Finding God in the Silence: Contemplative Prayer and Therapy

In this paper the author shares some of his experiences of using silence in therapy. He presents one of the modes of practicing silence, namely the meditation technique known as Contemplative Prayer, and shows advantages of using this technique in the process of self-purification and self-balancing of the therapist. The author stipulates that silence is a royal way to discovering God. Finding this divine particle within oneself and client changes the whole outlook of therapy. The therapist is no longer alone with the client, but God becomes an active participant in the therapeutic process through His love for both therapist and client.     

The Taciturn Exemplar

Early Confucian thinkers have an intense interest in the external aspects of moral exemplars. This article explores this interest by unpacking a complicated relation between silence, speech, and moral cultivation in the Analects. Situating Confucius’s desire to be silent in a pedagogical context, this article points out a tension between speaking of moral knowledge and personalizing it. It argues that silence is considered a desirable pedagogical practice because it fosters a more intimate relation between people and the moral knowledge they receive. This article then offers a detailed analysis of several difficult pedagogical moments between Confucius and two of his most eloquent students, Zigong and Zai Wo. Their problematic ways of speaking provide cases in point that flesh out the arguments sketched above. This article concludes by reflecting on how silence can also be alienating in moral cultivation, and on how people’s styles of speech may shape who they are.     

The psychoanalytic discourse. The Freudian subject of analysis

Discussing "rationalizing" interpretations of Freud's work and suggesting as an example Jürgen Habermas' reception of Freud the authors mark non-rationalized forms of speaking and silence as specifically Freudian discoveries. Objecting to Freud's recourse to Plato's allegory of the yet undivided "globe man" they draw upon Nietzsche's critique of the "true world" (beyond phenomena).     

Introduction to Panel: Ghosts that Haunt—Sexual Boundary Violations in our Communities

Sexual boundary violations are ghosts that silence and haunt our psychoanalytic communities. In an attempt to break that silence and confront our ghosts, I put together a panel that included a faculty member (Seth Aronson), an institute graduate (Nancy Crown), and an institute candidate (Carina Grossmark). Our task: To address the particular impact of boundary violations on each cohort. Taken together, our aim is to disturb and provoke; that is, to get us all thinking and speaking about the unspeakable.     

中国背景下员工沉默的测量以及信任对其的影响

应用自行编制的员工沉默行为调查问卷,通过对928名被试的调查,对中国背景下员工沉默行为的结构维度进行了探讨。探索性因素分析结果表明,员工沉默由三个因素构成。三因素结构的结果在验证性因素分析中得到了证实。由此得到结论,员工沉默有三维结构：默许沉默、漠视沉默和防御沉默。以员工沉默的三个维度为因变量,以员工对上级和组织的信任为自变量进行回归分析,结果表明,员工对上级信任对员工沉默三个维度都有负面影响,而员工对组织信任对默许沉默和漠视沉默有负向影响,对防御沉默的影响并不显著     

A Multi-Level Approach to Direct and Indirect Relationships between Organizational Voice Climate,Team Manager Openness,Implicit Voice Theories,and Silence

Employee silence impedes sustainable organizational development, and it can conceal harm for internal and external stakeholders. Established approaches to overcoming silence in organizations draw on the assumption that employees withhold their views based on deliberate elaborations on the effectiveness and risks they associate with voice. Our research aims at complementing these approaches. Applying an information processing approach to culture and using implicit voice theories (IVTs; i.e., taken-for-granted beliefs about when and why speaking up at work is risky or inappropriate) as an example, we introduce a model proposing ways through which shared implicit knowledge structures emerge in teams and organizations, and how they affect motives to remain silent. We examine parts of the model with a sample of 696 employees nested in 129 teams and 67 organizations. Our findings show that IVTs can be shared at the team and organizational level, that shared IVTs explain variance in silence motives above and beyond perceptions of organizational climate and manager openness at the team and organization level, and that IVTs function as a mediator between team manager openness and silence motives. In sum, our findings point at shared IVTs as a way to conceptualize underlying basic assumptions of cultures of silence.     

