“This one’s on me!”: Differential well-being effects of self-centered and recipient-centered motives for spending money on others

Motivation and Emotion - Past research reliably shows that spending money on others (termed prosocial spending) makes people happier than spending money on oneself. The present research tested...     

“Tell me more about this…”: An examination of the efficacy of follow-up open questions following an initial account

In information gathering interviews, follow-up questions are asked to clarify and extend initial witness accounts. Across two experiments, we examined the efficacy of open-ended questions following an account about a multi-perpetrator event. In Experiment 1, 50 mock-witnesses used the timeline technique or a free recall format to provide an initial account. Although follow-up questions elicited new information (18–22% of the total output) across conditions, the response accuracy (60%) was significantly lower than that of the initial account (83%). In Experiment 2 (N = 60), half of the participants received pre-questioning instructions to monitor accuracy when responding to follow-up questions. New information was reported (21–22% of the total output) across conditions, but despite using pre-questioning instructions, response accuracy (75%) was again lower than the spontaneously reported information (87.5%). Follow-up open-ended questions prompt additional reporting; however, practitioners should be cautious to corroborate the accuracy of new reported details.     

Revisiting Bion’s “Notes on Thinking”: Implications for School Psychologists

Bion’s “Notes on Thinking” (1962a) is not typically associated with the practice of school psychology. However, most of the ideas articulated in the paper, such as the need to learn to engage with what feels frustrating, the capacity to contain emotions and process experiences, and the role of the mother in enabling her child to tolerate emotional states, are applicable to the challenges school psychologists and teachers routinely face in schools. Perhaps the most prominent of these are the need to be able to tolerate and contain the reactions difficult children generate with their acts and the ability to create conditions that help school personnel reflect on the behavior of these children and thus be more attuned to their needs.     

Other than “the set pattern”: Developing one’s own thoughts about spirituality and religion

In qualitative research, psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists who had continued to have a personal interest in religion or spirituality reflected on their religious upbringing. The 25 participants interviewed often gave their responses in what can be identified as narrative form. These narratives articulated participants’ often poignant and distinctive, sometimes humorous, experiences. They relate how and why accepted teaching regarding religious and spiritual issues was challenged, usually in adolescence, but for several participants much earlier. Important aspects included differing responses of significant others to the participants’ independent thinking, the beginnings of subsequent religious and spiritual questing, and, for some, the decision to become a psychotherapist.     

“Why me?”: Low-Income Women’s Poverty Attributions,Mental Health,and Social Class Perceptions

Although much is known about broad societal attitudes toward poverty, less is known about how women perceive their own poverty. We sought to examine the types of self attributions low-income women make about their poverty, as well as the association of self poverty attributions to women’s mental health and upward mobility beliefs. Using close-ended questions in a community sample of 66 low-income mothers from the Midwestern United States, we found these women were most likely to attribute their poverty to issues related to having children, their romantic relationships, and structural/government blame. The least endorsed attributions for poverty were fatalistic and individualistic reasons. Attributing one’s poverty to children and structural reasons was related to greater depression, and attributing one’s poverty to romantic relationships and structural reasons was related to greater anxiety. Moreover, attributing one’s poverty to children and romantic relationships was positively related to upward mobility beliefs, whereas individualistic attributions were negatively related to upward mobility beliefs. Understanding how women view their poverty and upward mobility can help to improve interventions and policies aimed at low-income women.     

“Care for the Common Home”: Responses to Pope Francis’s Encyclical Letter

Journal of Religion and Health - This article aims to build awareness of the growing global crisis in social, economic and environmental terms from different disciplinary approaches. The authors...     

Women’s Porno: The heterosexual female gaze in porn sites “for women”

The article deals with a number of Internet sites claiming to specialize in providing pornography for heterosexual women, as a vehicle to examine the nascent “gaze” and visual parameters of heterosexual female sexuality. The focus here is semiotic—looking at visual coding of website images rather than audience reception (i.e., whether heterosexual women are actually the main consumers of women’s porno). Motivation for this decision is discussed. Theoretically, the article draws from Butler’s performative notions of sexuality in anchoring discussion. The remainder of the article does a comparative textual analysis of nine pornographic Internet sites, three of which label themselves “for women.” Findings are as follows: “Women’s porno” fuses the matter and anti-matter of men’s homo- and heterosexual pornography, in the process engendering an active, sexually interested, heterosexual female gaze and typifying Butler notion of “insurrectionary speech.”     

Innovating “Traditional” Women’s Roles: Byzantine Insights for Orthodox Christian Gender Discourse

Some contemporary hierarchically endorsed statements about gender within Orthodox Christianity appeal to “traditional roles” for women. Byzantine hagiographies about women, however, often confound the stability suggested by such rhetoric, and offer a more open “tradition” of Orthodox Christians celebrating diverse and boundary-breaking forms of women’s sanctity (even if via negation of their womanhood). Although these texts betray an unabashedly historical patriarchal perspective, they also can be read as using gender, via an almost apophatic dialectic, to convey theological values that challenge essentialist associations between specific vocations, authoritative positions, and particular sexes. As hagiography is an influential genre for Orthodox beliefs and practices, the ways hagiographers negotiate and depict gender should inform understandings of gender in Orthodox “tradition.”     

