The relationship between baptismal status and spiritual practices among committed Baptist youth

The empirical correlates of baptismal status raise intriguing questions for empirical theologians (does baptism make a measurable difference) and for social scientists (how does baptismal status function as an indictor of religiosity). The present study investigates these problems among a sample of 674 highly committed Christian adolescents participating in a weeklong youth mission and service event sponsored by the Convention of Atlantic Baptist Churches in Eastern Canada. In this sample, 72% had been baptised as an older child or adolescent, 13% had been baptised only as a baby before they were old enough to make a decision for themselves, and 15% had never been baptised. Multivariate analyses, controlling for sex and age differences and for maternal and paternal church attendance, found significant associations between baptismal status and spiritual practices. The status of never having been baptised is significantly associated with lower levels of church attendance, personal Bible reading, and personal prayer. The status of having been baptised only as a baby is significantly associated with lower levels of church attendance

Psychological type profile of religiously committed male and female Canadian Baptist youth: a study among participants at tidal impact

A sample of 479 female and 274 male religiously committed Canadian youth over the age of 11 years completed the Adolescent Form of the Francis Psychological Type Scales (FPTSA) within the context of a weeklong mission and service event sponsored by the Convention of Atlantic Baptist Churches. The data demonstrated strong preferences for intuition among both males (75%) and females (66%), and strong preferences for feeling among both males (86%) and females (92%). Females demonstrated stronger preferences for judging (61%) compared with males (39%). Both sexes demonstrated similar preferences for extraversion (52% among females and 49% among males). The most frequently occurring type among both males (22%) and females (20%) was ENFP. The implications of these findings are discussed for youth ministry and for potential recruitment into ordained ministry

Religiosity and music copyright theft among Canadian Baptist youth

This study examines the views of 706 Canadian Baptist youth (between the ages of 14 and 18 years) on the moral issue of music copyright theft, and explores the influence on these views of age, sex, Sunday church attendance, personal prayer, personal Bible reading, and conservative Bible believing. The participants were attending Springforth 2005 (a major Canadian Baptist Youth Conference). The data demonstrate a high level of acceptance of music copyright theft, with only 26% of the participants agreeing that downloading copyright music from the Internet without paying is always wrong. Employing multiple regression modelling, the data demonstrated that, as Canadian Baptist youth mature (grew older), as they became more familiar with Bible teaching (through frequent reading of the scriptures), and as they became more integrated within the community of faith (through frequent Sunday church attendance), so they take a tougher line against music copyright theft

The Scale Properties of the Adolescent Form of the Francis Psychological Type Scales (FPTSA) Among Canadian Baptist Youth

A sample of 755 religiously committed young people between the ages of 12 and 18 attending Tidal Impact (a weeklong youth mission and service event sponsored by the Convention of Atlantic Baptist Churches in Eastern Canada) completed a trial 80-item form of the Francis Psychological Type Scales designed for use among adolescents. These data were employed to refine four ten-item forced-choice scales to distinguish between preferences for the two orientations (extraversion and introversion), the two perceiving processes (sensing and intuition), the two judging processes (thinking and feeling) and the two attitudes (judging and perceiving). The scale properties of the new instrument commend the 40-item Adolescent form of the Francis Psychological Type Scales (FPTSA) for future use

The New Indices of Religious Orientation Revised (NIROR): A study among Canadian adolescents attending a Baptist Youth Mission and service event

This study explores the properties of the New Indices of Religious Orientation Revised (NIROR) among a sample of 521 Canadian adolescents attending a Baptist youth mission and service event, ranging in age from 12 to 19 years. This revision simplified the language of the original instrument to increase its accessibility among young people. The data support the internal consistency reliability and construct validity of the three revised nine-item scales designed to operationalise extrinsic religious orientation, intrinsic religious orientation, and quest religious orientation

Assessing the psychological type profile of Canadian Baptist youth : a study employing the Francis Psychological Type Scales for Adolescents (FPTSA)

