Does infantile amnesia exist? Can children accurately recall traumatic events? Do memory's organizing, storage, and retrieval mechanisms change during childhood development? Through a thorough examination of recent scientific evidence, The Fate of Early Memories divorces fact from fiction regarding the nature, durability, and fallibility of memory.

In this article, we focus on two issues, namely, the nature and onset of very early personal memories, especially for traumatic events, and the role of stress in long-term retention. We begin by outlining a theory of early autobiographical memory, one whose unfolding is coincident with emergence of the cognitive self. It is argued that it is not until this self emerges that personal memories will remain viable over extended periods of time. We illustrate this with 25 cases of young (...) children′s long-term retention of early traumatic events involving emergency room treatment. On the basis of both qualitative and quantitative analyses, we conclude that very young children retain limited memories for events which they commonly express behaviorally, coherent autobiographical memories are not constructed until the child develops a cognitive sense of self , autobiographical memories for traumatic events are essentially no different from those for nontraumatic events, stress is only related to long-term retention inasmuch as it is one variable that serves to make an event unique, and like nontraumatic events, traumatic memories lose peripheral details during the retention interval and retain the central components of the event. These results are discussed both in terms of their implications for theories of early autobiographical memory as well as the ways in which we might differentiate implanted memories and authentic memories for traumatic events. (shrink)

In this article, we present the contemporary conceptualization of metamemory as beliefs, accurate and naive, about memory. We discuss the implications of metamemory for memory construction in general and for suggestibility and the recovery of memories in particular. We argue that beliefs about memory influence the probability that suggestions will be incorporated into memory and judgements about the veracity of subsequent recollections. Implications for research on the role of beliefs in suggestibility and memory recovery are outlined.

Previous research shows that manipulations (e.g. levels-of-processing) that facilitate true memory often increase susceptibility to false memory. An exception is the generation effect. Using the Deese/Roediger–McDermott (DRM) paradigm, Soraci et al. found that generating rather than reading list items led to an increase in true but not false memories. They argued that generation led to enhanced item-distinctiveness that drove down false memory production. In the current study, we investigated the effects of generative processing on valenced stimuli and after a delayed (...) retention interval to examine factors that may lead to a generation effect that increases false memories. At the immediate test, false recognition rates for both negative and neutral valanced critical lures were similar across read and generate conditions. However, after a one-week delay, we saw a valence differentiation, with a generation effect for false recognition but only for negative stimuli. The roles of item-specific and relational processing during encoding and their interaction with long-term retention are discussed. (shrink)

Commentator: Mark Purvis Commentator: Sheena McMain Commentator: Clare Connolly Commentator: Maggie Eisner Commentator: Shirley Brierley Commentator: Becky Ship.

