The present research assessed whether levels of depression, anxiety and worry, obsessive-compulsive distress, and psychopathy were differentially related to distinct thought suppression profiles. As a means to achieving this goal, the Profiles of Everyday Thought Suppression (PETS) scale was constructed to measure the frequencies with which various target thoughts are suppressed. The PETS scale demonstrated good internal consistency and test-retest reliability, and scores were positively correlated with the general tendency to experience intrusions, the general tendency to suppress thoughts, neuroticism, and health complaints. Although the proportions of time people suppress thoughts was positively associated with the frequencies with which the thoughts are experienced, the strength of the associations differed across thought contents, suggesting that not all frequently experienced thoughts are invariably subject to suppression attempts. The frequency with which thoughts are generally suppressed was positively associated with overall levels of subclinical psychopathology experienced during the past month. When comparing across the various thought categories, results from multiple analytic strategies converged to suggest that specific subclinical psychopathological states are associated with particular sets of thoughts that are frequently suppressed. / Psychology

This report examines the legacy of “mirrors for princes” literature, or advice literature for kings, in Iranian political thought, particularly in the modern period. While most scholars have studied ‘mirrors’ literature as a predominantly medieval phenomenon, this report argues that the genre and the ideals of kingship it articulates continued to flourish well into the modern period in Iran. Through an analysis of themes found both in the medieval Persian texts and the ‘mirrors’ composed in the Safavid and Qajar periods, this report demonstrates a remarkable continuity in the genre and in the ideology of kingship throughout centuries of dynastic and structural changes in Iran. Moreover, although the genre of ‘mirrors’ appears to have faded with the Qajar dynasty, this report shows how its ideology of kingship continued to influence the rhetoric of political legitimacy in the Pahlavi period. Muhammad Reza Shah in particular relied on the office of the king and his duties of executing justice and protecting Islam to justify both the necessity of the monarchy and his right to the throne. / text

This study explores how racial and religious identities are impacted and subsequently reconciled among Black women who join the historically White Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) in Southwest Atlanta, Georgia. This study was based upon the premise that the African-American religious aesthetic and the Black Church shape racial and religious identities. Therefore, identity reconciliation among Black LDS women who previously attended the Black church is jeopardized. A mixed-methods research approach was used to measure Black women’s ability to reconcile their racial and religious identities. The data gathered enabled the researcher to broadly determine the degree to which reconciliation is achieved among Black LI)S women. The researcher found that the diminutive presence of the African-American religious aesthetic in the LDS Church did not considerably influence identity reconciliation among Black LDS women . This finding is significant as it will help to inform future studies about identity reconciliation among Black people who join historically White religious institutions as well as the viability of the Black Church as a resource for spiritual and racial identity cultivation among Black people.

No description available.

A central task of contemporary analytic philosophy is to develop an understanding of how our minds are connected to the external (or mind-independent) world. Arising from this task is the need to explain how thoughts represent things in the world. Giving such an explanation is the central endeavor of this dissertation—the aim being to contribute to our understanding of what it is for a subject to be thinking of a particular object. The structure of the dissertation is set, in part, by responding to the commonly held view that a satisfactory explanation of what it is to think of a particular object can be drawn out of, or extended from, an explanation of what it is to be referring to that particular object. Typically, in investigating these matters, it is accepted that there is an explanatory priority of language over thought. This is the Priority Thesis. Some take the Priority Thesis to reflect an appropriate methodological strategy. In this form, it implies the methodological point that the best way to describe thoughts is by describing them as they are expressed in language. Most, however, seem to take the Priority Thesis to be symptomatic of a substantive, metaphysical truth. This, to put it one way, is that the content of a thought is paralleled by the content of the associated linguistic expression. I call this the Assumption of Parallelism. This characterizes what we call Linguistic Turn philosophy (i.e., analytic philosophy). The body of the dissertation arises out of questioning the extent of the application ofthe Priority Thesis in developing theories of reference and thought. I call the move of the partial overturning ofthe Priority Thesis the Linguistic U-Turn. The overall conclusion is that we cannot explain what it is to think of a particular object by extending explanations of what it is to be referring to that particular object. In particular, I reject what I call the Causal Theory of Thought—the view that the representational properties of a thought are explained by the referential properties of the appropriate singular term. My aim, then, is to show that a popular conviction concerning the representational properties of thoughts about things in the world is not warranted.

