Flawed Expectations

Two experts in Catholic catechesis give an in-depth study of both how and why the new Catechism Of The Catholic Church came into existence, touching on the negative reception it has received from various quarters.

Bold moves were effective in trade reform in Chile, Turkey, and Venezuela. But discredited governments, in countries with a history of policy failure, are probably better off sending no signals of policy reform and approaching it in small, cautious steps.

Proposes a new comprehensive theory about how expectations are formed and how they shape the macro economy.

All Groan Up: Searching for Self, Faith, and A Freaking Job! is the story of the GenY/Millennial generation told through the individual story of author Paul Angone. It’s a story of struggle, hope, failure, and doubts in the twilight zone of growing up and being grown, connecting with his twentysomething post-college audience with raw honesty, humor, and hope.

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Sample Book Insights: #1 The brain is a prediction machine that constructs an elaborate simulation of the world based on its expectations and previous experiences. These simulations usually coincide with objective reality, but they can sometimes stray far from what is actually in the physical world. #2 The brain’s visual cortex is wired with many neural connections feeding in predictions from other regions of the brain. The eye is a small but essential element of your vision, while the rest of what you see is created in the dark within your skull. #3 The brain’s reliance on prediction helps us deal with incredible ambiguity. If you look at the image below, you will struggle to identify anything recognizable. But if you see the original image, it suddenly becomes a lot clearer. #4 The brain can also predict the effects of our movements, so that we don’t jump out of our skin whenever one of our legs brushes against the other. However, there will always be some small errors in each brain’s simulation of the world around us.

In a tragic instant in 1998, my relatively normal world as a mature man, family provider and wage earner, Christian, husband, and father changed drastically, but also, my God changed (or at least my perceptions and expectations of God and life in general were severely shaken). The world I went to bed with was not the world I awakened to early the next morning to learn that my only daughter was dead! The emotions that engulfed me were then and are to this day unfathomable--emotions, pain, doubt, anger, and many other religious and interpersonal struggles that I've called bitter grief. The faith and religion that I had depended on and expected to provide strength, understanding, and comfort for most of my fifty-four years in such a situation were now very quickly major parts of my problem. Simplistic efforts to console and explain, to ease my pain, to answer my questions, just angered me and aggravated my bewilderment. Eventually, this book emerged at first from the relentless conflagration of emotions and distress that first started their expression as a journal stressing my need for meaningful support and empathy following the open surprise, bewilderment, and guilt-ridden feelings of divine betrayal that gripped me after my only daughter was killed in a tragic one-vehicle accident. The total impact that my daughter's death had on me was finally confirmed sixteen years later following the unexpected death of my eldest son. This book recalls and reflects my personal experiences of dealing with bitter grief and, as a whole, describes my feelings, actions, and even my very questionable thinking from that traumatic beginning (the sometimes dark and unthinkable emotions and reasoning that followed my child's death)--not as I had expected that I should have or would have felt or thought, but as I actually did feel and think--triggering the overwhelming need to ask endless questions and then seek to understand. I had to ask and continue to ask why until I understood well enough to again be at peace with God! Why is perhaps the most fundamental question of life? Why does anything exist? And especially, Why does life exist? If there is a Creator God who loves us, why do pain and suffering exist? And I now realized that if one's religion and faith don't satisfactorily address the problem of severe human suffering and horrific tragedy, then they must lack the capacity to interpret the human experience or to provide a realistic or adequate world view. Thus, I had to ask why questions that reached well beyond the deaths of my children. For the first time, I had to step outside of my now crumbling former religious comfort zone to consider my tragic and bitter losses and God's role in my losses and His role in all the other terrible pain, suffering, and death that exists in the world. I had to ask myself very difficult questions and try to understand Why? the harsher and horrific things of life happen, but more specifically Why Jodi? Why me? and Why now? I've tried to honestly consider why life often seems so unfair, but this was a surprisingly difficult thing to do--to seriously question the things I had come to believe and to expect from life and from God. And then sixteen years later by God's sovereign choice, I got a second chance to look at and reassess Why? following the death of my eldest son (Brian). This book is also in some sense a lament and a chronicle (though somewhat topical and not strictly chronological) of my life as a distraught bereaved parent transitioning by means of bitter grief and sorrow to some new more stable normal under the sovereign leading of God as must others who also suffer bitter grief. This book is the story of my life since April 23, 1998, my experiences, successes, and disappointments; and I hope they will be of value to you as you deal with your own bitter grief and/or try to help others cope with theirs.

Social Perception and Social Reality contests the received wisdom in the field of social psychology that suggests that social perception and judgment are generally flawed, biased, and powerfully self-fulfilling. Jussim reviews a wealth of real world, survey, and experimental data collected over the last century to show that in fact, social psychological research consistently demonstrates that biases and self-fulfilling prophecies are generally weak, fragile, and fleeting. Furthermore, research in the social sciences has shown stereotypes to be accurate. Jussim overturns the received wisdom concerning social perception in several ways. He critically reviews studies that are highly cited darlings of the bias conclusion and shows how these studies demonstrate far more accuracy than bias, or are not replicable in subsequent research. Studies of equal or higher quality, which have been replicated consistently, are shown to demonstrate high accuracy, low bias, or both. The book is peppered with discussions suggesting that theoretical and political blinders have led to an odd state of affairs in which the flawed or misinterpreted bias studies receive a great deal of attention, while stronger and more replicable accuracy studies receive relatively little attention. In addition, the author presents both personal and real world examples (such as stock market prices, sporting events, and political elections) that routinely undermine heavy-handed emphases on error and bias, but are generally indicative of high levels of rationality and accuracy. He fully embraces scientific data, even when that data yields unpopular conclusions or contests prevailing conventions or the received wisdom in psychology, in other social sciences, and in broader society.

The psychological theory of expectation that David Huron proposes in Sweet Anticipation grew out of the author's experimental efforts to understand how music evokes emotions. These efforts evolved into a general theory of expectation that will prove informative to readers interested in cognitive science and evolutionary psychology as well as those interested in music. The book describes a set of psychological mechanisms and illustrates how these mechanisms work in the case of music. All examples of notated music can be heard on the Web. Huron proposes that emotions evoked by expectation involve five functionally distinct response systems: reaction responses (which engage defensive reflexes); tension responses (where uncertainty leads to stress); prediction responses (which reward accurate prediction); imagination responses (which facilitate deferred gratification); and appraisal responses (which occur after conscious thought is engaged). For real-world events, these five response systems typically produce a complex mixture of feelings. The book identifies some of the aesthetic possibilities afforded by expectation, and shows how common musical devices (such as syncopation, cadence, meter, tonality, and climax) exploit the psychological opportunities. The theory also provides new insights into the physiological psychology of awe, laughter, and spine-tingling chills. Huron traces the psychology of expectations from the patterns of the physical/cultural world through imperfectly learned heuristics used to predict that world to the phenomenal qualia we experienced as we apprehend the world.