Mark Noll, America's God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln Brooks Holifield, American Theology: Christian Thought from the Age of the Puritans to the Civil War Intellectual history, after a generation of neglect, is suddenly getting attention again in the United States. Giving impetus to this renewal of energy are two major works on American religious thought before the Civil War: Mark Noll's America's God and Brooks Holifield's American Theology. Both are big books, over 600 pages each, and (...) they address a big topic stretching across time and space: the grand tradition of American theology, now a lost art. They treat a time when Christian theology as an intellectual activity enjoyed considerably more prestige and cultural influence than it does today, and surely it has seldom been so innovative and diverse as in the period they treat. Both books have been written by highly respected scholars, deeply learned in the relevant primary and secondary sources. The danger in reviewing such large undertakings is that reviewers will not treat them as a whole but simply grumble that their own specialty doesn't get enough attention: the historian of gender wants more about women, the historian of science more about his subject, etc. These books deserve to be evaluated in toto. Having been conceived and written independently, even though more or less simultaneously, they demonstrate contrasting visions of how to deal with their subject. The two books typify the “external” and “internal” approaches to intellectual history respectively, illustrating for the reader strengths and limitations of the two approaches as well as their complementarity. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:A History of American Music EducationSondra Wieland HoweA History of American Music Education, 3rd edition, by Michael L. Mark and Charles L. Gary. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Education, 2007, 500 pp., $95.00 cloth, $44.95 paper.Mark and Gary's editions of A History of American Music Education are indispensable reading for every music education student, practicing professional music educator, and the general reader who is interested in (...) the development of music teaching in American public schools. Based on excellent secondary sources, this history presents an overview of music education from Colonial America, through the development of textbooks in the nineteenth century and the growth of professional organizations in the early twentieth century, to the expansion of the curriculum and the role of government in education since 1950.This third edition is written by Michael L. Mark, professor emeritus at Towson University in Maryland, and dedicated to the memory of his friend and coauthor, Charles L. Gary.1 Mark has written two other books that complement the history editions. Contemporary Music Education surveys various reform projects since the 1950s, trends in the philosophy of music education, government policies, and the development of new methods.2Music Education: Source Readings includes writings about music education from both the European and American perspectives.3 There are many recent articles and dissertations on the history of music education, but the only recent book is Terese Volk's Music, Education, and Multiculturalism, which describes school programs and materials emphasizing multiculturalism in the twentieth century from a historical perspective.4 Publications in musicology add to our knowledge of the history of music in American society, but musicologists rarely write about music in public schools. Publications on the history of education are helpful in understanding trends in music education, but these publications do not discuss music.The third edition of A History of American Music Education is expanded to 500 pages from the approximately 400 pages of the earlier editions, largely because of new formatting and [End Page 115] spacing that make the third edition easier to read. Each chapter has a reference list in APA style in contrast to the Chicago Manual style of the earlier editions, with endnotes plus a bibliography at the end of each chapter. The material in Mark's third edition is basically the same as the earlier editions, with some expansion of the history of music education after 1950.This book, based on secondary sources, is an overview of the history of music in American public schools, showing the response of education to societal needs during various historical periods. There is an emphasis on the role of national music organizations, especially MENC: The National Association for Music Education (MENC), in advocating for the importance of music for every child. The historical account includes the various justifications for teaching music and discussions of the meaning of music. There were times when music educators were interested in aesthetics, but there were also many times when they were mainly interested in a practical understanding of music and extrinsic motives for including music in the school curriculum.5The first section on "The Western Heritage" (chapters 1-3) briefly covers music in Jewish traditions through the Greek and Roman cultures because the insights of these ancient thinkers influenced all Western societies. The chapter on the Middle Ages through the Reformation shows the role of music as a practical subject, part of the quadrivium with arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy. As music became an integral part of the church, musicians developed methods of teaching note reading. Martin Luther promoted the singing of "good music" in schools and education in the vernacular for the middle classes. With the development of Italian conservatories and the patronage of music by the elite classes of the Renaissance, music training became specialized for musicians working in the church and courts. These various conflicting European opinions of the role of music in society influenced American education.The second section on "The New World" (chapters 4-5) emphasizes the use of music as a means of praising God. Spanish musicians established successful music education programs in Peru and Mexico to promote Christianity. The French brought Christianity to... (shrink)

Children’s sociocultural experiences in their day-to-day lives markedly play a key role in learning about the world. This study investigated parent–child teaching during early childhood as it naturally occurs in the home setting. Thirty-nine families’ naturalistic interactions in the home setting were observed; 1033 teaching sequences were identified based on detailed transcriptions of verbal and non-verbal behavior. Within these sequences, three domains of learning (knowledge, skills, and dispositions) and subtopics were identified and analyzed in relation to gender, child birth order, (...) context, teaching strategies, and learner response. Findings show knowledge, skills, and dispositions were taught equally, marked by the most prominent subtopics taught within each domain, including cognitive (skill), game rule (knowledge), and social rule (disposition). Further, mothers and fathers were found to teach their children equally, however, fathers taught knowledge more than mothers, whereas mothers taught dispositions more than fathers. Differences between domains of learning and subtopics also existed between mother’s and father’s teaching based on child birth order and gender. This study also assessed the contrast between teaching knowledge, skills, and dispositions by context, parent teaching strategies, and child learner response. Results support the notion that family interactions in the home setting set a stage for children’s rich informal learning experiences. Vygotskian sociocultural conceptions underpin this research and findings are discussed using this central theoretical lens. (shrink)

