Psychological Resources and Attitudes Toward People With Physical Disabilities

In a representative sample of the population (N = 950), this study investigated the influence of psychological resources on attitudes toward people with physical disabilities. Hierarchical regression analysis showed that 2 psychological resources (liking people, belief in a just world) had a significant influence on attitude toward people with disabilities, controlling for the demographic variables of age, education, and sex. Contact, social desirability, and the Big Five dimensions of Extraversion, Neuroticism, and Openness also proved to be significant. The psychological resources of self‐esteem, life satisfaction, and hope were not significant. Practical implications are discussed.     

Family Reflections: A Promising Therapeutic Program Designed to Treat Severely Alienated Children and Their Family System

Parental alienation is a form of child psychological abuse and traditional therapeutic approaches do not work with these types of cases. This article provides explanation for the gross failure of traditional therapeutic approaches. The rest of the article discusses the Family Reflections Reunification Program (FRRP), specifically designed to treat severely alienated children and their family system. This program was piloted in 2012 with 22 children in 12 families. Evaluations at the end of the retreat and at 3-month, 6-month, 9-month, and 12-month follow-ups demonstrate a 95% success rate in re-establishing and maintaining a relationship between children and once-rejected parents.     

Understanding Jung: recent biographies and scholarship

The tendency to associate Jung with Freud has undergone a change and both are increasingly perceived as founders of depth psychological schools whose exact relationship is unclear. The separation of the two was largely due to Jung's rejection by the psychoanalytic community because of his perceived spiritual inclinations. Recent scholarship has emphasized these spiritual inclinations in both a positive and negative way and brought to light Jung's non-Freudian sources, while other Jungian practitioners are seeking a closer association with psychoanalysis. This conflicting development is related to tendencies in Jung himself that are evident in his own life and in research conducted into the writing and publication of Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Though the status of the latter as Jung's autobiography has been called into question there remains the necessity to explain the myth of Jung's life enshrined there and the impact this has had on a public looking for meaning in a time of considerable change.     

The depths and shallows of psychological externalism

This paper examines extant ways of classifying varieties of psychological externalism and argues that they imply a hitherto unrecognized distinction between shallow and deep externalism. The difference is between starting points: shallowly externalist hypotheses begin with the attribution of psychological states to individuals, just as individualistic hypotheses do, whereas deeply externalistic hypotheses begin with agent-environment interaction as the basis of cognitive processes and attribute psychological states to individuals as necessary for such interaction. The over-arching aim is to show how deep externalism works and what its implications are for psychological and philosophical theorizing.

Passion, Pain, and Purpose: One Man’s Response to the Passion of the Lord

The purpose of this article is to review and comment on the book The Passion of the Lord: African American Reflections. Edited by James A. Noel and Matthew V. Johnson, and published by Facets (an imprint of Fortress Press: Minneapolis), the book explores the unique perspective of African American thought in relation to the story of the Passion of Christ, and the cultural aesthetics which allow Christ’s suffering on the cross to become a powerful agent of spiritual strength, hope, love, and faith. This article records one African American man’s deep personal engagement of, and resonance to, the material as he validates, affirms the important insights of the seven theologians presented. Through personal observation and experience, poetry and relevant cultural idioms, the author honors work which, ultimately, contributes to a vitally important self-understanding of who African Americans are now, where they are now, and how they have come to be the people they are now in America.

The spiritual care of sick children: reflections from a pilot participation project

The authors are a multi-disciplinary team of chaplains, one with a counselling qualification, and an academic with a research background in spirituality and youth work. A pilot participation project undertaken at Birmingham Children’s Hospital (UK) focused on increasing the understanding of the spiritual needs of sick children and young people and involving children and young people in improving the service and provision of spiritual and religious care to them. Views from children, young people and parents were sought with the intention of developing resources and training that help facilitate the meeting of spiritual and religious needs of children and young people in hospital. Within the wider chaplaincy team are chaplains from the six major world faiths and this project considers spiritual needs of children and young people who perceive themselves as belonging to a faith group or not. Reflections from the pilot include identifying ten principles and practices to inform the spiritual care of sick children and proposing the concept of interpretive spiritual encounters as a tool for spiritual care. The pilot study indicated that being more proactive in offering spiritual care enhanced the quality of service offered by Chaplaincy.     

The Tripartite Foundations of Temporal Psychological Distance: Metaphors,Ecology, and Teleology

What is psychological distance? Why do events sometimes seem “close” yet other times seem “ages away?” We propose a tripartite model of the foundations of psychological distance in which: (a) people use spatial distance as a metaphor for psychological distance; (b) the ecology of subjective experiences that coincide with changes in objective distance define, and hence, influence psychological distance; (c) psychological distance is shaped in the service of people's ultimate goals, or teleological considerations, of successfully navigating through time. This model implies that the subjective experiences that are typically associated with reductions in objective temporal distance should reduce temporal psychological distance–the subjective sense of how close or far away events are. We review evidence indicating that emotional arousal, attention, fluency, and motivational considerations all reduce psychological distance. This model also implies a temporal asymmetry in which people prioritize thinking about the future, which approaches in time, over thinking about the past, which recedes in time. Consequently, the future is psychologically closer than the past, people attend more to the future than to the past, and people feel more emotionally aroused about the future than about the past. These findings help advance understanding of psychological distance as a distinct psychological construct.     

