Implications for Sin and Psychology: An Investigative Study of the Sin Awareness Scale

Though scientific psychology once attempted to distance itself from religious constructs, times have changed. It now seems clear that the clinical practice of psychology involves metaphysics as well as science (O\u27donohue, 1989, Jones, 1994). Recent research also shows significant relationships between religion, spirituality and health (Hill and Pargament, 2003, Richards and Bergin, 2005). Yet the body of psycho logy and scholarship largely overlooks the study of sin. As a result, there is a shocking absence of measurement tools for research on perceptions of sin. What are the psychological implications of a Christian view of sin? Before studying the religious notion of sin, a suitable measurement tool needs to be developed. The purpose of this study is to assist in the examination of the psychometric properties and the continuation of the scale development for the final version of the Sin Awareness Scale (SAS). The final version of the SAS is analyzed with two samples: One involving Christian participants (N = 104) and another involving a large, religiously and ethnically diverse group (N = 1806). The results evidence sustained suppo11 for the structure of a 24-item tool with 6 subscales that demonstrated moderate to strong reliabilities, though one of the subscales demonstrates poorer reliability and construct validity than the other five subscales. Discriminant validity analyses revealed the SAS to measure a construct other than religious strain, shame and guilt. Finally, convergent validity analyses suggests that the SAS Grace from God subscale highly corresponds with religious comfort. Implications and limitations are discussed

Information thermodynamics of transition paths between multiple mesostates

A central concern across the natural sciences is a quantitative understanding of the mechanism governing rare transitions between two metastable states. Recent research has uncovered a fundamental equality between the time-reversal asymmetry of the ensemble of such transition paths and the informativeness of system dynamics about the reactivity of a given trajectory, immediately leading to quantitative criteria for judging the importance of distinct system coordinates for the transition. Here we generalize this framework to multiple mesostates. We find that the main system-wide and coordinate-specific results generalize intuitively, while the combinatorial diversity of pairwise transitions raises new questions and points to new concepts. This work increases the previous framework's generality and applicability and forges connections to enhanced-sampling and coarse-grained dynamical approaches such as milestoning and Markov-state models.Comment: 9 pages main text, 2 pages Appendice

Connections between efficient control and spontaneous transitions in an Ising model

A system can be driven between metastable configurations by a time-dependent driving protocol, which uses external control parameters to change the potential energy of the system. Here we investigate the correspondence between driving protocols that are designed to minimize work and the spontaneous transition paths of the system in the absence of driving. We study the spin-inversion reaction in a 2D Ising model, quantifying the timing of each spin flip and heat flow to the system during both a minimum-work protocol and a spontaneous transition. The general order of spin flips during the transition mechanism is preserved between the processes, despite the coarseness of control parameters that are unable to reproduce more detailed features of the spontaneous mechanism. Additionally, external control parameters provide energy to each system component to compensate changes in internal energy, showing how control parameters are tuned during a minimum-work protocol to counteract underlying energetic features. This study supports a correspondence between minimum-work protocols and spontaneous transition mechanisms.Comment: 10 pages, 6 figure

Measurements of total alkalinity and inorganic dissolved carbon in the Atlantic Ocean and adjacent Southern Ocean between 2008 and 2010

Water column dissolved inorganic carbon and total alkalinity were measured during five hydrographic sections in the Atlantic Ocean and Drake Passage. The work was funded through the Strategic Funding Initiative of the UK's Oceans2025 programme, which ran from 2007 to 2012. The aims of this programme were to establish the regional budgets of natural and anthropogenic carbon in the North Atlantic, the South Atlantic, and the Atlantic sector of the Southern Ocean, as well as the rates of change of these budgets. This paper describes in detail the dissolved inorganic carbon and total alkalinity data collected along east–west sections at 47° N to 60° N, 24.5° N, and 24° S in the Atlantic and across two Drake Passage sections. Other hydrographic and biogeochemical parameters were measured during these sections, and relevant standard operating procedures are mentioned here. Over 95% of dissolved inorganic carbon and total alkalinity samples taken during the 24.5° N, 24° S, and the Drake Passage sections were analysed onboard and subjected to a first-level quality control addressing technical and analytical issues. Samples taken along 47° N to 60° N were analysed and subjected to quality control back in the laboratory. Complete post-cruise second-level quality control was performed using cross-over analysis with historical data in the vicinity of measurements, and data were submitted to the CLIVAR and Carbon Hydrographic Data Office (CCHDO), the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center (CDIAC) and and will be included in the Global Ocean Data Analyses Project, version 2 (GLODAP 2), the upcoming update of Key et al. (2004)