Demographic differences among consumer groups have become increasingly important to the development of marketing strategies. Marketers depend heavily on the sales force to implement strategies at the consumer level and, not surprisingly, different groups may view the salesperson’s role differently. Unfortunately, unethical sales practices targeted at various consumer groups, and especially at seniors, have been utilized as well. The purpose of this study is to provide initial empirical evidence of the ethical ideological make-up of four age segments outlined by Strauss (...) and Howe (1991, Generations: The History of America’s Future 1584–2069, Morrow, New York) and to examine the propensity for these groups (seniors, in particular) to respond differentially to potentially unethical sales tactics. Data were collected from 179 respondents representing the four generational age groups. MANOVA revealed that the seniors in this study were distinct with respect to ethical ideology and less accepting of unethical sales tactics. Managerial implications are discussed for sales organizations to maximize their effectiveness across consumer groups. (shrink)

Recent writing on the nature of freedom has served to underline a crucial gap in the academic experience. First--and most obviously--the concept of freedom has been modernized by its application to contemporary institutions. Second, a new approach to the concept of liberty has been pioneered in the construction of new typologies of freedom. Finally, awareness of variety in concepts of freedom has been paralleled in variations in the practice of freedom. The tumultuous history of Western man may be conceptualized as (...) the story of how freedom has become embodied. What is missing from the story is the relationship of concepts to actions.This relationship has been established for some specific notions of freedom. Many of the philosophical analyses--especially recent ones like pragmatism and existentialism--have been predicated on actual human behavior. On the other hand, many classic histories of freedom--those of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, John Bagnell Bury, Guido de Ruggiero, and Harold Laski--have traced the actual development of a definite kind of freedom.This volume contains essays prepared to celebrate the anniversary of the publication of John Stuart Mill's On Liberty, revised in the light of discussions by Henry D. Aiken, William Ebenstein, Mark DeWolfe Howe, and David Spitz, as well as other articles, many of them growing out of the discussion either in the form of commentary or independent contributions. There are also two papers written independently. (shrink)

Excellence in sport performance is normally taken to be a matter of superior performance of physical movements or quantitative outcomes of movements. This paper considers whether a wider conception can be afforded by certain kinds of nature based sport. The interplay between technical skill and aesthetic experience in nature based sports is explored, and the extent to which it contributes to a distinction between different sport-based approaches to natural environments. The potential for aesthetic appreciation of environmental engagement is found to (...) be strongly dependent on whether or not environmental engagement is exploited for the end of producing a quantifiable result or enhancing technical skill. It is also argued that an existential rather than spectatorial attitude to aesthetic experience is offered by specifically nature oriented sport. Aesthetic experience achieved in this way is therefore neither passive nor detached, but extends Berleant's concept of participatory environmental aesthetics and underpins both an alternate (wide) conception of excellence in sport activity and a richer experience of aesthetic engagement than more objectivised standpoints. (shrink)

Hume's Reception in Early America: Expanded Edition brings together the original American responses to one of Britain's greatest men of letters, David Hume. Now available as a single volume paperback, this new edition includes updated further readings suggestions and dozens of additional primary sources gathered together in a completely new concluding section. From complete pamphlets and booklets, to poems, reviews, and letters, to extracts from newspapers, religious magazines and literary and political journals, this book's contents come from a wide variety (...) of sources published in colonial America and the early United States between 1758 and 1850. As well as classics by Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and Alexander Hamilton, it contains scores of unknown and hard-to-locate items, many of which have not been reprinted since their original publication. These responses are divided into four parts covering Hume's Essays; his Philosophical Writings; his History of England; and his Character and Death. Each of those parts has a separate introductory essay, and every selection is introduced by a short headnote that sets the piece in its historical context and provides bibliographical references. Packed with new insights into Hume and American thought and culture, Hume's Reception in Early America reveals the relevance and impact of Hume on American political, philosophical, historical, religious, and aesthetic debates. (shrink)

