Overcoming the “Holy Hush”: A Qualitative Examination of Protestant Christian Leaders’ Responses to Intimate Partner Violence

Described as a “holy hush,” past research has noted a general silence about and reluctance to address intimate partner violence (IPV) in religious congregations. To explore this, we interviewed 20 Protestant Christian religious leaders about how they understood and responded to IPV. Based on a thematic content analysis, our study revealed some of the challenges, tensions, and complexities that may be barriers to leaders speaking about and responding to IPV, and also the ways religious leaders in our sample attempted to overcome these challenges. For example, results revealed religious leaders understood violence on a gradation from less to more severe, and linked a need for and type of response to the level of violence. Throughout, religious leaders expressed a tension between their leadership role and responding to IPV. Furthermore, religious leaders acknowledged their need for greater training and connections to service providers, however, they reported not currently being connected to other IPV resources or organizations in the community. We discuss how the findings illuminate challenges and tensions for religious leaders in responding to IPV and how some leaders in this study were navigating these tensions to respond. We also discuss how findings may inform future research and the development of trainings and protocols for religious leaders and congregations on responding to IPV, promoting survivor safety, and fostering a greater understanding of IPV. Implications for collaboration with other community‐based IPV organizations are also discussed.     

The Struggle for the Nature of “Prejudice”: “Prejudice” Expression as Identity Performance

This article develops an identity performance model of prejudice that highlights the creative influence of prejudice expressions on norms and situations. Definitions of prejudice can promote social change or stability when they are used to achieve social identification, explanation, and mobilization. Tacit or explicit agreement about the nature of prejudice is accomplished collaboratively by persuading others to accept (1) an abstract definition of “prejudice,” (2) concrete exemplars of “prejudice,” and (3) associated beliefs about how a target group should be treated. This article reviews three ways in which “prejudice” can be defined in the cut and thrust of social interaction, namely, by mobilizing hatred and violence, by accusation and denial, and by repression. The struggle for the nature of prejudice determines who can be badly treated and by whom. Studying such ordinary struggles to define what counts (and does not count) as “prejudice” will allow us to understand how identities are produced, norms are set into motion, and populations are mobilized as social relations are reformulated.     

History in the Service of Politics: Constructing Narratives of History During the European Refugee “Crisis”

It is common for politicians to refer to “our proud history of supporting refugees,” yet the historical record regarding responses to refugees is not straightforwardly positive. So how is history drawn upon in political debates regarding refugees? Applying discursive psychology, this article analyzes the use of history in five U.K. parliamentary debates that took place from September 2015 to January 2016 on the European refugee “crisis.” The analysis identifies six “functions” of the use of the history: resonance, continuity, reciprocity, posterity, responsibility, and redemption. It shows how references to historical events create narratives regarding the United Kingdom’s history of supporting refugees in order to construct the nation in particular ways, mobilize collective identities, and legitimize or criticize political actions. Specifically, references to the United Kingdom’s role in providing refuge to Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany functions as a hegemonic narrative that reinforces the United Kingdom’s “heroic” position and constructs the Syrian conflict as involving an oppressive dictator and innocent refugees in need to help, thereby legitimizing support for Syrian refugees. The analysis demonstrates the flexibility of historical narratives, reformulates the distinction between “psychological” and “rhetorical” uses of historical analogies, and reflects on the social and political implications of such uses of history.     

“Living in sin” and sinful living: Toward filling a gap in the explanation of violence against women

The present article argues that the failure of most family violence researchers to analyse cohabiting relationships separately from marital unions constitutes a major gap in our understanding of violence against women. The review of available evidence indicates that violence by men in cohabiting relationships is more common and more likely to be severe. Research is therefore needed to identify the causal pathways leading to violence for marrieds and cohabitors separately. Recognising a lack of theoretical application, a number of explanatory frameworks that may be used to study marital status differences in violence are articulated. An application of Berger and Kellner's phenomenological thesis to the study of selection and relationship factors appears particularly promising. As part of an agenda for future research in this area, several problems of past studies that need to be overcome are identified along with possible solutions.     

Beyond “Heartless Conservative” and “Bleeding Heart Liberal” Caricatures: How Religiosity Shapes the Relationship Between Political Orientation and Empathy

Is political orientation associated with self‐reported empathy? Popular caricatures frame political orientation in terms of the “heartless conservative” and the “bleeding heart liberal.” Yet, previous research has produced findings that present mixed evidence to support these caricatures. Using data from the 2004 General Social Survey, analyses show that the caricatures of the caring liberal and the cold‐hearted conservative are supported by results for empathy—in which conservatives have lower levels of empathy than liberals—but this pattern holds only when individuals also have low levels of religiosity. In the context of high religiosity, self‐identified conservatives do not have lower empathy than self‐identified liberals, net of a host of sociodemographic characteristics. Our observations demonstrate that patterns in empathy across political orientation are evident only when levels of different forms of religiosity are considered.     

Reply to Kenneth Thomas's “Wild Analysis in Politics”

We try to clarify Kenneth Thomas's (“Wild Analysis in Politics”) mistakes about our analysis of the question: Do right‐wing authoritarian (RWA) beliefs originate from psychological conflict? We suggest, contrary to Thomas's analysis, an approach that builds on the kinds of psychodynamic causes we use to explain RWA and the importance of confirming them empirically.     

