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Social mirroring has been proposed to be an automatic process whereby an observer understands the intentions of others by using his/her motor system to simulate others' actions. Automaticity implies that if the observer's eyes are fixed on another person, the observer's mirror system will engage whether attention is focused on the other person or not. This proposal has not been fully tested, however. The current study therefore addressed whether μ-suppression, an electroencephalographic measure of putative mirror neuron activity, induced by observing the actions of others would be affected by attentional distraction. Participants performed two different distraction tasks while watching a video of a hand repeatedly touching the forefinger and thumb together. μ-suppression was compared across three different blocks: (1) video with no distraction, (2) video with mental imagery distraction and (3) video with word generation distraction. While the no distraction condition yielded the typical level of μ-suppression, the word generation distraction task eliminated any evidence of μ-suppression suggesting that simply fixating the eyes on an action without focusing attention is insufficient to induce μ-suppression. A secondary goal of the current experiment was to replicate correlational findings between μ-suppression and empathic perspective-taking. A counterintuitive, negative relationship between μ-suppression and perspective-taking was replicated, and a theoretical model for explaining this relationship is offered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Popular theology has neglected a developmental perspective and has reinforced the concepts of human inadequacy and divine self-sufficiency. This has tended to keep persons in a state of infantile dependency on a super-father-figure God. Pastoral care, with its concern for the person and its commitment to the processes of growing and maturing in the self and in relationships, needs a theological frame of reference which positively reinforces a developing maturity in relation to God, as well as self and others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Concerns over sterlization and abortion typify our current moral dilemma. These matters begin as individual problems but rapidly expand to become pressing social concerns. The ethical, psychological, and physical factors related to sterilization in men and women are examined and a careful scrutiny of the meaning of the decision to the parties is advised. Abortion is an even more complex issue. The counselor's value system is always a part of the counseling process. Rigidity is not helpful in attempts to adjudicate conflicting rights among the child, the mother, and the father. Four alternative approaches to counseling with persons considering abortion are described. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The results reported in the previous section indicated that the Flexibility and Application scales measured different aspects or dimensions of performance on transfer tasks; these results have suggested that meaningful learning may be particularly related to the flexible dimension of performance. Although the Blind Application Index may not measure a separate aspect of transfer performance, it is nonetheless a useful scale, as it gives a succinct description of an interesting aspect of behaviour-the 'non-meaningful' learning of a solution rule. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The tuning of neurons in area CA1 of the hippocampus emerges through a combination of non-spatial input from different sensory modalities and spatial information about the animal's position and heading direction relative to the spatial enclosure being navigated. The positional modulation of CA1 neuronal responses has been widely studied (e.g. place tuning), but less is known about the modulation of these neurons by heading direction. Here, utilizing electrophysiological recordings from CA1 pyramidal cells in freely moving mice, we report that a majority of neural responses are modulated by the heading-direction of the animal relative to a point within or outside their enclosure that we call a reference point. The finding of heading-direction modulation relative to reference points identifies a novel representation encoded in the neuronal responses of the dorsal hippocampus. Place cells are neurons in the hippocampus which encode an animal's location in space. Here, in mice, the authors show that place cell activity is also modulated by the heading-direction of the animal relative to a particular "reference point" that can be either within or outside their enclosure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]