Prologue, invitation to thinking about God In the Hebrew Bible? -- Part I, questions about God? -- Why does God in the Bible have a body? -- What do God's body parts in the Bible mean? -- Why is God angry in the Bible? -- Does God in the Bible have gender or sexuality? -- Part II, questions about God in the world? -- What can creation tell us about God? -- Who-or what-is the Satan? -- Why do people suffer (...) according to the Hebrew Bible? -- Epilogue, God in the Bible and beyond. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Birth-Mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary HistoryC. S. SchreinerThe Birth-Mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary History, by Susan Howe; 189 pp. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1993, $40.00.In the interview which concludes The Birth-Mark, Susan Howe says that during childhood her Boston household was visited by such pioneers of American studies as Perry Miller and F. O. Matthiessen. Career-wise, however, (...) class='Hi'>Howe’s path to academia has be en indirect: born in 1937, she gained her first professorship in 1989 in the Poetics Program at SUNY Buffalo. A visual artist by [End Page 192] training, Howe veered into a genre of writing in the 1970s that seeks to “install certain narrativ es somewhere between history, mystic speech, and poetry” (p. 44). Her poetry includes Secret History of the Dividing Line (1978), Pythagorean Silence (1982), and Defenestration of Prague (1983). In 1985 she published an original criti cal study, My Emily Dickinson, which criticized editors for having homogenized the format and typography of Dickinson’s manuscripts, taming the unruly rigor of poems which were originally “multifaceted visual and verbal productions.” Howe also argu ed that the Amherst poet should not be viewed as a victim of repression, as many feminists see her, but as a refuser of congregations, a powerful will-to-reclusion in art—“One unchosen American women alone at home and choosing.” Emily’s home was a nomadi c space between orthodoxies.An understanding of Howe’s kinship with Dickinson’s poetic daring is helpful for reading The Birth-Mark, whose prose is poetic, and whose protagonist, Mary Rowlandson, shared Dickinson’s “stubborn strength in isolation.” The captivity narratives ar e portals into the antinomian controversy of New England, which was “the primordial struggle of North American literary expression” (p. 4). It is not Gilbert and Gubar to whom Howe has recourse in her analyses of hostage consciousness. She cites the philo sophy of Emmanuel Lévinas. As with feminism, which she extends rather than follows, Howe takes up the philosophy of alterity without its orthodoxy. (In the face of frontier brutality she cannot discern the “Father of orphans and defender of widows” of Psalm 68.) Encounters in the wilderness of tribes, woods, and waters aroused an immodest otherness within the American literary unconscious, unsettling the styles of expression and selfhood which the puritan colonies were trying to instantiate. The literary awakening of Dickinson, Rowlandson, Melville, Hawthorne, and other writers was not due to the Great Awakening urged by churches, but to the traumatic transfer of sovereignty from God to frontier, a permanent revolution to which these writers’ imaginations would remain exposed.Howe’s new foray into criticism tracks the textual marginalia which yield the visionary utterances of Rowlandson and Hutchinson. A self-confessed “library cormorant,” Howe gathers a quiet spectacle of testimonies, those of separated loved ones dragged int o “Removes” by tribes of Native Americans. These resonant texts from New England village libraries and major collections at Harvard, are melded together by Howe’s intuitive, almost telepathic sensibility into a kind of spiritual drama informed by critical acumen. Howe takes her bearings from Patricia Caldwell’s essay “The Antinomian Language Controversy,” which appeared in the Harvard Theological Review in 1976. The dislocating frontier experience for Hutchinson, Rowlandson, and others forced the c reation of a different language. It is with this antinomian language that Howe develops a sensitive rapport, echoing its myriad haunting voices in her commentaries. What Gadamer calls effective history broods and rustles inside her [End Page 193] writing with lyrical unease. Indeed, Howe’s work is a creative example of the fusion of horizons which Gadamer says epitomizes the hermeneutic event. Howe’s personal method as revealed in her interview: “Not to explain the work, not to trans late it, but to meet the work with writing... Not just to write a tribute, but to meet her [Dickinson] in the tribute. And that’s a kind of fusion” (p. 158). Some scholars will find her method obscure. But it’s hard to find anything negative at this height. Howe would have us meet others at their most exposed, delicate point, where their vulnerability... (shrink)

