Everyday conceptions of modesty: a prototype analysis

Good theoretical definitions of psychological phenomena not only are rigorously formulated but also provide ample conceptual coverage. To assess the latter, we empirically surveyed everyday conceptions of modesty in a combined U.S./U.K. sample. In Study 1, participants freely generated multiple exemplars of modesty that judges subsequently sorted into superordinate categories. Exemplar frequency and priority served, respectively, as primary and secondary indices of category prototypicality that enabled central, peripheral, and marginal clusters to be identified. Follow-up studies then confirmed the ordinal prototypicality of these clusters with the aid of both explicit (Studies 2 and 3) and implicit (Study 3) methodologies. Modest people emerged centrally as humble, shy, solicitous, and not boastful and peripherally as honest, likeable, not arrogant, attention-avoiding, plain, and gracious. Everyday conceptions of modesty also spanned both mind and behavior, emphasized agreeableness and introversion, and predictably incorporated an element of humility.     

J. Robert Oppenheimer: A Faith Development Portrait

J. Robert Oppenheimer was among the most important and enigmatic figures in 20th century science. He is best known for successfully directing the Manhattan Project that produced the first atomic bombs that were dropped on Japan at the end of World War II. Subsequently, he became a scientist and statesman who advised the United States government in the areas of atomic weapons development and public policy. He later became subject to an investigation in 1954 into his previous political affiliations and his personal behavior that ended in the revoking of his security clearance. This essay seeks to chronicle Oppenheimer’s coming of age as a public intellectual with a view toward his own psychological history and most especially in relationship to the stages of faith development articulated by James Fowler and colleagues. Moreover, though not conventionally religious, Oppenheimer’s life and thought were permeated with themes and ideas of a religious and ethical nature that shaped his adult character and informed his view of the world. This essay was originally presented at The Richardson History of Psychiatry Research Seminar at Weill Cornell Medical College.     

William James’ <Emphasis Type="Italic">The Varieties of Religious Experience</Emphasis> Revisited

This essay addresses the familial, religious, and cultural context for the writing and presentation of William James’ classic work The Varieties of Religious Experience. The essay emphasizes the importance of the impact of Henry James, Senior, upon his son. This relationship along with a severe cardiac condition contributed to James’ taking on and carrying through with his exploration of religious experience. The article explores The Varieties and concludes with a discussion of the importance of James’ use of narrative to the study of mind–body medicine. This paper was originally presented at the Richardson Research Seminar in the History of Psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College.     

Creating physically accurate visual stimuli for free: Spectral rendering with RADIANCE

Visual psychophysicists, who study object, color, and light perception, have a demand for software that produces complex but, at the same time, physically accurate stimuli for their experiments. The number of computer graphic packages that simulate the physical interaction of light and surfaces is limited, and mostly they require the purchase of a license. RADIANCE (Ward, 1994), however, is freely available and popular in the visual perception community, making it a prime candidate. We have shown previously that RADIANCE's simulation accuracy is greatly improved when color is coded by spectra, rather than by the originally envisaged RGB triplets (Ruppertsberg & Bloj, 2006). Here, we present a method for spectral rendering with RADIANCE to generate hyperspectral images that can be converted to XYZ images (CIE 1931 system) and then to machine-dependent RGB images. Generating XYZ stimuli has the added advantage of making stimulus images independent of display devices and, thereby, facilitating the process of reproducing results across different labs. Materials associated with this article may be downloaded from www.psychonomic.org.     

Personality change at the intersection of autonomic arousal and stress

We hypothesized that personality change in children can be predicted by the interaction of family risk with susceptibility to autonomic arousal and that children characterized by both high-risk families and highly reactive autonomic nervous systems tend to show maladaptive change. This hypothesis was tested in a 6-year longitudinal study in which personality-type prototypicality, problem behavior, and negative emotional intensity were measured at 2-year intervals. The results indicated that children who both had exaggerated skin conductance responses (a measure of autonomic reactivity) and were living in families with multiple risk factors were most likely to develop an undercontrolled personality type and to exhibit increases in problem behavior and negative emotional intensity. The implications of the results for understanding personality change are discussed.     