Fred Dretske (1981) claimed that the essence of the kind of cognitive activity that gives rise to Intentional mental states is a process by which the analogue information coming from a source-object is transformed into digital form. It is this analogue-to-digital conversion of data that enables us to form concepts of things. But this achievement comes with a cost, since the conversion must involve a loss of information. The price we pay for the lost information is a proportional diminishment in our ability to discriminate the source-object from others that may be similar to it. I argue that this fact underlies an important distinction between what a mental state may be about and to what the state may be directed, Aboutness and directedness are two of four Intentional dimensions on which this project concentrates. The other two are aspectual shape and misrepresentation. The distinction between aboutness and directedness is a part of a proposed approach to Intentionality based on the script theory of Roger Schank and Robert Abelson (1977). Scripts are schemata—organized knowledge structures that guide our understanding of the world around us. Schank and Abelson's basic ideas are extended to yield four different script-types: episodic (related to situations and events), instrumental (related to procedural knowledge), personal (representing an agent's goals and plans), and definitional (involved in object-recognition). The relationship between scripts and the Intentionality of thought is the main focus of this dissertation. An important secondary concern is the viability of externalism and internalism. It is argued that neither of these attitudes is independently adequate to provide a full account of Intentional content. Rather, the proper approach is to confine externalistic influences to aboutness and then characterize directedness in a manner that captures the world-according-to-the-agent. This strategy is implemented in the following way: aboutness is construed causally-evolutionarily; directedness is constructed with the help of the notion of an equivalence class; aspectual shape is shown to be a function of the kind of information a script provides; and an account of misrepresentation is given by comparing the different extensions generated from aboutness and directedness respectively.

This study supported Schon's notions of reflective practice as being applicable to teachers involved in teaching physical activities in the context of unforgiving learning environments and specifically to teachers in the sport diving community. According to Schon, one's ability to recognize patterns and act effectively and efficiently in situations of uniqueness and uncertainty depends upon one's capacity to frame problems. In doing so, one draws upon a repertoire of past experience arid ways of capturing that experience which enables the development of the ability to reframe problems in light of information gathered from the direct experience. Reframing occurs through the processes of reflection-in-action and reflection-onaction and is a response to an internal dialogue related to the action setting, in which something has not happened as expected, thus producing a curious or intrigued response. A number of issues specific to teacher reflection in unforgiving learning environments emanated from the analysis of one sport diving teacher engaged in teaching an entry-level sport diving course which involved three different teaching environments (the classroom setting, the confined water [pool] and open water [ocean] environments). Three research questions guided the analysis. In answer to the first research question: What factors do sport diving practitioners reflect upon in each of the three environments? six reflective themes were identified in this case study with five being common across the three teaching environments and the remainder being specific to the classroom environment. The common themes were: a trusting relationship, the necessity of teacher control, to see the 'unforgivingness' of the environment, learning from one's practice, challenges to one's practice and understanding one's practice. In answer to the second research question: What influences the reflective process? the analysis revealed thirteen underlying or influencing factors or dispositions across the three teaching environments with eight of them being common to either two, or all three, of the environments. In answer to the third research question: What is the nature of sport diving practitioners' reflective practice? five categories have been used to address the analysis: 1) across environment related, 2) classroom and confined water (pool) related, 3) confined water (pool) and open water (ocean) related 4) classroom and open water (ocean) related and 5) specific to one environment. The reflection process documented in this study suggested that Schon's notion of reflective practice is very applicable to the professional development of sport diving as his conception of reflection applies to the three areas of teaching which exist in unforgiving learning environments: the problem solving disposition of teacher reflection, the learning from one's practice, and the probing of internal dialogue.

The primary purpose of this study was to investigate a biographical approach to understanding how we, as teachers and co-researchers, think and act; and how we have come to think and act the way we do in our classrooms. The term autobiographic praxis was central to the study as a specific conceptualization of a teacher's knowledge. Until this study, autobiographic praxis existed as a biographical conceptualization of a teacher's personal, practical and professional knowledge based. This study used the work of Butt and Raymond who, with two teachers, Lloyd and Glenda, working as co-researchers, explored and reported these two teacher's stories highlighting elements of their knowledge held. Based upon that work, this study, through ethnographic field work, returned to the respective teachers classrooms and utilized elements of their stories to guide both observation and interviews about their classroom practices. This exploration of teacher knowledge held and teacher knowledge expressed was an attempt to show the potential of a methodology which integrates autobiography, classroom observation and biographic and ethnographic interviews. The results with respect to the two teachers, Lloyd and Glenda, indicated that:(1) the substance and process of knowledge they held can be accessed through collaborative autobiographic inquiry, and (2) that the knowledge expressed as elements of classroom action can be observed in a stronger interpretive light if guided by understandings of their stories, such that (3) methodologically through biographic and ethnographic interviews elements of knowledge held, as revealed through autobiography, can be brought into a dialogue with the actions of knowledge expressed, as observed through ethnographic participant observation, and thus (4) the resultant findings were that in the thoughts and actions of the two teachers significant indicators were present to illustrate a strong harmonic relationship between who they were as persons, and who they were as teachers, due specifically to a synchronicity between their knowledge held and knowledge expressed. The process, of doing the sudy, illustrated the potential of biographic conceptualization of teacher knowledge accessed through a method of inquiry which featured story, observation and interview. The findings of this study were considered desirable in that teachers and researchers, working together, should attempt to engage in action research concerned with achieving a dialogue between teacher thought and action. / x, 194 leaves : ill. ; 28 cm.

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No description available.