This paper offers a new way to make sense of disagreement expansion from a polylogical perspective by incorporating various places in addition to players and positions into the analysis. The concepts build on prior implicit ideas about disagreement space by suggesting how to more fully account for argumentative context, and its construction, in large-scale complex controversies. As a basis for our polylogical analysis, we use a New York Times news story reporting on an oil train explosion—a significant point in the (...) broader controversy over producing oil and gas via hydraulic fracturing. (shrink)

J S Mill used the term ‘dead dogma’ to describe a belief that has gone unquestioned for so long and to such a degree that people have little idea why they accept it or why they continue to believe it. When wives and children were considered chattel, it made sense for the head of a household to have a ‘sovereignal right’ to do as he wished with his property. Now that women and children are considered to have the full complement (...) of human rights and slavery has been abolished, it is no longer acceptable for someone to have a ‘right’ to completely control the life of another human being. Revealingly, parental rights tend to be invoked only when parents want to do something that is arguably not in their child9s best interest. Infant male circumcision is a case in point. Instead of parental _rights_, I claim that parents have an _obligation_ to protect their children9s rights as well as to preserve the future options of those children so far as possible. In this essay, it is argued that the notion that parents have a right to make decisions concerning their children9s bodies and minds—_irrespective of the child9s best interests_—is a dead dogma. The ramifications of this argument for the circumcision debate are then spelled out and discussed. (shrink)

Vogelstein cautions medical organizations against jumping into the fray of controversial issues, yet proffers the 2012 American Academy of Pediatrics' Task Force policy position on infant male circumcision as ‘an appropriate use of position-statements.’ Only a scratch below the surface of this policy statement uncovers the Task Force's failure to consider Vogelstein's many caveats. The Task Force supported the cultural practice by putting undeserved emphasis on questionable scientific data, while ignoring or underplaying the importance of valid contrary scientific data. Without (...) any effort to quantitatively assess the risk/benefit balance, the Task Force concluded the benefits of circumcision outweighed the risks, while acknowledging that the incidence of risks was unknown. This Task Force differed from other Academy policy-forming panels by ignoring the Academy's standard quality measures and by not appointing members with extensive research experience, extensive publications, or recognized expertise directly related to this topic. Despite nearly 100 publications available at the time addressing the substantial ethical issues associated with infant male circumcision, the Task Force chose to ignore the ethical controversy. They merely stated, with minimal justification, the opinion of one of the Task Force members that the practice of infant male circumcision is morally permissible. The release of the report has fostered an explosion of academic discussion on the ethics of infant male circumcision with a number of national medical organizations now decrying the practice as a human rights violation. (shrink)

A specific issue for argumentation theory is whether information and communication technologies play any role in governing argument — that is, as parties engage in practical activities across space and time via ICTs, does technology matter for the interplay of argumentative content and process in managing disagreement? The case made here is that technologies do matter because they are not merely conduits of communication but have a role in the pragmatics of communication and argumentation. In particular, ICTs should be recognized (...) as communication-information services that are delegated degrees of responsibility for managing disagreements arising from practical activities. These services are organized around practical theories for designing disagreement space. However, recognizing this relationship between argument and technology requires accounting for procedures, techniques, or rules and speech acts that are not argumentative propositions in any strict sense but that are consequential for what becomes argumentation in any setting. An account about designing disagreement space, grounded in Jackson and Jacobs’s theory of Disagreement Management, is put forward to address these issues while more generally contributing to understanding argument in context. (shrink)

It is time to bring the rich resources of these traditions into the contemporary debate about the nature of self. This volume is the first of its kind.

