Jungian psychology and pastoral care

This article provides a review of the implications of analytic psychology for pastoral care and the caregiver. Four areas of Jung's thought are examined: (1) his mode of treatment, (2) the process of individuation, (3) his theory of personality types, and (4) his concept of synchronicity. We suggest that Jung's system of thought contains a rich reservoir of insight for the enrichment of pastoral care.     

Participation in Religious Groups as a Function of Group Composition: A Self-Attention Perspective1

A self-attention approach to the effect of the group on the individual is applied to the phenomenon of participation in religious groups. Previous work indicates that group members become more self-attentive, and thus more concerned with matching to standards of appropriate behavior, as the relative size of their subgroup decreases. This suggests that, in the context of religious groups, members of a congregation will be more self-attentive, and thus more likely to participate in the religious group, when there are fewer congregation members relative to the number of ministers. The results of analysis of ten archival records of participation in religious groups support this perspective. The importance of self-attention processes in religious group settings is discussed.     

Life Change and Psychological Distress: The Role of Perceived Control and Desirability

Two studies were conducted to specify what attributes of life change events increase the risk of future psychological distress. It was hypothesized that the events perceived as both undesirable and uncontrollable would be most likely to be linked to subsequent distress. In the fiist study, which employed a retrospective methodology, 117 college students reported the life changes that occurred to them over a 3-month span and indicated the desirability and controll-ability of each event. These subjects also responded to an inventory, used in studies of community mental health, to assess symptoms of psychological distress. The findings indicated that only events perceived as both undesirable and uncontrollable were related to the incidence of psychological distress symptoms. Study 2 examined the same hypothesis in a prospective methodology. As in Study 1, only undesirable, uncontrollable life events were significantly related to subsequent psychological distress symptoms. The results of both studies implicate the importance of perceptions of control over aversive events in understanding the link between real life outcomes and illness.     

Is the acquisition of basic-colour terms in young children constrained?

We investigated whether the learning of colour terms in childhood is constrained by a developmental order of acquisition as predicted by Berlin and Kay [1969 Basic Color Terms (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press)]. Forty-three children, aged between 2 and 5 years and grouped according to language ability, were given two tasks testing colour conceptualisation. Colour comprehension was assessed in a spoken-word-to-colour-matching task in which a target colour was presented in conjunction with two distractor colours. Colour naming was measured in an explicit naming task in which colours were presented individually for oral naming. Results showed that children's knowledge of basic-colour terms varied across tasks and language age, providing little support for a systematic developmental order. In addition, we found only limited support for an advantage for the conceptualisation of primary (red, green, blue, yellow, black, white) compared to non-primary colour terms across tasks and language age. Instead, our data suggest that children acquire reliable knowledge of nine basic colours within a 3-month period (35.6 to 39.5 months) after which there is a considerable lag of up to 9 months before accurate knowledge of the final two colours (brown and grey) is acquired. We propose that children acquire colour term knowledge in two distinct time frames that reflect the establishment of, first, the exterior (yellow, blue, black, green, white, pink, orange, red, and purple) and, second, the interior structure (brown and grey) of conceptual colour space. These results fail to provide significant support for the order predicted by Berlin and Kay, and suggest, instead, that the development of colour term knowledge is largely unconstrained.     

Does L/M cone opponency disappear in human periphery?

We have assessed the optimal cone contrast sensitivity across eccentricity in human vision of the two cone-opponent mechanisms [L/M or red-green, and S/(L + M) or blue-yellow] and the luminance mechanism. We have used a novel stimulus, termed a 'sinring', that is a radially modulated sine-wave arc, Gaussian enveloped in both angular and radial directions. This stimulus overcomes the problem inherent in Gabor stimuli of confounding stimulus spatial frequency, size, and eccentricity and so allows contrast sensitivity to be tracked accurately into the periphery. Our results show that L/M cone opponency declines steeply across the human periphery and becomes behaviourally absent by 25-30 deg (in the nasal field). This result suggests that any L/M cone-opponent neurons found in primate peripheral retina beyond this limit are unlikely to be significant for colour contrast detection measured behaviourally.     

