Mainstream personality psychology and the study of religion

In this commentary, I make some general observations about the study of personality and religion and some specific comments about individual articles from the perspective of contemporary personality psychology. Most of the authors represented here treat religion as a domain of human experience and behavior that can be understood in terms of familiar personality principles and processes. I therefore urge greater attention to the Five-Factor Model of personality traits, especially Openness to Experience, in understanding religious phenomena. Mainstream psychologists, including longitudinal researchers, behavior geneticists, and epidemiologists, should consider the inclusion of religious variables in their research designs.     

Confidence in judgment

Experiments have shown that, generally, people are overconfident about the correctness of their answers to questions. Cognitive psychologists have attributed this to biases in the way people generate and handle evidence for and against their views. The overconfidence phenomenon and cognitive psychologists' accounts of its origins have recently given rise to three debates. Firstly, ecological psychologists have proposed that overconfidence is an artefact that has arisen because experimenters have used question material not representative of the natural environment. However, it now appears that some overconfidence remains even after this problem has been remedied. Secondly, it has been proposed that overconfidence is an artefactual regression effect that arises because judgments contain an inherently random component. However, those claiming this appear to use the term overconfidence to refer to a phenomenon quite different from the one that the cognitive psychologists set out to explain. Finally, a debate has arisen about the status of perceptual judgments. Some claim that these evince only underconfidence and must, therefore, depend on mechanisms fundamentally different from those subserving other types of judgment. Others have obtained overconfidence with perceptual judgments and argue that a unitary theory is more appropriate. At present, however, no single theory provides an adequate account of the many diverse factors that influence confidence in judgment.     

Why positive psychology is necessary

The authors provide a definition of positive psychology and suggest that psychologists should try to cultivate a more appreciative perspective on human nature. Examples are given of a negative bias that seems to pervade much of theoretical psychology, which may limit psychologists' understanding of typical and successful human functioning. Finally, a preview of the articles in the special section is given.     

Psychological Research With Administrative Data Sets: An Underutilized Strategy for Mental Health Services Research

A key element in the identity of professional psychologists is their commitment to base practice on the best knowledge available about a problem being tackled. Although administrative data (e.g., records of provider billing and procedures) can often shed light on the dark areas of the complex U.S. health care system, psychologists make notably little use of them. Experience teaches that decisions must often be made despite the absence of "gold standard" knowledge from the well-designed, controlled studies learned in graduate school. Increased involvement of psychologists in work using administrative data can improve service provision but requires that psychologists adopt unaccustomed approaches to research. The authors discuss administrative data's strengths and limitations, recent progress made in using them, how psychologists can acquire and use low-cost information from administrative data, and examples of questions that can be answered.     

“The Smarts That Counts?”: Psychologists' Decision-Making in Personnel Selection

An exploratory approach was taken to examine personnel psychologists' use of sources of information when making a decision regarding candidates' fit to managerial positions. The main focus was on the process, based on actual information used to make real-life decisions about real-life candidates. Different types of information, available to the psychologists were used to predict their actual final decision regarding a sample of 434 managerial candidates. Results suggest a preference to indices of cognitive skills in making decisions about candidates. It seems that even when other non-cognitive indices were used, they were tainted by the cognitive indices, suggesting a halo effect. Implications for practice and further research are discussed.     

Psychologists' ethical responsibilities in Internet-based groups: issues, strategies, and a call for dialogue

How can psychologists participate ethically as facilitators, advisers, and peer members in Internet-based groups? The astonishing growth of Internet technology and on-line groups has outpaced the development of formal ethical guidelines for psychologists involved in on-line groups. This article provides an initial appraisal of psychologists' ethical responsibilities in discussion, support, and self-help groups that operate on the Internet and offers practical strategies for avoiding ethical problems. By presenting initial strategies and guidelines for ethical behavior in Internet-based groups, the authors hope to stimulate the field to further discuss and analyze these issues.     

Addressing the Supply of Psychologists in the Workforce: Is Focusing Principally on Demand Sound Economics?

The growth of the psychologist workforce offers greater human capital for delivering psychological services. Workforce expansion also may contribute to excessive services or psychologists' employment concerns. Our survey revealed that interns and Internship Directors perceive the supply and demand workforce imbalance as one of the most important problems, and possibly the most challenging problem, facing professional psychology in the next decade. Organized psychology has predominantly focused on options for approaching workforce imbalances by exploring avenues for increasing the demand for psychologists' services and broadening the scope of their professional activities. Additional attention to moderating the supply of psychologists and current training levels is perceived as an important and potentially more successful means of addressing imbalances between the workforce supply and the demand for psychologists' services. Internship directors were pessimistic about the impact of most of the resolutions of the 1997 Supply and Demand Conference in addressing workforce imbalances.     

