implications of this concern?Fifteen years ago, Silverman (1970) suggested that primary-school-aged children who stuttered were not concerned about their disfluencies. A clinical implication of that report was that the interpreted lack of concern might negatively affect the children's motivation and desire for change in therapy. Scant research exists to support or refute this implication. While research is available on reactions to stuttering, pretherapeutic attitudes—especially those of children—have not been systematically reported. Guitar (1976) measured the pre-treatment attitudes of 38 adult stutterers and reported that, “those stutterers with more negative attitudes measured just prior to treatment, were most likely to have high levels of stuttering a year later, even though all subjects left therapy entirely fluent.” In related areas, research by Kolb, Winter, and Berlen (1968), McFall (1970), and McFall and Hammen (1971) has indicated that clients who are more motivated do better in behavior modification programs.Whether or not these findings may be generalized to children, in the midst of a developmental process, is purely speculative.     

Perceptual and conceptual organization of facial emotions: Hemispheric differences

Patients with lesions to either the right or left hemisphere and control subjects were asked to judge the similarity of pairs of photographs of a person displaying different emotions, and of pairs of emotion words. The results were submitted to a multidimensional scaling analysis. Right-hemisphere-damaged subjects were found to be more impaired at perceiving facial emotions than were left-hemisphere-damaged subjects or controls, and this impairment was not confined to the perception of a subset of facial emotions nor to judging emotional valence (Pleasantness versus Unpleasantness). Rather, subtle impairments in perceiving a wide range of facial emotions were found, mostly concerning differentiation of the Positive-Negative and Attention-Rejection dimensions, and concerning the strategies the subjects used to make their judgments. The right-hemisphere-damaged subjects performed comparably to controls in their ratings of emotion words, suggesting that their ability to conceptualize emotional states was intact and that their impairment was strictly in the perception of emotion.     

Children's relative number judgments: One-to-one correspondence,recognition of noncorrespondence,and the influence of cue conflict

Although one-to-one correspondence can be seen as a component of successful counting, number conservation, and relative number judgments, there is evidence of considerable discrepancies between children's competencies in these different tasks. Concerning relative number judgments there are strikingly different claims concerning the ability of young children to make one-to-one correspondence-based judgments. In part these discrepancies reflect differences in criteria. Four experiments are reported in which 5-year-olds' relative number judgments of small and large number displays with and without perceptual aids were studied. Children were found to respond to local rather than global density differences and to benefit from the provision of perceptual aids on both small and large number displays with one exception, namely, large number displays where the longer row is less numerous.