Sticks and stones can break my bones, but ethnophaulisms can alter the portrayal of immigrants to children

An archival study examined the portrayal of ethnic immigrants to children as a function of the prevailing cognitive representation of those ethnic immigrant groups in ethnophaulisms. The complexity in ethnophaulisms (and, to a lesser degree, the valence in ethnophaulisms) predicted the portrayal of ethnic immigrant groups. Overall, ethnic immigrant groups characterized in terms of ethnophaulisms of low complexity were less frequently present in children's literature, children from these ethnic groups were described more in terms of physical appearance than in terms of personal traits, fictional child characters from those ethnic groups were portrayed with smaller heads and with lower verbal complexity, and the folksongs attributed to these groups had a more negative affective tone. The implications of these results for approaches to intergroup relations are considered.     

Conceptualization of perceptual attributes: a special case for color?

Young children experience difficulties establishing conceptual representations of color compared with everyday objects. We argue that comparing the development of color cognition to that of familiar objects is inappropriate since color is a perceptual attribute that can be abstracted from an object and by itself lacks functional significance. Instead, we compared the recognition, perceptual saliency, and naming of color to that of three other perceptual object attributes (motion, form, and size) in 47 children aged 2 to 5 years as a function of language age. Results revealed that, although color was perceptually salient relative to the other visual attributes, no selective impairment to color cognition (recognition and naming) was found relative to the three other visual attributes tested. Thus, when the appropriate comparisons are made, we find no special delay in the development of color conceptualization. Furthermore, the striking disparity between perceptual saliency and cognition of color in our youngest age groups suggests that perceptual saliency has little influence on the conceptual development of color.     

Processing time of contour integration: the role of colour, contrast, and curvature

We investigated the temporal properties of the red - green, blue-yellow, and luminance mechanisms in a contour-integration task which required the linking of orientation across space to detect a 'path'. Reaction times were obtained for simple detection of the stimulus regardless of the presence of a path, and for path detection measured by a yes/no procedure with path and no-path stimuli randomly presented. Additional processing times for contour integration were calculated as the difference between reaction times for simple stimulus detection and path detection, and were measured as a function of stimulus contrast for straight and curved paths. We found that processing time shows effects not apparent in choice reaction-time measurements. (i) Processing time for curved paths is longer than for straight paths. (ii) For straight paths, the achromatic mechanism is faster than the two chromatic ones, with no difference between the red-green and blue-yellow mechanisms. For curved paths there is no difference in processing time between mechanisms. (iii) The extra processing time required to detect curved compared to straight paths is longest for the achromatic mechanism, and similar for the red - green and blue-yellow mechanisms. (iv) Detection of the absence of a path requires at least 50 ms of additional time independently of chromaticity, contrast, and path curvature. The significance of these differences and similarities between postreceptoral mechanisms is discussed.     

Self‐Stigma,Mental Health Literacy,and Health Outcomes in Integrated Care

The authors describe research on the self‐stigma of mental illness and help seeking, mental health literacy, and health outcomes in an integrated care medical center. Results revealed that self‐stigma of mental illness and self‐stigma of seeking help had an inverse relationship with mental health literacy. No statistically significant relationships were found between health outcomes, either type of self‐stigma, and mental health literacy. The authors discuss these and other findings and offer research and counseling implications.     

A Case Law Survey of the Personality Assessment Inventory: Examining Its Role in Civil and Criminal Trials

This article describes the Behaviors from Intergroup Affect and Stereotypes–Treatment Scale (BIAS–TS), a self-report measure of experiences of active harm, passive harm, active facilitation, and passive facilitation. The BIAS–TS was derived from the Behaviors from Intergroup Affect and Stereotypes (BIAS) Map, and provided reliable, replicable, and stable indexes of different harmful and facilitatory behaviors that people encounter in their day-to-day lives from multiple sources (Studies 1 and 2). The BIAS–TS subscales were uniquely associated with concurrent subjective well-being, and were distinct from the HEXACO dimensions of personality, Social Dominance Orientation, and Right-Wing Authoritarianism (Study 3). The BIAS–TS also provided novel support for the subordinate-male target hypothesis proposed by social dominance theory (Study 4). The BIAS–TS instruction set can be easily reworded to assess perceived discrimination and intergroup rejection from specific or multiple general sources and is applicable in numerous contexts. A copy of the BIAS–TS is included.