Clinical Behaviors for Addressing Religious/Spiritual Issues: Do We Practice What We Preach?

To determine if counselors integrate clinical behaviors for addressing religious/spiritual issues in counseling consistent with their ratings of the importance of such behaviors, the authors conducted a national survey of American Counseling Association (ACA) members. Seventy‐eight ACA members rated the importance of and frequency with which they engaged in a set of 30 clinical behaviors that were identified in the existing literature as addressing religious/spiritual issues within counseling. Results indicated possible disparities between importance and frequency ratings. Potential barriers to counselors' utilization of religious and spiritually directed clinical behaviors were identified.     

The Outcome of Parenting: What Do We Really Know?

Lykken's proposal that people should be required to apply for a license before they can become parents is based on his belief that the increase in crime over the past 40 years is due largely to the increase in the number of children reared in fatherless homes. I argue that the absence of a father is a correlate of criminal behavior in the offspring but not its cause. Other correlations that are usually interpreted as the effects of good or bad child-rearing practices are similarly ambiguous and subject to other explanations. I conclude that the increase in crime over the past 40 years cannot be blamed on the absence of fathers or inept child rearing, and offer two alternative hypotheses.     

What Do We Mean by “The Biology of Menopause”?

Most commonly, the biology of menopause is equated with the biomedical model of menopause. The biomedical model emphasizes the central importance of estrogen and has an overriding focus on disease. A broader-biological model is presented, which emphasizes the role of hormones in healthy functioning. Hormones are team players in complex, multidetermined systems that have a purpose. Hormones act in concert with other physiological systems and with sensory and social inputs. Human biology is both similar to and different from that of other animals. The implications of these assumptions for understanding menopause are discussed, especially the kinds of questions that are asked and the kinds of evidence needed before conclusions are drawn with regard to clinically significant areas. A broader-biological model of menopause provides a framework within which health-related issues can be considered from a perspective that is, on the one hand, more holistic, and on the other hand, more attentive to individual differences.     

Expressions of Generativity and Civic Engagement in a ‘Learning in Retirement’ Group

This study describes the dynamics of generative expressivity in a group of 20 well-educated members of a local “learning in retirement’ community. Using qualitative methods to analyze interview data, a wide variety of generative activities were identified, conditions defining and giving rise to them described, and meanings explored. The predictable influence of the motive of generativity would suggest that “valued life activities” will include those that yield some benefit for future generations as well as oneself. While there was considerable evidence in this group of generative activity patterns consistent with civic engagement, questions were raised about the continuing investment in such activities where personal benefits and a clear sense of agency were not in evidence. Some gender differences were also identified, but they were not as great as might be found in other samples.

What is she eating? The effects of meal size on impressions of a female eater

How does what a woman eats affect others' impressions of her? One hundred and thirteen male and female college students, mainly White and middle class, watched a videotape of a female student eating one of four meals that varied in size and gender connotations. Results showed that meal size significantly affected ratings of the woman's social appeal. Thus, eating lightly appears to be socially advantageous for a woman, a phenomenon that may contribute to women's high rates of eating disorders.     

Exploratory Investigation of Personal Influences on Educators’ Engagement in Engineering Ethics and Societal Impacts Instruction

Science and Engineering Ethics - Cultivating an understanding of ethical responsibilities and the societal impacts of technology is increasingly recognized as an important component in...     

What Kinds of People Should We Create?

The advent of genetic engineering will give people the power to design the members of the succeeding generation, and thus will render practical the issue how such a power ought to be exercised. Here I address that issue in a general way. I point out that the aim of making future people better adapted to the modern social environment is implicitly circular, since the natures of the people themselves will determine the nature of the social environment. I claimthat the human property the enhancement of which would do most to enrich experience is intelligence; accordingly increased intelligence should be a primary aim of genetic designers. The tendency to feel pain should be attenuated, as positive motivation is substituted for negative (to some extent). People should be designed so as to be motivated more by reason than by any non-rational drives (though rational motivation may still involve pleasure andpain). The sex drive, having outlived its usefulness, will probably be replaced by some other source of pleasure. As a side effect of these changes in people, the arts and social sociences will be transformed beyond recognition. [1]     

Does a Truck Driver See What a Nurse Sees? The Effects of Occupation Type on Perceptions of Sexual Harassment

Previous researchers have demonstrated differential prevalence of harassment of men and women in men’s traditional, women’s traditional, and neutral occupation types, but they have not looked at differences in harassment judgments among these occupations. Our hypotheses rely on the assumption that people who have observed frequent sexual harassment of others in their work environments react differently to new cases than do those who have witnessed fewer of these episodes in the past. Participants watched videos of two cases and made judgments about the presence or absence of sexual harassment. We categorized the participants based on their occupations—men’s traditional, women’s traditional, and neutral, and compared responses among groups. A gender by occupation type interaction emerged. Men in men’s traditional occupation types provided the highest ratings of harassment, followed by men in neutral occupations; men in women’s traditional occupation types provided the lowest ratings. Conversely, women in women’s traditional occupations provided the highest ratings of harassment, followed by women in neutral occupations; women in men’s traditional occupations provided the lowest ratings of sexual harassment.     

What is a Truth Value And How Many Are There?