A linguist looks at “schizophrenic” language

The language of some patients diagnosed as schizophrenic is apparently caused by a disruption in the ability to order linguistic elements into meaningful structures. This disruption affects different levels of language at different times, even in the same patient, thus causing six definable characteristics of schizophrenic speech. These characteristics are discoverable only through a linguistic analysis of a corpus of such speech.     

Why psychology needs conceptual analysts: Wachtel's “discontents” revisited

Commenting on Wachtel's “Investigation and its Discontents” [Wachtel, P. L. (1980). Investigation and its discontents: Some constraints on progress in psychological research. American Psychologist, 35, 399–408], I agree that lack of support for a career path of conceptual analysis and critique is a serious problem. Psychology requires a strong conceptual component because it is subject to unusual distortions and self-deceptions in theory formation and evidential evaluation due to issues of power, self-esteem, and social ideology. I agree with Wachtel that pressures for quantity of publication are detrimental to scientific quality, but dispute his suggestion that excessive focus on quantity in assessing productivity can be addressed by having tenure and promotion candidates submit only their three best papers. Such reviews must be based on the entire record, so improvements must involve journals’ acceptance standards. Regarding Wachtel's concern about the influence of grants on reviews, I argue that grants should be relevant only to the extent they bear on the candidate's scholarly goals.     

“Hammered down on every side” versus “just being positive”: A critical discursive approach to health inequality

Socio‐economic and health inequality are strongly linked and are increasingly perpetuated by discourses of individual responsibility. However, little research from a critical discursive perspective has addressed how people affected themselves may account for this relationship. This research examined the ways in which people who are in debt, unemployed, or in insecure, minimum‐wage employment construct health and negotiate identities around it. Data from semistructured interviews with 6 participants were analysed and 3 main interpretative repertoires were identified: a medical repertoire of health as a lack of illness; health as adopting the “right” behaviours and attitudes; and health as being heavily influenced by external factors, such as income and life circumstances. The analysis focuses on how participants managed the tension between these latter 2 repertoires by adopting various subject positions around health: that it is “slipping” away from them; that it requires motivation; and that it is unattainable. Underpinning this is a “common‐sense” idea of health as something that is worked towards through culturally approved actions and attitudes.     

THE PROBLEM OF “GOD” IN PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION: LONERGAN'S “COMMON SENSE” (RELIGION) VERSUS “THEORY” (THEOLOGY)

The emphasis on God in American psychology of religion generates the problem of explaining divine‐versus‐natural causality in “spiritual experiences.” Especially “theistic psychology” champions divine involvement. However, its argument exposes a methodological error: to pit popular religious opinions against technical scientific conclusions. Countering such homogenizing “postmodern agnosticism,” Bernard Lonergan explained these two as different modes of thinking: “common sense” and “theory”—which resolves the problem: When theoretical science is matched with theoretical theology, “the God‐hypothesis” explains the existence of things whereas science explains their natures; and, barring miracles, God is irrelevant to natural science. A review of the field shows that the problem is pervasive; attention to “miracles”—popularly so‐named versus technically—focuses the claims of divine‐versus‐natural causality; and specifications of the meaning of spiritual, spirituality, science, worldview, and meaning itself (suffering that same ambiguity: personal import versus cognitive content) offer further clarity. The problem is not naturalism versus theism, but commonsensical versus theoretical thinking. This solution demands “hard” social science.     

“PURE” VERSUS “PRACTICAL” EPISTEMIC JUSTIFICATION

Abstract: In this article I distinguish a type of justification that is “epistemic” in pertaining to the grounds of one's belief, and “practical” in its connection to what act(s) one may undertake, based on that belief. Such justification, on the proposed account, depends mainly on the proportioning of “inner epistemic virtue” to the “outer risks” implied by one's act. The resulting conception strikes a balance between the unduly moralistic conception of William Clifford and contemporary naturalist virtue theories.     

The Evolving “D” in “BASIC ID”

The multimodal counseling model is based on the notion that a client's concerns can be dealt with most successfully when the counselor or therapist treats several aspects of a client's functioning. The multimodal model uses the acronym BASIC ID to identify the areas of client functioning that frequently need to be treated. These areas include behavior, affect, sensation, imagery, cognition, interpersonal relations, and drugs. The D mode, which represents drugs, is a misunderstood aspect of the BASIC ID partly because it does not seem to parallel other aspects of the model. Over the past few years the D mode has been expanded to include more than drugs, in particular, to include diet and other physiological factors. This article describes the evolution of the D mode and attempts to show the importance of a physiological dimension to the multimodal counseling approach.     

“SECOND-GUESSING”

Messages received from other social actors cannot always be taken at face value. When people have reason to question such messages, it is hypothesized that they engage in a cognitive process called “second-guessing,” wherein they reevaluate the literal interpretation of the message to determine its veridicality. Should they determine that it is not veridical, they generate an alternative, potentially more plausible interpretation. We assessed the frequency and importance of situations that might provoke reinterpretation of messages. Such situations were seen as occurring frequently and were of some importance. Social actors revealed sophisticated knowledge concerning the strengths and weaknesses of information obtained about people or events outside their direct experience. They also claimed to be able to “debias”such information, winnowing a “correct” interpretation from one judged to be “incorrect.” Preliminary data suggest that naive social actors are quite good at delecting scientifically documented sources of bias and making reasonable adjustments in their judgments to correct for those biases when plausibly present.