Merton’s “True Self”: A Resource for Survivors of Sexual Abuse by Priests

The toxic impact of clergy sexual abuse in childhood and adolescence can be complex and enduring. For some, a particularly painful consequence is noteworthy change in one’s personal identity or sense of self. Survivors frequently experience unrelenting grief over the loss of the “self” that was experienced as “real” prior to the onset of abuse. Memories of days and times when this self was “alive” are often accompanied by strong feelings of affection and joy. Despair over the loss of this identity contrasts sharply with the indifference or hostility felt for the self with which they have been burdened as a consequence of sexual abuse by clergy in childhood. Many struggle with the unbearable conviction that they are fated to live “in the skin” of an identity that is not an authentic expression of the person they were meant to be. This article suggests that the writings of Thomas Merton (1915–1968) may offer a hopeful resource for survivors of clergy sexual abuse and for those working in support of survivors’ recovery. Merton has been described as “the most influential Catholic author of the twentieth century” ). His writings touch the “deeper woundedness of spirit and psyche” (Kilcourse, Cross Curr, 49:87–96, 1999, p. 90) and his elegant examination of the true self lies “at the center of his teaching on the Christian life” (Conn, Pastor Psychol, 46:323–332, 1998, p. 327). For Merton, the true self is indestructible and, because it is “rooted in God” (Merton, The inner experience: Notes on contemplation, Harper Collins, New York, 2003, p. 2), always open to discovery, growth, and transformation. This framework may be especially useful for individuals whose personal identity, as a consequence of sexual abuse in childhood by clergy, is experienced as forever poisoned and beyond redemption.     

“More Splendid than the Sun”: Christ’s Flesh among the Reasons for the Incarnation

This article defends two arguments proposed by Robert Grosseteste for the view that the Incarnation is logically prior to the Fall. Each of them is motivated by the goodness of Christ as a creature who is nonetheless worthy of worship, though the first considers this fact as an intrinsic good, and the second considers it as instrumentally good, by virtue of its making possible fleshly communion between God and his creatures. I will then consider Bonaventure’s reasons for rejecting these arguments, which turn on the worry that they posit a divine obligation to become Incarnate. I show that while Bonaventure’s concern is reasonable, he addresses it at the unacceptable cost of denying important aspects of the Incarnation’s purpose in the actual world. However, Bonaventure accepts that the Incarnation and Passion are “necessary” for human redemption in a way that is consistent with divine freedom, an intuition which Aquinas brings to particularly clear expression by analyzing the Incarnation as necessary in the sense of being the most fitting means of salvation. Applying this line of thought to Christ’s flesh, considered as the fitting instrument by which God has elected to perfectly beatify humanity, allows us to reconcile Grosseteste’s insistence on the Incarnation’s priority to the Fall with Bonaventure’s insistence on its absolute gratuity.     

Similarity,distance, and categorization: A discussion of Smith’s (2006) warning about “colliding parameters”

The idea that categorization decisions rely on subjective impressions of similarities between stimuli has been prevalent in much of the literature over the past 30 years and has led to the development of a large number of models that apply some kind of decision rule to similarity measures. A recent article by Smith (2006) has argued that thesesimilarity—choice models of categorization have a substantial design flaw, in which the similarity and the choice components effectively cancel one another out. As a consequence of this cancellation, it is claimed, the relationship between distance and category membership probabilities is linear in these models. In this article, I discuss these claims and show mathematically that in those cases in which it is sensible to discuss the relationship between category distance and category membership at all, the function relating the two is approximately logistic. Empirical data are used to show that a logistic function can be observed in appropriate contexts.     

When people’s judgments of learning (JOLs) are extremely accurate at predicting subsequent recall: the “Displaced-JOL effect”

Judgments of learning (JOL) made after a delay more accurately predict subsequent recall than JOLs made immediately after learning. One explanation is that delayed JOLs involve retrieving information about the target item from secondary memory, whereas immediate JOLs involve retrieval from primary memory. One view of working memory claims that information in primary memory is displaced to secondary memory when attention is shifted to a secondary task. Thus, immediate JOLs might be as accurate as delayed JOLs if an intervening task displaces the target item from primary memory, requiring retrieval from secondary memory, prior to making the JOL. In four experiments, participants saw related word-pairs and made JOLs predicting later recall of the item. In Experiment 1, delayed JOLs were more accurate than JOLs made shortly after learning, regardless of whether a secondary task intervened between learning and JOL. In Experiments 2–4, the secondary task demands increased and JOLs made shortly after learning with an intervening task were just as accurate as delayed JOLs, and both were more accurate than immediate JOLs with no intervening task (Experiment 4). These results are consistent with a retrieval-based account of JOLs, and demonstrate that the “delayed-JOL effect” can be obtained without a long delay.