Biography: A Brief History.

Journal of Religion and Health -     

What I Was Doing Versus What I Did: Verb Aspect Influences Memory and Future Actions

ABSTRACT— This research examined whether describing past actions as ongoing using the imperfective aspect (rather than describing them as completed using the perfective aspect) promotes memory for action-relevant knowledge and reenactment of these actions in a future context. In Experiment 1 , participants who used the imperfective aspect to describe their strategy on a prior interpersonal task were more likely to use this strategy on a later task than were participants who used the perfective aspect to describe their prior strategy. Experiment 2 demonstrated that describing behaviors on a task using the imperfective rather than the perfective aspect increased willingness to resume that task by improving memory for task contents. The last two experiments showed that the effects of the imperfective aspect on memory decayed over time and that the imperfective aspect facilitated performance of a future behavior only when the described past behavior was relevant to the future behavior. Thus, the effects of aspect are moderated by memory decay and are behavior-specific.     

Contemplation: Beyond and Behind

This essay seeks to explore contemplation as it features in Christian theology and philosophy, both ancient and modern. Contemplation, in ancient philosophy, is transformed in Christian theology; nonetheless, it has the structure of what Jean Wahl calls ‘transascendance’, a rising to the heights. Although contemplation remains as a theme in modern Christian theology, it drops out in modern philosophy: that is, post-Renaissance philosophy. And yet it returns, both in analytic and continental philosophy, in the twentieth century. It returns, however, in the mode of ‘transdescendance’: by way of conditions of possibility, and fundamental orientations.     

Mental Health Risk and Social Ecological Variables Associated with Educational Attainment for Gulf War Veterans: Implications for Veterans Returning to Civilian Life

This study examines how post-secondary educational attainment among young veterans of the first gulf war affects their mental health status. The all-volunteer military attracts recruits by offering them veterans’ educational benefits. Education should help veterans adjust to civilian life. Few studies have shown whether education following military service helps improve veterans’ mental health, however. Viewing resiliency, life span and life course, and social geography theories through the lens of social ecology, it is hypothesized that selected contextual factors in the personal, interpersonal, and organizational domains could mediate or moderate the relationship between education and veterans’ mental health. Informational social networks showed an association with obtaining mental illness treatment. Recent treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) showed an association with use of veterans’ educational benefits. Residing with a small nuclear family in conjunction with having higher levels of health and educational benefits and a higher family income was associated with higher educational attainment.     

Community vs. Clinic-Based Modular Treatment of Children with Early-Onset ODD or CD: A Clinical Trial with 3-Year Follow-Up

This study examines the treatment outcomes of 139, 6–11 year-old, clinically referred boys and girls diagnosed with Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD) or Conduct Disorder (CD) who were randomly assigned to a modular-based treatment protocol that was applied by research study clinicians either in the community (COMM) or a clinic office (CLINIC). To examine normative comparisons, a matched sample of 69 healthy control children was included. Multiple informants completed diagnostic interviews and self-reports at six assessment timepoints (pretreatment to 3-year follow-up) to evaluate changes in the child’s behavioral and emotional problems, psychopathic features, functional impairment, diagnostic status, and service involvement. Using HLM and logistic regression models, COMM and CLINIC showed significant and comparable improvements on all outcomes. By 3-year follow-up, 36% of COMM and 47% of CLINIC patients no longer met criteria for either ODD or CD, and 48% and 57% of the children in these two respective conditions had levels of parent-rated externalizing behavior problems in the normal range. We discuss the nature and implications of these novel findings regarding the role of treatment context or setting for the treatment and long-term outcome of behavior disorders. This study was supported by grants to the first author from the National Institute of Mental Health (MH 57727) and to the second author by the National Institute of Nursing Research (NR 07615). The fourth author was supported by grant K01 MH078039 from the National Institute of Mental Health. The authors acknowledge the research and clinical staff of the Resources to Enhance the Adjustment of Children (REACH) program, and Drs. David Brent, Tammy Chung, William Gardner, John Lochman, and Wayne Osgood. Reprints may be obtained from Dr. Kolko, WPIC, 3811 O’Hara St., Pittsburgh, PA 15213.