The equal opportunities issue constitutes one of the biggest ethical and practical challenges ever faced by business, because it strikes at fundamental cultural assumptions about the purpose and responsibilities of business and the rights of individuals which are ingrained from childhood. The author is chairman of Business in the Community's‘Opportunity 2000′.

Abstract. In this essay, I compare the atheism of Friedrich Nietzsche with that of Richard Dawkins. My purpose is to describe certain differences in their respective atheisms with the intent of showing that Nietzsche's atheism contains a richer and fuller affirmation of human life. In Dawkins’s presentation of the value of life without God, there is a naïve optimism that purports that human beings, educated in science and purged of religion, will find lives of easy peace and comfortable wonder. Part (...) of my argument is that this optimism regarding the power of objective science is subject to Nietzsche's criticism of Socrates and what he calls the “theoretical man.” As such, it fails in terms of providing a true affirmation of life in the godless world. (shrink)

The present study examined whether a dissociation among formats for rational numbers can be obtained in tasks that require comparing a number to a non-symbolic quantity. In Experiment 1, college students saw a discrete or else continuous image followed by a rational number, and had to decide which was numerically larger. In Experiment 2, participants saw the same displays but had to make a judgment about the type of ratio represented by the number. The magnitude task was performed more quickly (...) using decimals, whereas the relation task was performed more accurately with fractions. The pattern observed for percentages was very similar to that for decimals. A dissociation between magnitude comparison and relational processing with rational numbers can be obtained when a symbolic number must be compared to a non-symbolic display. (shrink)

In 2017 Ploug and Holm argued that anonymizing individuals in the Danish circumcision registry was insufficient to protect these individuals from what they regard as the potential harms of being in the registry. We argue that Ploug and Holm’s fears in each of the areas are misguided, not supported by the evidence, and could interfere with the gathering of accurate data. The extent of the risks and harms associated with ritual circumcision is not well known. The anonymized personal health data (...) supplemented with the circumcision registry will enable more precise research into the medical consequences of ritual circumcision, and allow parents to make more fully informed decisions about circumcision with minimal, if any, adverse consequences. (shrink)

The Helsinki Declaration is the universally accepted standard for ethical behavior in research involving human subjects. The Declaration calls for research studies to compare new therapies to the best current therapies. Despite this standard, multiple studies of pain relief interventions in newborns have recruited placebo controls instead of active controls using the best current therapy. These studies are evaluated using the standards required by the Helsinki Declaration, and the reasons for the ethical shortcomings of these studies are explored.

The Helsinki Declaration, first published in 1964, is the universally accepted standard for ethical behavior in research involving human subjects. The Declaration was formulated in response to the abuses of human subjects by the scientists in Nazi Germany and to update the Nuremberg Code. Amended in 1975, 1983, 1989, 1996, and 2000, the Declaration provides the foundation for the United States federal regulations for research involving human subjects.To conform to standards developed in the Declaration, a researcher must fulfill the following: (...) respect the autonomy of the individual; promote and safeguard the individual’s health; provide informed consent without coercion; take special measures with vulnerable populations; compare new therapies to the best current therapies; have a thorough scientific knowledge of the subject; assess risk versus benefit of the intervention; perform studies that will ultimately benefit the population involved in the research; accurately report their findings; and fully disclose ethical concerns in their research protocols. (shrink)