What is spiritual? What is spiritual suffering?

The author offers definitions for "spiritual" and for "spiritual suffering," suggesting that human spiritual needs include Love, Faith, Hope, Virtue, and Beauty. Spiritual suffering is experienced when these needs are unfulfilled. Spiritual care involves assisting in the fulfillment of these needs. He considers the constant movement between spiritual needs and fulfillments, encouraging use of fluid (not static) assessment methods using "spiritual spectra." As a model, this outline of basic spiritual needs may serve as the foundation for many current spiritual assessment tools.     

Unimodal and crossmodal effects of endogenous attention to visual and auditory motion

Three experiments were conducted examining unimodal and crossmodal effects of attention to motion. Horizontally moving sounds and dot patterns were presented and participants’ task was to discriminate their motion speed or whether they were presented with a brief gap. In Experiments 1 and 2, stimuli of one modality and of one direction were presented with a higher probability ( p = .7) than other stimuli. Sounds and dot patterns moving in the expected direction were discriminated faster than stimuli moving in the unexpected direction. In Experiment 3, participants had to respond only to stimuli moving in one direction within the primary modality, but to all stimuli regardless of their direction within the rarer secondary modality. Stimuli of the secondary modality moving in the attended direction were discriminated faster than were oppositely moving stimuli. Results suggest that attending to the direction of motion affects perception within vision and audition, but also across modalities.     

Development of the acquisition and control of action-effect associations

Voluntary action is anticipatory and, hence, must depend on associations between actions and their perceivable effects. We studied the acquisition of action-effect associations in 4-5-vs. 7-year-old children. Children carried out key-pressing actions that were arranged to produce particular auditory effects. In a subsequent test phase, children were to press keys in response to the previous effect sounds, with the sound-key mapping being either consistent or inconsistent with previous key-sound practice. As the processes underlying voluntary action controls are known to significantly improve between 4 and 7 years of age, it was expected that younger children were more prone to automatic effects of acquired sound-key associations. This hypothesis was confirmed, but reaction times and accuracy measures showed different and dissociable patterns. Four-year-olds but not 7-year-olds were more likely to commit an error--i.e., to perform a sound-compatible rather than the correct action--if the sound-key mapping was inconsistent with previous practice. This effect strongly depended on previous practice, suggesting that it reflects long-term learning. In contrast, reaction time effects of mapping consistency did not depend on previous experience but only on the consistency between stimulus and action effect in the present task. Taken altogether, the results suggest that children acquire response-effect associations automatically and that younger children are more likely to suffer from frequent goal neglect; i.e., they tend to forget the current action goal, so that their behavior is dominated by automatic, stimulus-triggered response tendencies.     

Peripheral cuing by abrupt-onset cues: the influence of color in S-R corresponding conditions

Research on visuospatial attention indicates that a peripheral abrupt-onset cue at target position (valid condition) facilitates processing of the target, whereas a cue at another position interferes. This validity effect seems to be contingent on a similarity of the cue's color to the set of target colors (cf. J. Exp. Psychol.: Human Percep. Perform. 18 (1992) 1030). In Experiments 1-3, we confirm this contingency with cues that have the potential to activate responses. Thus, attentional capture and response capture are apparently governed by the same principle. In Experiment 2, it is demonstrated that color priming is not responsible for the contingency. In Experiment 3, it is shown that a more efficient reallocation of attention after color-dissimilar cues than after color-similar cues might contribute to the contingency.     

Adjustment to chronic low back pain--the relative influence of fear-avoidance beliefs, catastrophizing, and appraisals of control

The present study investigated the relative extent to which patients' adjustment to chronic low back pain (CLBP) was influenced by their fear-avoidance beliefs, their tendency to catastrophize, and their appraisals of control. Eighty-three CLBP patients completed a series of self-report measures before participating in a physical therapist-led intervention. Hierarchical multiple regression analyses revealed that patients' perceptions of their ability to decrease pain explained a small, but statistically significant, proportion of the variance in pain intensity. In addition, patients' levels of catastrophizing, as well as their fear-avoidance beliefs about both work and physical activity, were independently associated with levels of disability. Interestingly, however, when exploring the relative predictive utility of these three psychological factors, it became evident that fear-avoidance beliefs about physical activity (FABs-PA) were the only significant predictor of patients' disability. Specifically, those patients who exhibited higher levels of FABs-PA tended to report greater levels of disability, even after adjusting for age, sex and pain intensity.     