A growing body of international research employing psychological type theory within the context of congregation studies has drawn attention to the way in which churches draw larger numbers of feeling types than thinking types (among both men and women). These studies have focused on adult churchgoers. The present study extends this field of research among 1630 Canadian Baptist youth attending church-based summer youth programmes (aged 12 to 19 years) who completed the Francis Psychological Type Scales for Adolescents. In this new study, 87 % of male youth and 93 % of female youth preferred feeling. The implications of these findings are assessed for the ministry of the Church among thinking types

Measures and Limits of Models of Fixation Selection

Models of fixation selection are a central tool in the quest to understand how the human mind selects relevant information. Using this tool in the evaluation of competing claims often requires comparing different models' relative performance in predicting eye movements. However, studies use a wide variety of performance measures with markedly different properties, which makes a comparison difficult. We make three main contributions to this line of research: First we argue for a set of desirable properties, review commonly used measures, and conclude that no single measure unites all desirable properties. However the area under the ROC curve (a classification measure) and the KL-divergence (a distance measure of probability distributions) combine many desirable properties and allow a meaningful comparison of critical model performance. We give an analytical proof of the linearity of the ROC measure with respect to averaging over subjects and demonstrate an appropriate correction of entropy-based measures like KL-divergence for small sample sizes in the context of eye-tracking data. Second, we provide a lower bound and an upper bound of these measures, based on image-independent properties of fixation data and between subject consistency respectively. Based on these bounds it is possible to give a reference frame to judge the predictive power of a model of fixation selection . We provide open-source python code to compute the reference frame. Third, we show that the upper, between subject consistency bound holds only for models that predict averages of subject populations. Departing from this we show that incorporating subject-specific viewing behavior can generate predictions which surpass that upper bound. Taken together, these findings lay out the required information that allow a well-founded judgment of the quality of any model of fixation selection and should therefore be reported when a new model is introduced

Predikin and PredikinDB: a computational framework for the prediction of protein kinase peptide specificity and an associated database of phosphorylation sites

Background: We have previously described an approach to predicting the substrate specificity of serine-threonine protein kinases. The method, named Predikin, identifies key conserved substrate-determining residues in the kinase catalytic domain that contact the substrate in the region of the phosphorylation site and so determine the sequence surrounding the phosphorylation site. Predikin was implemented originally as a web application written in Javascript

A comparison of nefazodone, the cognitive behavioral-analysis system of psychotherapy, and their combination for the treatment of chronic depression

Background Patients with chronic forms of major depression are difficult to treat, and the relative efficacy of medications and psychotherapy is uncertain. Methods We randomly assigned 681 adults with a chronic nonpsychotic major depressive disorder to 12 weeks of outpatient treatment with nefazodone (maximal dose, 600 mg per day), the cognitive behavioral-analysis system of psychotherapy (16 to 20 sessions), or both. At base line, all patients had scores of at least 20 on the 24-item Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression (indicating clinically significant depression). Remission was defined as a score of 8 or less at weeks 10 and 12. For patients who did not have remission, a satisfactory response was defined as a reduction in the score by at least 50 percent from base line and a score of 15 or less. Raters were unaware of the patients’ treatment assignments. Results Of the 681 patients, 662 attended at least one treatment session and were included in the analysis of response. The overall rate of response (both remission and satisfactory response) was 48 percent in both the nefazodone group and the psychotherapy group, as compared with 73 percent in the combined-treatment group (P Conclusions Although about half of patients with chronic forms of major depression have a response to short-term treatment with either nefazodone or a cognitive behavioral-analysis system of psychotherapy, the combination of the two is significantly more efficacious than either treatment alone

Effects of antiplatelet therapy on stroke risk by brain imaging features of intracerebral haemorrhage and cerebral small vessel diseases: subgroup analyses of the RESTART randomised, open-label trial

Background Findings from the RESTART trial suggest that starting antiplatelet therapy might reduce the risk of recurrent symptomatic intracerebral haemorrhage compared with avoiding antiplatelet therapy. Brain imaging features of intracerebral haemorrhage and cerebral small vessel diseases (such as cerebral microbleeds) are associated with greater risks of recurrent intracerebral haemorrhage. We did subgroup analyses of the RESTART trial to explore whether these brain imaging features modify the effects of antiplatelet therapy