What Does it Take to Break the Silence in Teams: Authentic Leadership and/or Proactive Followership?

Leadership may help break the silence in teams, but this may not be equally true for all employees. Using behavioral plasticity theory, we propose that authentic leadership—a set of leadership behaviors through which leaders enact their true selves—reduces silence and motivates speaking up in employees low on proactive personality, but hardly affects employees who are proactive by nature, because proactive employees are less susceptible to social influences. Using data from 223 employees (nested in 45 work teams), we indeed find authentic leadership to reduce silence in employees with less proactive personalities, but not in more proactive employees. We discuss theoretical and practical implications for silence and authentic leadership.     

A Psychometric Evaluation of Poloma and Pendleton's (1991) and Ladd and Spilka's (2002, 2006) Measures of Prayer

Prayer has increasingly been used as an empirical measure of religiosity. Recent developments include Ladd and Spilka's Inward, Outward and Upward Prayer Scale, which measures what respondents think about while praying, and Poloma and Pendleton's Measure of Prayer Type, which measures four different dimensions of prayer as well as degree of intimacy with the divine. The present study provides a factor analytical evaluation of both measures, including an examination of total scale and subscale reliability. The measures were administered to a sample of 518 Irish respondents. Although the total scales and subscales were found to be reliable, confirmatory factor analysis revealed that the hypothesized factor structures were a less than optimal fit of the data, while correlational analysis revealed a conceptual overlap between the measures.     

Visual Attention in Real-World Conversation: Gaze Patterns Are Modulated by Communication and Group Size

Gaze behavior both initiates and maintains conversations, playing a crucial role in real-world collaboration. Hitherto, most findings on social attention stem from research using pictures of faces in the laboratory, however, attention operates differently in the real world. Thus, we know little of how gaze behavior operates in naturalistic interactions. To bridge this gap, we applied mobile eye-tracking to investigate the gaze patterns present in naturalistic conversations. Specifically, we examined gaze behavior of participants in a group of two or five, either sitting together in silence, or engaging in a conversation, in which they took turns either listening or speaking to each other. Results show that participants looked more frequently towards others when the group was communicating compared to when remaining silent, and that they looked at others more frequently when listening compared to when speaking. Furthermore, being part of a dyad led to more social attention being afforded during conversation compared to the group situation, regardless of whether subjects were listening or speaking. Meanwhile, when sitting in silence subjects showed less social gazing in a dyad than in a group of five. Our results provide qualitative and quantitative insights into the patterns of visual attention during dynamic naturalistic conversations.     

Don’t Talk About the Elephant: Silence and Ethnic Boundaries in Postwar Bosnia-Herzegovina

In December 1995, the guns fell silent on Bosnia-Herzegovina and so did much dialogue. Silence is omnipresent in this postwar society: People conceal their suffering; they remain silent about their potential responsibility and guilt and—in interethnic encounters—the violent past is often wholly screened out. Drawing on a literature analysis as well as own interviews and ethnographic observations conducted in Bosnia-Herzegovina since 2007, the article focuses on the interplay between silence and the constitution of ethnic boundaries. In accordance with the literature, it argues that silencing in-group atrocities reinforces the boundaries between former enemies by strengthening ethnically biased collective memories. However, existing research also suggest that not speaking about war in interethnic encounters most likely contributes to the integration of Bosnian society because it enables members of different ethnic communities to interact ‘peacefully’ in everyday life, thereby creating ‘new’ realities within which ethnic boundaries become less important. This conclusion assumes that silencing necessarily leads to forgetting. The following paper challenges this perception and argues that silence about war and the avoidance of conflict in interethnic communication can, in fact, also promote a further consolidation of ethnic boundaries. When conversations about past realities only take place between like-minded people, the likely result is that their pre-existing shared perspective on this reality will become solidified. In other words, silencing war in interethnic encounters impedes any potential revision or restructuring of interethnic relations and therefore stabilises the boundaries between ethnic groups.     