Truth values are, properly understood, merely proxies for the various relations that can hold between language and the world. Once truth values are understood in this way, consideration of the Liar paradox and the revenge problem shows that our language is indefinitely extensible, as is the class of truth values that statements of our language can take – in short, there is a proper class of such truth values. As a result, important and unexpected connections emerge between the semantic paradoxes and the set-theoretic paradoxes.     

The Influence of Close Ties on Depression: Does Network Religiosity Matter?

Despite a growing body of the literature on how features of social networks influence well-being, we know little of how the religiosity of social networks matter. This study addresses three types of religious social network ties and their association with mental health: same (non)-religious ties, religious discussion ties, and ties offering prayers on an individual's behalf. Using ego-centric network data from the 2006 Portraits of American Life Study (N = 2,223), multivariate regression results suggest that a greater number of ties that discuss religion and pray for the respondent are detrimental to the mental health of those of a low religious salience. Taken together, this study demonstrates that religious dimensions of social networks exact an important influence on mental health and highlights the importance of identifying specific features of religion among core network ties.     

Engagement in a Science Museum – The Role of Social Interactions

This qualitative research explores the interactions of elementary school students during free-choice activity with science museum exhibits. The study participants were 39 students, who visited a science museum on six occasions during a three-year-period (from 4^th to 6^th grades). Our study showed that most interactions around exhibits are social in nature. Within these social interactions, students mainly discuss the technicalities of operating the exhibits and rarely engage with their scientific content. On occasion, exhibits are no more than settings for social interactions that could equally occur, for example, in the schoolyard. The main implications of this study concern exhibit design and pedagogy. Because students find ways to create their own social interactions in museum settings, museum pedagogy should leverage this social interaction into cognitive engagement with the scientific content of exhibits.     

The Role of Conviction in Personal Disease Risk Perceptions: What Can We Learn From Research on Attitude Strength?

Perceived risk for disease is included as a predictor of intentions and behavior in many health behavior theories. However, perceived risk is not always a strong predictor of intentions and behaviors. One reason may be suboptimal conceptualization and measurement of risk perceptions; in particular, research may not capture the conviction and certainty with which a risk perception is held. The rich and independent literature on attitudes might be leveraged to explore whether conviction is an important moderator of the effects of risk perceptions on intentions and behavior. Attitudes are more predictive of intentions when they are high in multiple aspects of attitude strength, including attitude certainty and being more accessible and stable over time. Working from the assumption that risk perceptions have a similar structure and function to attitudes, we consider whether factors known to strengthen the attitude–behavior correspondence might also strengthen the risk perception–behavior correspondence. Although by strict definition risk perceptions are not evaluations (a critical component of attitudes), the predictive validity of risk perceptions may be increased by attention to one's “conviction” or certainty of perceived risk. We also review recent strategies designed to improve risk perception measurement, including affective and experiential assessments of perceived risk and the importance of allowing people to indicate that they “don't know” their disease risk. The aim of this paper is to connect two disparate literatures – attitudes and persuasion in social psychology with risk perceptions in health psychology and decision science – in an attempt to stimulate more work on characteristics and proper measurement of risk perceptions.     

Finding The Positives in Psychology: What Are We Doing?

The purpose of this article is to delineate some of the consequential aspects of the intrinsic duality that is created in the pursuit of knowledge around positive psychological and asset-based constructs. I will reflect on what we have learned during studies in educational psychology that focused on assets and strengths, by drawing on highlights from particularized studies. I will then specifically problematize the use of the asset-based approach in educational psychology, by pointing out key challenges encountered at the coalface of knowledge creation in the asset-based approach and Positive Psychology. The article concludes with suggestions for pathways of inquiry, with specific reference to the questions we might be asking. Sensitivity to the discourses we construct in our psychological endeavours, and multi-layered, complex understandings is preferenced.     

What Do We Compare When We Compare Religions? Philosophical Remarks on the Psychology of Studying Comparative Religion Abroad

The issue of comparison is a vexing one in religious and theological studies, not least for teachers of comparative religion in study abroad settings. We try to make familiar ideas fresh and strange, in settings where students may find it hard not to take “fresh” and “strange” as signs of existential threat. The author explores this delicate pedagogical situation, drawing on several years' experience directing a study abroad program and on the thought of figures from the Western existentialist tradition and Chinese Confucian philosophy. The article focuses particularly on “oh events” – defined as moments when one learns one has something to learn and something to unlearn. The author argues that the experience of shame that is typical of oh events can become a valuable resource for cross‐cultural learning and personal transformation, if teachers assist students to reflect on the experience as a sign of differing, but potentially harmonizable, cultural expectations. This essay is published alongside of six other essays, including a response from John Barbour, comprising a special section of the journal (see Teaching Theology and Religion 18:1, January 2015).     

The effect of parental divorce on young adults' romantic relationship dissolution: What makes a difference?

It was proposed that parental divorce does not have a uniform effect on young adults' romantic relationships and that differential outcomes depend on how young adults perceive their parents' divorce. Using a sample of 571 young adults, structural equation modeling suggested that, compared with those from intact families, young adults whose parents divorced held a more favorable attitude toward divorce. A positive attitude toward divorce was associated with lower commitment to their romantic relationship, which in turn affected its dissolution. More importantly, young adults' perception of parental divorce varied depending on interparental conflict and parents' marital quality before the divorce. The variation in the perception of interparental divorce was linked to relationship dissolution via attitude toward divorce and relationship commitment.