Winnicott's dream: some reflections on D. W. Winnicott and C. G. Jung

The author discusses D. W. Winnicott's 1964 review of C. G. Jung's autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, emphasizing the psychological effect the reviewing process had on Winnicott himself. Writing the review constellated Winnicott's unconscious, and he reported having a healing dream 'for Jung and for some of my patients, as well as for myself'. Winnicott's 'countertransference' to Jung helped him personally, and the review was Winnicott's first written formulation of his theory on 'The use of an object'.     

Article for “Diversity Stories in Community Research and Action” Facing Resistance in Waking Up to Privilege

This article identifies a challenge brought to us while facilitating a diversity workshop with adults in a school work setting. Our program involved using the video The Color of Fear as a centerpiece of a training to school district staff where the goals were to raise awareness and understanding of race, gender and class issues, increase understanding of power and privilege, and build alliances between people from diverse backgrounds. The challenge came from a white, male participant and involved issues of privilege, the intersections of race, class, and gender, and resistance to addressing diversity matters. Reflections of what worked and didn't work are offered as well as recommendations to other facilitators who will face similar challenges.     

The kove and the karai a lesson from the Paraguayan Chaco

Reflections of an anthropologist who has lived both with Uamah herders in the Andes and with hunting-and-gathering people inhabiting the lowland forests of the Paraguayan Chaco.     

HIV counselling in the 1990s and beyond

It is 15 years since AIDS was first described in the medical literature. Reports of immune system disorders among gay men in large cities in the USA in 1981 signalled the start of what has now become a pandemic affecting millions of people. The psychological impact of HIV infection has been well-documented and it is widely reported that psychological treatment is mosdy provided for the treatment of adjustment reactions. Counselling for HIV prevention and HIV antibody testing has also been at the forefront of psychological support services. More recenuy, there has been a determined effort among counsellors to develop a range of psychotherapeutic approaches to help people to cope with and adjust to living with terminal illness. Most research published in the 1980s on the psychological impact of HIV addressed the infected individual. This symposium introduces a growing interest in the field for counselling those who are affected by HIV, including families, health-care workers and communities. This trend is becoming the focus of many counselling programmes worldwide and is likely to continue throughout the 1990s and beyond.     

We'll miss you Steve: how the death of a technology innovator emotionally impacts those who use and love his digital devices

The death of Apple co-founder Steven Jobs was accompanied by a period of public mourning. Reflections shared by both those he knew and those who were connected to him through the devices he pioneered were imbued with expressions of loss. The goal of the present research was to understand the grieving of those who knew Jobs through his devices, as a way of exploring how interpersonal emotions are shaped by relationships with technology. The findings from three studies conducted in the weeks after Jobs' death indicated demographic variability in mourning across the general population, suggesting that many people were more deeply affected by his passing. Latter studies highlighted the motivational factors that are related to the use of the Apple devices which were at play in shaping feelings of sadness and loss.     

A Palliative Approach to Spirituality in Residential Aged Care

SUMMARY

This paper describes how a palliative approach to care is relevant in the context of residential aged care, with specific focus on the spiritual needs of residents. Three issues are described that make attention to spirituality in residential aged care particularly challenging: effects of cognitive changes, potential threats to dignity, and uncertainties about how to provide bereavement support to the range of people who experience loss in this care context. Reflections on how residential aged care staff might better assess the spiritual needs of residents are offered with suggestions from the literature about how to sensitively respond to these needs.     

Tokenism in Psychology: Standing on the Shoulders of Small Boys

Tokenism is a situation in which a member of a distinctive category is treated differently from other people. This article is about the situation in which Tokens (people perceived as distinctive) are considered experts on something for having the properties of a token (the thing which makes them distinctive). Tokens who differ by appearance or by being born into another culture might be considered experts on cultures grouped into the same racial/cultural category. Tokens who differ by being skilled in number-related mathematics might be considered experts on the mathematization of phenomena. Tokens might say that some result is valid for all people in some racial/cultural category without sufficient evidence, or use number-related mathematics as a mathematization of psychological phenomena without trying to find more abstract mathematizations. This harms psychological research. A possible future genesis of cultural and number tokenisms is discussed, and some suggestions to improve the discourse offered. The effect of tokenism might be diminished if psychologists focus on more proper thinking about psychological phenomena.     