The Silent Treatment? Changes in patient emotional expression after silence

Psychotherapy can be an emotionally laden conversation, where both verbal and nonverbal interventions may impact the therapeutic process. Prior research has postulated mixed results regarding how clients emotionally react following a silence after the therapist is finished talking, potentially due to studying a limited range of silences with primarily qualitative and self-report methodologies. A quantitative exploration may illuminate new findings. Utilising research and automatic data processing from the field of linguistics, we analysed the full range of silence lengths (0.2–24.01 s), and measures of emotional expression—vocally encoded arousal and emotional valence from the works spoken—of 84 audio recordings of Motivational Interviewing sessions. We hypothesised that both the level and the variance of client emotional expression would change as a function of silence length; however, due to the mixed results in the literature, the direction of emotional change was unclear. We conducted a multilevel linear regression to examine how the level of client emotional expression changed across silence length, and an ANOVA to examine the variability of client emotional expression across silence lengths. Results of both analyses indicated that as silence length increased, emotional expression largely remained the same. Broadly, we demonstrated a weak connection between silence length and emotional expression, indicating no persuasive evidence that silence leads to client emotional processing and expression.     

The Lord's Prayer in Eastern Spirituality

This article first speaks briefly of prayer in general and its essence; and then discusses various kinds of prayer in the Orthodox Christian tradition, chief among which is personal prayer made in private, and liturgical prayer celebrated in church. There is also spontaneous prayer, less favored in Orthodoxy, where the model prayer is the Lord's Prayer. The main part of the article examines the petitions that make up the Lord's Prayer and the interpretation given to them by patristic writers. It concludes by affirming the unique character of the prayer, which can be regarded as the perfect summary of the Christian message.     

Shame and Silence

Abstract

Samantha Vice’s proposal on how to live in ‘this strange place’ of contemporary South Africa, includes an appeal to the concepts of shame and silence. In this paper, I use Emmanuel Levinas and Giorgio Agamben to move the discussion of shame from a moral to an existential question. The issue is not about how one should feel, but about the kind of self that whiteness in South Africa makes possible today. Shame desubjectifies. Vice’s recommendation of silence is then taken as witnessing/listening, which I argue grounds the possibility of a recovery of the self.     

The Use of Prayer in the Management of Pain: A Systematic Review

The availability of safe and effective non-pharmacological therapies for pain is an important unmet medical need. Prayer may be considered as an effective adjunctive therapy for pain and this systematic review aims to clarify this association. Pertinent databases were searched for English language publications, dated 2000–2019. Inclusion criteria involved prayer as an on-site or personal intervention and at least one pre-specified pain-related outcome. We evaluated 411 abstracts. Nine studies met criteria. Active prayer to God emerged as a preferred beneficial intervention for religious patients undergoing surgery or a painful procedure. Prayer effect does not seem to be opioid mediated. Improved trial design will facilitate the study of prayer as an adjuvant therapy for pain.

     

Perceptual coherence of speech: stability of silence-cued stop consonants

A series of experiments was conducted to examine the perceptual stability of stop consonants cued by silence alone, as when [s] + silence + [laet] is perceived as splat. Following a replication of this perceptual integration phenomenon (Experiment 1), attempts were made to block it by instructing subjects to disregard the initial [s] and to focus instead on the onset of the following signal, which was varied from [plaet] to [laet]. However, these instructions had little effect at short silence durations (Experiment 2), and they reduced stop percepts for only 2 subjects at longer silence durations (Experiment 3). That is, subjects were generally unable to voluntarily dissociate the [s] noise from the following signal and thus to perceive the silent interval as silence rather than as a carrier of phonetic information. A low-uncertainty paradigm facilitated the task somewhat (Experiment 4). However, when the [s] frication was replaced with broadband noise (Experiment 5), listeners had no trouble at all in the selective-attention task, except at very short silence durations (less than 40 ms). This last finding suggests that, except for the shortest durations, the effect of silence on phonetic perception does not arise at the level of psychoacoustic stimulus interactions. Rather, the results support the hypothesis that perceptual integration of speech components, including silence, is a largely obligatory perceptual function driven by the listener's tacit knowledge of phonetic regularities.     

