Spirituality in Disability and Illness

Spirituality appears with increasing frequency in the research literature, and a paradigm involving mind-body-spirit interaction is emerging. The relationship of spirituality to disability and illness is at the center of a growing body of knowledge. A comprehensive literature review supported spirituality as coping method among individuals experiencing a variety of illnesses including hypertension, pulmonary disease, diabetes, chronic renal failure, surgery, rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, HIV/AIDS, polio and addictive illnesses. Additionally, spirituality is a resource when dealing with critical illness as well as terminal illness and end of life issues, and it is utilized by both patients, and family members. Discussion of research findings, implications for health care practice and future research is also presented.     

Common and Specific Dimensions of Self-Reported Anxiety and Depression in Adolescent Outpatients

To investigate the common and specific dimensions of anxiety and depression in adolescents, the Beck Anxiety Inventory (BAI; Beck, A. T., & Steer, R. A. Manual for the Beck Anxiety Inventory. San Antonio, TX: Psychological Corporation 1993a) and Beck Depression Inventory-II (BDI-II; Beck, A. T., Steer, R. A., & Brown, G. K. Manual for Beck Depression Inventory (2nd Ed.). San Antonio, TX: Psychological Corporation 1996) were administered to 840 adolescent (13–17 years old) outpatients who were diagnosed with various types of psychiatric disorders. A Schmid-Leiman transformation was used with the iterated-principal-factor pattern matrix of the BAI and the BDI-II loadings. The amounts of orthogonalized common variance that were explained by the one second-order (56%), one first-order depression (22%), and two first-order anxiety (22%) dimensions were comparable to those previously reported for adult psychiatric outpatients. The results were discussed as supporting the construct of negative affectivity that is proposed in L. A. Clark and Watson’s (1991) tripartite model of anxiety and depression.

Using movement and intentions to understand human activity

During perception, people segment continuous activity into discrete events. They do so in part by monitoring changes in features of an ongoing activity. Characterizing these features is important for theories of event perception and may be helpful for designing information systems. The three experiments reported here asked whether the body movements of an actor predict when viewers will perceive event boundaries. Body movements were recorded using a magnetic motion tracking system and compared with viewers’ segmentation of his activity into events. Changes in movement features were strongly associated with segmentation. This was more true for fine-grained than for coarse-grained boundaries, and was strengthened when the stimulus displays were reduced from live-action movies to simplified animations. These results suggest that movement variables play an important role in the process of segmenting activity into meaningful events, and that the influence of movement on segmentation depends on the availability of other information sources.     

Mindfulness and Emotion Regulation: The Development and Initial Validation of the Cognitive and Affective Mindfulness Scale-Revised (CAMS-R)

As interest grows in mindfulness training as a psychosocial intervention, it is increasingly important to quantify this construct to facilitate empirical investigation. The goal of the present studies was to develop a brief self-report measure of mindfulness with items that cover the breadth of the construct and that are written in everyday language. The resulting 12-item measure demonstrated acceptable internal consistency and evidence of convergent and discriminant validity with concurrent measures of mindfulness, distress, well-being, emotion-regulation, and problem-solving approaches in three samples of university students. To address potential construct contamination in two items, data are also presented on an alternate 10-item version of the measure.

Connect within to connect outside: effect of salespeople's political skill on relationship performance

Scholars have recently explored the effects of salespeople's intraorganizational relationships on salespeople's job-related outcomes. Grounded in social influence theory, we explore the effects of salespeople's intraorganizational skills on salesperson relationship performance. We empirically tested the proposed relationships using the data from a non-Western sales force working with an organization in an emerging economy. The results indicate that salespeople's political skill positively contributes to salespeople's identification with the organization and to creative performance, while strikingly, we also find that salesperson task adaptivity weakens these effects. Moreover, salespeople's identification and creative performance are positively related to customer satisfaction. These findings demonstrate that salespeople's intraorganizational relationships play a key role in enhancing customer satisfaction. In light of these results, we explore implications for marketers and academics and conclude by suggesting directions for further research.     

Accelerated lamellar disintegration in eutectoid steel

The fastest kinetics of lamellar disintegration (predicted duration of 44 min) in AISI 1080 steel is obtained with a novel approach of incomplete austenitisation-based cyclic heat treatment involving forced air cooling with an air flow rate of 8.7 m³ h^?1. A physical model for process kinetics is proposed that involves lamellar fragmentation, lamellar thickening, divorced eutectoid growth and generation of new lamellar faults in remaining cementite lamellae in each cycle. Lamellar fragmentation is accentuated with faster rate of cooling through generation of more intense lamellar faults; but divorced eutectoid growth is ceased. Accordingly, as compared to still air cooling, much faster kinetics of lamellar disintegration is obtained by forced air cooling together with the generation of much smaller submicroscopic cementite particles (containing more proportion of plate-shaped non-spheroids) in divorced eutectoid region.     

TACIT: An open-source text analysis,crawling, and interpretation tool

As human activity and interaction increasingly take place online, the digital residues of these activities provide a valuable window into a range of psychological and social processes. A great deal of progress has been made toward utilizing these opportunities; however, the complexity of managing and analyzing the quantities of data currently available has limited both the types of analysis used and the number of researchers able to make use of these data. Although fields such as computer science have developed a range of techniques and methods for handling these difficulties, making use of those tools has often required specialized knowledge and programming experience. The Text Analysis, Crawling, and Interpretation Tool (TACIT) is designed to bridge this gap by providing an intuitive tool and interface for making use of state-of-the-art methods in text analysis and large-scale data management. Furthermore, TACIT is implemented as an open, extensible, plugin-driven architecture, which will allow other researchers to extend and expand these capabilities as new methods become available.     

Mean Beck Depression Inventory-II total scores by type of bipolar episode

The 1996 Beck Depression Inventory-II was administered to 120 outpatients diagnosed with DSM-IV-TR bipolar I disorders who had recently experienced manic, mixed, or depressed episodes. A focused contrast supported the hypothesis that the mean Beck-II total score for the 40 patients with depressed episodes (M=34.1, SD = 13.2) was higher than the mean Beck-II total score for the 40 patients with mixed episodes (M=25.9, SD= 13.6) which was, in turn, higher than the mean Beck-II total score for the 40 patients with manic episodes (M= 11.7, SD=7.8, p<.001). The Beck Depression Inventory-II appears to be useful for measuring self-reported depression in patients with bipolar I disorders.