Validity of the Eating Disorder Examination Questionnaire (EDE-Q) in screening for eating disorders in community samples

In order to examine the concurrent and criterion validity of the questionnaire version of the Eating Disorders Examination (EDE-Q), self-report and interview formats were administered to a community sample of women aged 18-45 (n = 208). Correlations between EDE-Q and EDE subscales ranged from 0.68 for Eating Concern to 0.78 for Shape Concern. Scores on the EDE-Q were significantly higher than those of the EDE for all subscales, with the mean difference ranging from 0.25 for Restraint to 0.85 for Shape Concern. Frequency of both objective bulimic episodes (OBEs) and subjective bulimic episodes (SBEs) was significantly correlated between measures. Chance-corrected agreement between EDE-Q and EDE ratings of the presence of OBEs was fair, while that for SBEs was poor. Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis, based on a sample of 13 cases, indicated that a score of 2.3 on the global scale of the EDE-Q in conjunction with the occurrence of any OBEs and/or use of exercise as a means of weight control, yielded optimal validity coefficients (sensitivity = 0.83, specificity = 0.96, positive predictive value = 0.56). A stepwise discriminant function analysis yielded eight EDE-Q items which best distinguished cases from non-cases, including frequency of OBEs, use of exercise as a means of weight control, use of self-induced vomiting, use of laxatives and guilt about eating. The EDE-Q has good concurrent validity and acceptable criterion validity. The measure appears well-suited to use in prospective epidemiological studies.     

Change after long-term psychoanalytic psychotherapy

Psychoanalytic psychotherapy in clinical practice is traditionally a long-term treatment conducted by well-trained psychotherapists. However, very few studies have been published that evaluate the effects of such treatment. To redress this lack of studies, 55 individuals selected for long-term psychoanalytic psychotherapy (average, 3 years) were invited to participate in a naturalistic study. The psychotherapists had a mean of 15 years of professional experience. The 36 patients who completed psychotherapy manifested a substantial reduction in symptomatic suffering and decreased levels of character pathology, as measured by the Karolinska Psychodynamic Profile (KAPP) and the Karolinska Scales of Personality. Generally, such changes were not found in the individuals who did not engage in treatment. In the therapy group, improvements were found on eight KAPP subscales defining different aspects of character: Intimacy and Reciprocity, Frustration Tolerance, Regression in the Service of the Ego, Coping with Aggressive Affects, Conceptions of Bodily Appearance and their Significance for Self-esteem, Sexual Function, Sexual Satisfaction, and Personality Organization. The results indicate that individuals who engaged in psychotherapy improved their capacity to handle crucial aspects of life and reduced their symptomatic suffering.     

Psychological research online: report of Board of Scientific Affairs' Advisory Group on the Conduct of Research on the Internet

As the Internet has changed communication, commerce, and the distribution of information, so too it is changing psychological research. Psychologists can observe new or rare phenomena online and can do research on traditional psychological topics more efficiently, enabling them to expand the scale and scope of their research. Yet these opportunities entail risk both to research quality and to human subjects. Internet research is inherently no more risky than traditional observational, survey, or experimental methods. Yet the risks and safeguards against them will differ from those characterizing traditional research and will themselves change over time. This article describes some benefits and challenges of conducting psychological research via the Internet and offers recommendations to both researchers and institutional review boards for dealing with them. ((c) 2004 APA, all rights reserved)     

The relationship between acute stress disorder and posttraumatic stress disorder in severely injured trauma survivors

This prospective longitudinal study was designed to investigate the relationship between acute stress disorder (ASD) and the subsequent development of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in a population of severely injured hospitalised trauma survivors. Symptoms of ASD were assessed just prior to discharge in 307 consecutive admissions to a Level 1 Trauma Centre, with PTSD assessments completed at 3 and 12 months post-injury. A well-established structured clinical interview was adopted for both assessments. Only 1% of the sample met criteria for an ASD diagnosis (at a mean of 8 days post-injury), while the incidence of PTSD was 9% at 3 months and 10% at 12 months. Although all ASD symptom clusters contributed to the prediction of subsequent PTSD severity, logistic regression indicated that only re-experiencing and arousal predicted a categorical PTSD diagnosis. The dissociative symptoms that form the core of ASD were rarely endorsed and showed high specificity but low sensitivity, resulting in a high proportion of false negative diagnoses. Reducing the number of dissociative symptoms required for a diagnosis ameliorated, but did not resolve, the problem. In this particular population, the low sensitivity of the ASD diagnosis renders it a poor screening test for use in identifying high risk individuals for early intervention and prevention strategies.