Religion and Psychology: New Research. Edited by Sylvan D. Ambrose. New York: Nova Science, 2006. xi + 311 pp. $79.00 hardcover

The possible moderating functions of prayer duration and belief in prayer on the prayer–well-being relation were examined. A multidimensional self-report measure of prayer including five types of prayer—Supplication, Thanksgiving, Adoration, Confession, and Reception—as well as measures of prayer duration, belief in prayer, and life satisfaction were used. On the basis of a sample of 345 Jewish religious pray-ers living in Israel it was found that for men all five types of prayer were directly related to life satisfaction. No moderating effects were found. In contrast, for women, although no significant direct relations were found between prayer type and life satisfaction, prayer duration moderated the relation between Supplication, Confession, and Reception with life satisfaction. In addition, significant three-way interactions (Prayer Type × Prayer Duration × Prayer Belief) were found for all five types of prayer. For women with a high belief in prayer, a positive prayer—well-being relation emerged when prayer duration was long, and a negative prayer—well-being relation emerged when prayer duration was short. In contrast, for women with a low belief in prayer, the opposite pattern emerged; lengthy prayer was negatively related to well-being, whereas short prayer was positively related to well-being. An explanation based on self-attributions of prayer sincerity is offered.     

Travail cognitivo-émotionnel chez des patients en soins palliatifs : étude du vécu,de la réminiscence et du silence

IntroductionFacing one's own mortality allows one to be more aware of one's life history, to make the link between one's different personal experiences and to open up to introspection, be it in exchange or in silence.ObjectiveTo collect the cognitive-emotional work taking place in palliative care patients and to appreciate the use and contribution of reminiscence as well as the place of silence in the discourse.MethodOur study is cross-sectional, exploratory and qualitative. The interviews were conducted by the psychologist using an interview guide previously defined for this study. Non-verbal elements were taken into account following the interview. Nine patients, exclusively women, with an average age of 71 years, suffering from cancer, hospitalized and who were told that their curative treatments were over, were included.FindingsAfter a thematic analysis, it appears that the patients’ concerns are mainly focused on their relationship with their end of life and death. We observe a majority of negative reminiscences as well as a diversity in their contributions. The main function of silence is emotional when the themes of the end of life and illness are discussed.ConclusionIt seems necessary to support questions about the end of life and the reminiscences that may be activated following the proximity of death. Recognition of the different types of silence must also be part of the listening skills of professionals.     

Centering Prayer as a Healing Response to Everyday Stress: A Psychological and Spiritual Process

Eastern forms of meditation have been widely studied for their effectiveness in stress management (Walsh and Shapiro American Psychologist 61:227–239, 2006). Yet few empirical studies have been conducted on the health effects of Judeo-Christian contemplative prayer practices. This study contributes to research in this underdeveloped area by exploring the outcome of a contemporary form of Christian meditation called Centering Prayer (Keating 1986) on everyday stress and on Christians’ approach to communicating with God. The impact of 10 weekly 2-hour group sessions and individual practice of Centering Prayer 2-times daily by 15 Roman Catholic congregants was hypothesized to decrease participants’ stress and increase their collaborative relationship with God (Pargament et al. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 27:90–104, 1988). Pre-post quantitative and qualitative data on Centering Prayer versus comparison groups supported the hypothesis.     

Understanding Body Language

The article details the significance of nonverbal communication or body language for the counselor in interview situations. The article gives background material of the research done in the area of nonverbal communication and quotes extensively from the leaders in the field. The article includes illustrations of messages sent by arm and hand gestures, feet movements, eye movements, silence, posture, appearance, the use of time and space, and the grouping of individuals. The article also includes a discussion of kinesics, the study of body movements; proxemics, the study of the use of personal space; and culture as a guiding factor in body language.