Religious and near-death experience in relation to belief in a future life

Christian belief in a future life was historically based on theistic religious experience. Today Near-death Experiences (NDEs) are more often cited. Exceptional reports of NDEs go back to the dawn of history but modern medicine has democratised them. Accounts from St Paul, St John of the Cross, and from Tibetan and Japanese Buddhism are described and compared with a large survey of contemporary experiences. The author pleads the desirability of establishing a prospective research project to determine the objectivity of some of the experiences claimed

Cognitive variability

Throughout psychological literature there are many, and ever increasing, references to a variable, usually presumed to be related to certain personality phenomena, which has~ been described as flexibility, fluidity, rigidity, perseveration, variability, and other similar terms. Generally, all these terms have refenced to the idea that the behaviour of people in different situations or of different people in the same situation··, varies along a continuum marked at one end by extreme limitation of reaction and at the other by extreme freedom of response. The use of this vague terminology and the fact that general concepts and definitions have been left far from clear, has rendered any approach to the topic extremely difficult, and I can echo with feeling the words of Chown (1959) when she said 11FeVJ major topics in contemporary psychology offer more promise than this one or present such a quagmire of confusion to the unwary investigator"! Probably the most satisfactory means of gaining a clear VieVJ of the field is with an historical perspective; I propose therefore to adopt this approach and to deal with the relevant literature under the general heading of - "Theories and types of rigidity fle:xibility11 It will be seen that it has been considered best to make a three-fold division of the literature - namely into that concerned with (l) 11Perseveration11 and "rigidity", (2) the rigid personality, and (3) Variability as such, although of necessity a certain amount of overlap doe

The impact of inflated responsibility and maternal reassurance on child behaviour.

Background: Cognitive models of OCD propose that cognitions such as ‘inflated responsibility’ have a causal role in the persistence of OCD symptoms. Research is mounting to support the applicability of these models to children, although the models do not take into account family context. Parents are often involved in accommodating their child’s OCD through the provision of reassurance. This study aimed to investigate the relationship between maternal inflated responsibility and maternal reassurance and secondly, the relationship between maternal reassurance and child OCD-behaviours. Method: Sixty children and their mothers were recruited from schools and the children completed a sweet sorting task in which their responsibility was inflated. Maternal responsibility was manipulated across three conditions; ‘high inflation’, ‘low inflation’ and ‘control’ (where mothers were not present during the sorting task). Child and maternal behaviours were examined from video-recordings of the task. It was hypothesised that mothers whose responsibility was inflated would offer more reassurance to their children and furthermore, their children would seek more reassurance and engage in more OCD-type behaviours. Results: The findings did not support the hypotheses as the manipulation did not have a significant effect on maternal reassurance giving. Contrary to the hypothesis, there was a trend for mothers in the ‘low’ group to offer more reassurance to their child than mothers in the ‘high’ group. No differences were found between groups for child behaviours. Children in the control group took significantly longer to complete the task than the others. Conclusions: The study was not able to provide support for a causal role of maternal reassurance in relation to their child’s behaviour. Limitations of the manipulation that may account for these findings are identified and suggestions are made for methodological improvements. Successfully demonstrating causal mechanisms between parental behaviours and child OCD-behaviours would have significant implications for the prevention and treatment of childhood OCD

Effects of time of day on age-related associative deficits

Time of day is known to influence cognition differently across age groups, with young adults performing better later than earlier in the day and older adults showing the opposite pattern. Thus age-related deficits can be smaller when testing occurs in the morning compared with the afternoon/evening, particularly for tasks requiring executive/controlled/inhibitory processes. Stronger influences of time of day were therefore predicted on associative than on item recognition memory based on their differential requirements for demanding recollective (rather than familiarity) processes. In two experiments, participants were presented with unrelated word pairs and then tested on both item recognition (old/new item?) and associative recognition (intact/recombined pair?). In Experiment 1, young adults were tested either in the morning or in the evening; recognition memory was better when time of testing matched participants’ morningness-eveningness preferences, and more so for associative than for item memory. In Experiment 2, young and older adults (evening and morning types, respectively) were tested both in the morning and in the evening; again, recognition memory was better at participants’ preferred times of day, especially for associative memory. Consequently, age-related associative deficits varied considerably - indeed more than fourfold - from a nonsignificant 8% for testing in the morning to a substantial 35% for testing in the evening, suggesting that it is important to consider time of day effects in future studies of the associative deficit hypothesis

Age-related changes in associative memory

Older adults suffer from many cognitive impairments relative to young adults and one of the most established types of age-related cognitive decline is a reduction in memory performance. Memory for single units of information (item memory) have been shown to be less susceptible to cognitive ageing than memory for associations among units of information (associative memory). An associative deficit hypothesis has been used to describe these observations as an age-related impairment in forming links between single units of information. The thesis elucidated specific differences between item and associative memory and evaluated how such differences correspond to their differential susceptibility to the effects of cognitive ageing. This indicated links between the associative deficit hypothesis and other theories of age-related memory decline, in particular, to the notion of age deficits in memory resulting from age deficits in self-initiated processing (in the absence of environmental support). Experiments 1-3 considered associative memory where the processing of associations was encouraged by distinctiveness of memory stimuli. Environmental support provided by distinctiveness was shown to improve associative memory in older adults. Experiments 4-7 considered how item and associative memory differ in their support from preexisting knowledge. Experimentally equating preexisting knowledge for item and associative memory tests eliminated the age-related associative deficit. Furthermore, it was found that preexisting knowledge could be used to enhance associative memory performance in older adults by providing support to encoding and/or retrieval processes. Experiment 8 established that item and associative memory processes were equally disrupted by a concurrent task, which indicated that both memory types are similarly affected by levels of available cognitive resources. In general, age-related associative deficits were considered to result from differing levels of environmental support for item and associative memory as opposed to a differential decline of item and associative memory processes

Rethinking political process in technological change : socio-technical configurations and frames

The political process perspective has done much to enhance our understanding of the organizational effects of technological change as a negotiated outcome reflecting the political and power dynamics of the adopting context. In so doing, we suggest, technology has been marginalized as an analytical category and the problem of change agency, although better understood, remains largely unresolved. This article addresses these issues through the articulation of the concepts of socio-technical configurations and technological frames and explores their utility in understanding change agency through an action research project. The project sought a novel form of \u27socio-technology\u27 transfer, taking ideas and concepts of \u27human-centered\u27 manufacturing embodied in team-based cellular manufacture from a European context into three firms in Australia.<br /

A Spatial Approach to Network Generation for Three Properties: Degree Distribution, Clustering Coefficient and Degree Assortativity

Social networks generally display a positively skewed degree distribution and higher values for clustering coefficient and degree assortativity than would be expected from the degree sequence. For some types of simulation studies, these properties need to be varied in the artificial networks over which simulations are to be conducted. Various algorithms to generate networks have been described in the literature but their ability to control all three of these network properties is limited. We introduce a spatially constructed algorithm that generates networks with constrained but arbitrary degree distribution, clustering coefficient and assortativity. Both a general approach and specific implementation are presented. The specific implementation is validated and used to generate networks with a constrained but broad range of property values.Social Networks, Network Generation, Clustering Coefficient, Assortativity