Psychopharmacology's debt to experimental psychology

The role of experimental psychology in the development of psychopharmacology has largely been ignored in recent historical accounts. In this article the authors attempt to redress that gap by outlining work in early experimental psychology that contributed significantly to the field. While psychiatrists focused on the therapeutic nature of drugs or their mimicry of psychopathology, experimental psychologists used psychoactive drugs as tools to study individual differences in normal behavior as well as to develop methodologies using behavior to study mechanisms of drug action. Experimental work by Kraepelin, Rivers, and Hollingworth was particularly important in establishing drug-screening protocols still used today. Research on nitrous oxide and on the effects of drug combinations is discussed to illustrate the importance of experimental psychology to psychopharmacology.     

Men Pursuing an Undergraduate Psychology Degree: What’s Masculinity Got to Do with It?

Using discursive psychology as its theoretical and methodological framework, the present study explored male Canadian undergraduate students’ accounts of their reasons for studying psychology, their experiences of being male undergraduate psychology students, and their anticipated future careers. Ten men (19–29 years-old) who were at least in their second year of study in the psychology major program were interviewed. Contrary to survey research concluding that men who make gender-atypical vocational choices conform less to masculine norms than do men who make typical academic and career choices, our participants produced contradictory accounts. On the one hand, in talking about their experiences as psychology students in the context of the gender gap, they argued that gender does not matter. On the other hand, they showed that gender does matter in brief “boy moments” when they shared tacit gender knowledge with the interviewer and in justifying their academic paths toward futures that involved leaving psychology for a male-concentrated field. Thus, gender-does-not matter was the preferred argument when gender was an explicit topic of conversation, and the doing of gender occurred in unacknowledged ways.

     

Discrepancy between human resource research and practice: Comparison of industrial/organisational psychologists and human resource practitioners' beliefs

There is a large and growing body of research to show that human resource (HR) practices affect individual performance, organisational productivity and organisational performance. Academic findings about effective HR practices, however, have not readily been adopted by practitioners. A variety of theoretical and practical explanations have been advanced about the research–practice gap. Research by Rynes, Colbert, and Brown (2002) suggested that the research–practice gap is due to a lack of knowledge, but the extent to which these findings apply to the Australian context is unknown. The sample consisted of 102 industrial/organisational (I/O) psychologists and 89 HR practitioners. The main aim of the present study was to replicate and extend the work of Rynes et al. by examining and comparing the knowledge of I/O psychologists and HR practitioners. It was found that overall I/O psychologists were better informed about HR research than HR practitioners; in particular, they were more knowledgeable about management practices and recruitment and selection. In both groups, of the five content areas examined (Management Practices; General Employment Practices; Training and Development; Recruitment and Selection; and Compensation and Benefits), the greatest gaps were in Recruitment and Selection.     

On not "giving psychology away": the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory and public controversy over testing in the 1960s

Psychological tests, especially the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, became the center of public controversy and Congressional scrutiny during the 1960s. This unwanted attention actually helped American psychologists more than they imagined. Assisted by those on Capital Hill, psychologists were able to defend their science in a manner that avoided imposed forms of public accountability. Social questions were reformulated as technical problems. The need to adjust intelligence and aptitude tests reinforced psychologists' control over them. Conversely, personality tests were not made more transparent and nonintrusive, unless psychologists thought these changes were scientifically necessary. This episode prompted tighter regulation of test use and demonstrated that traditional forms of testing were far too important to popularize and "give away".     

Soins pénalement ordonnés et positionnements professionnels : des pratiques au carrefour de la Santé et de la Justice

At the crossroad of Health and Justice, penally ordered care underlies professional practices, the articulation of which can turn out to be delicate. Here we tackle the relevance and practical application of these measures. For that purpose, semi-directive interviews and field observations have been conducted with probation agents, judges (who follow up the way sentences are executed) and psychologists. The professionals’ comments and experiences show the complexity of these measures, which intend to make “care” into a recidivism prevention tool. Misconceptions appear about theory, practices and interprofessional relationships. The idea of “care” as a sole medical term appears to be ineffective and calls for the creation of new practices.     

The Haunting of the Human Spirit

Understanding the human spirit, the thinking, motivating, feeling aspect of a person, need not entail supernatural reference in any more than a boundary sense. Methodological naturalism accounts for many putatively supernatural experiences in terms of naturalistic and scientific research. Fairy tales have natural functions, naturalistic accounts of miracles can have moral and spiritual power, and neuropsychological research can have value in understanding experiences of ghosts, apparitions, and presences. Even beliefs in personal immortality, at odds with current neurobiology, may serve a range of psychological functions and may raise more moral questions than they answer. Naturalistic accounts can make spiritual explorations possible where supernatural answers provide epistemic barriers.     