The Role of Culture in the Relationship Between Religiosity and Psychological Well-being

Several measures of religious practice and religious orientation (intrinsic/extrinsic/quest) and two measures of psychological well-being (positive affect and negative affect) have been employed in a cross-cultural survey of undergraduate university students from five different cultural/religious environments: Slovenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, the United States of America, and Japan. Results suggest that measures of exstrinsic, intrinsic, and quest religiosity are not entirely applicable in most of the cultures observed. Nevertheless, it was possible to discern abbreviated cross-culturally valid scales for each dimension. The strength and direction of the correlation between psychological well-being and a particular type of religious orientation proved to depend substantially upon culture. More importantly, the cultural environment plays a crucial role in shaping the relationship between general measures of religiosity and psychological well-being. According to the data, higher general levels of religiosity at the societal level are linked to more positive correlations between religiosity and psychological well-being. The overall picture leads to the conclusion that there is no culturally universal pattern in the relationship between measures of religiosity and psychological well-being and that the particular cultural and religious context should always be considered in studies dealing with this issue.

Beyond the qualitative paradigm: A framework for introducing diversity within qualitative psychology

The case for qualitative research in psychology is considered. We argue against the idea that qualitative research is merely a matter of technique or method, and question the utility of viewing it as a unitary paradigm. Rather, the links between epistemology, methodology, and method are explored within three theorized strands of qualitative inquiry, making reference to illustrative projects. Each strand is organized around a different approach to the issues of justifying and warranting psychological knowledge: (1) reliability and validity; (2) generativity and grounding; and (3) discourse and reflexivity. These are exemplified in Miles and Huberman's ‘data display’ model, Glaser and Strauss' method of ‘grounded theory’, and in various forms of ‘discourse’ analysis. Reflections upon points of contact between the three strands address two main issues: (1) rendering research publicly accountable; and (2) challenging relativism.     

Accounting for the Theory of Planned Behaviour in departure time choice

Motivating people to change their departure time could play a key role in reducing peak-hour congestion, which remains one of the most prevalent transport problems in large urban areas. To achieve this behavioural change, it is necessary to better understand the factors that influence departure time choice. So far departure time choice modelling focussed mainly on objective factors, such as time and costs as main behavioural determinants. In this study, we derived psychological factors based on the Theory of Planned Behaviour, estimated them based on structural equation modelling, and included them into a discrete choice model. The psychological factors were measured based on an online questionnaire addressed to car commuters to the city centre of Copenhagen (N = 286). The questionnaire additionally included a travel diary and a stated preference experiment with nine departure time choice scenarios. All psychological factors had a significant effect on departure time choice and could improve the model as compared to a basic discrete choice model without latent constructs. As expected, the effects of the psychological factors were different depending on framework conditions: for people with fixed starting times at work, the intention to arrive at work on time (as estimated by subjective norm, attitude, perceived behavioural control) had the strongest effect; for people with flexible working hours, the attitude towards short travel time was most relevant. Limitations, the inclusion of additional psychological factors and their possible interactions are discussed.     

Spinal cord injured people: differences in psychological variables from a gender perspective

This ex post factor study is within the framework of studies dealing with the psychological aspects involved in the rehabilitation of people with physical handicaps from the perspective of gender. From this perspective, the study focuses on comparing and studying the differences between men and women using the EMELM Scale (Multidimensional Evaluative Scale for People with Spinal Cord Injury). Participants were 143 people -99 men and 44 women- with spinal cord injuries. The results showed no differences as a result of gender in any of the following psychological variables related to the spinal cord injury adjustment process: extraversion-neuroticism, motivation and anxiety, locus of control, current coping strategies, remembrance of coping strategies and depression. The implications of these results for future research are discussed.     

Is a modular cognitive architecture compatible with the direct perception of mental states?

The Direct Social Perception Hypothesis maintains that we can perceive other people’s psychological states. Furthermore, it claims that doing so does not require any cognitive process that is simulative or theory-like, putting it in sharp contrast with mainstream accounts of social cognition. This paper contrasts the DSPH against the modular account of mindreading as proposed by Peter Carruthers and H. Clark Barrett. It maintains that the modularity view can respond to the challenges levelled by the DSPH, and that the positions are not as distinct as they originally appear. Finally, the paper discusses the role of non-folk psychological state concepts in our perceptions of other people.     

Imagining the End of Life: On the Psychology of Advance Medical Decision Making

Near the end of life, individuals often become too ill to express their wishes about the use of life-sustaining medical treatment. Instructional advance directives (i.e., livings wills) are widely advocated as a solution to this problem based on the assumption that healthy people can predict the types of medical treatment they will want to receive if they become seriously ill. In this paper, we review a large body of research from the psychological and medical literatures that challenges this assumption. This research demonstrates that across a wide variety of decision contexts people show limited ability to predict their affective and behavioral reactions to future situations. We outline several ways that policy and law regarding the use of advance directives could be informed by this research, and suggest a number of issues involved in advance medical decision making that could benefit from additional empirical and conceptual attention.