Work transitions

Individuals make choices in, and adjust to, a world of work that is often a moving target. Because work is so central to human functioning, and transitions in and out of work can have major mental health repercussions, the authors argue that applied psychologists in health services need to understand those transitions. This article focuses on the different types of transition throughout a person's working life and the resources needed at different stages to ensure the success of these transitions. The authors start by examining the roles of capability and adaptability in supporting and facilitating adjustment to work transitions and their relation to identity development. They then examine the role of social and institutional contexts in shaping work transitions and their outcomes. The authors focus on voluntary versus involuntary transitions and then broaden the lens in discussing the policy implications of research on work transitions.     

“Danger,Will Robinson!” The challenges of social robots for intergroup relations

Society's increasing reliance on robots in everyday life provides exciting opportunities for social psychologists to work with engineers in the nascent field of social robotics. In contrast to industrial robots that, for example, may be used on an assembly line, social robots are designed specifically to interact with humans and/or other robots. People tend to perceive social robots as autonomous and capable of having a mind. As such, they are also more likely to be subject to social categorization by humans. As social robots become more human like, people may also feel greater empathy for them and treat robots more like (human) ingroup members. On the other hand, as they become more human like, robots also challenge our human distinctiveness, threaten our identity, and elicit suspicion about their ability to deceive us with their human‐like qualities. We review relevant research to explore this apparent paradox, particularly from an intergroup relations perspective. We discuss these findings and propose three research questions that we believe social psychologists are ideally suited to address.     

Engaged,Embedded, Enjoined: Science and Technology Studies in the National Science Foundation

Engaged scholarship is an intellectual movement sweeping across higher education, not only in the social and behavioral sciences but also in fields of natural science and engineering. It is predicated on the idea that major advances in knowledge will transpire when scholars, while pursuing their research interests, also consider addressing the core problems confronting society. For a workable engaged agenda in science and technology studies, one that informs scholarship as well as shapes practice and policy, the traditional terms of engagement must be renegotiated to be more open and mutual than has historically characterized the nature of inquiry in this field. At the same time, it is essential to protect individual privacy and preserve government confidentiality. Yet there is a scientific possibility for and benefit to introducing more collaborative and deliberative research approaches between scholar and subject in ways that will not violate these first-order ethics. To make the case, this article discusses the possibilities and perils of engaged science and technology scholarship by drawing on our own recent experiences to conduct and apply STS research while embedded in the National Science Foundation. Brief accounts of these experiences reveal the opportunities as well as the challenges of engaged scholarship. They also provide lessons for those fellow travelers who might follow the authors to this or other like host organizations with ambitions of increasing fundamental knowledge about and applying research to the policies, programs, and decisions of the scientific enterprise.     

笔迹与人格关系研究的回顾及评价

西方心理学者对笔相学家的笔迹分析提出质疑,研究表明需要我们重新考虑笔迹分析的适用性,而其利用因素分析技术对笔迹与人格关系的大量研究发现,笔迹特征与EPQ中的E因素、N因素相关显著。我国古代丰富的笔迹学思想和当代笔相学家的实践经验为我们从心理学角度研究笔迹与人格之间的关系,提供了宝贵的资料,但我们在这一领域运用心理学方法的研究还刚刚起步。目前国内外心理学者在研究取向、笔迹特征选择和研究目的上还存在一定局限,对此加深认识,将会对我们具有重要的借鉴意义。     

Is JOOP of only academic interest?

Garry Gelade's paper offers some helpful suggestions and insights regarding how JOOP and other academic journals might strengthen their appeal to practitioners. His comments fall into two areas: (i) research agenda, and (ii) communication of research. I agree that most of his recommendations could lead to valuable improvements, and note that some of them are being tried elsewhere. However, I disagree with Gelade regarding his call for less emphasis on research method. The call for occupational psychologists to make their work more accessible to practitioners can be sensibly extended to making it relevant to policy.     

Strains in experimental social psychology: a textual anaylsis of the development of experimentation in social psychology

A textual analysis of post-World War II social psychology methodology manuals and handbook chapters on "methods" indicates that the introduction of the experimental method was enforced and gradually strengthened through the use of scientific rhetoric and the minimization of alternative research strategies. As a consequence, by the 1960s experimentation had become such an established identifying feature of psychological social psychology that the acceptability of ideas in the field came to depend largely on the ability of authors to couch them in the language of the experiment. Text writers continually shored up the defenses of scientific legitimacy and denigrated all other types of argument. We explore three sources of tension or strains evident as contradictions in these texts: (1) between a rational experimenter's carefully following prescribed, logic-generated scientific practices and the investigator's artfully or intuitively designing research; (2) between social psychologists' missionary activities of proselytizing the experiment as the primary research method and social psychologists' apologies and insecurities expressed about using experiments; and (3) between the treatment of participants as docile and submissive versus portraying them as underhanded and damaging to the outcome of the research. In addition, we briefly reexamine the strain (4) between sober scientific experimentation and a playful "fun and games" approach to experimentation (Lubek & Stam, 1995).