Assessing the Role of Spirituality in Coping Among African Americans Diagnosed with Cancer

Spirituality plays an important role in cancer coping among African Americans. The purpose of this study was to report on the initial psychometric properties of instruments specific to the cancer context, assessing the role of spirituality in coping. Items were developed based on a theoretical model of spirituality and qualitative patient interviews. The instruments reflected connections to self, others, God, and the world. One hundred African American cancer survivors completed the instruments by telephone. The instruments showed adequate internal reliability, mixed convergent validity, discriminant validity, and interpretable factor structures.     

Content Analyses of the Beliefs of Academic Procrastinators

Although relevant nomothetically-based personality literature has made great advances in recent years correlating traits to measures of procrastination, little is known about the specific irrational beliefs of procrastinators, especially when they are actively avoiding tasks or situations. Based on theories from Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT), it was hypothesized that compared to non-procrastinators, college student academic procrastinators would show greater self depreciation, greater other depreciation, greater life condition depreciation, and a lower frustration tolerance. Academic procrastination was operationally defined by quartile distributions on two self- report measures and three classroom-based assignments. Procrastinators and non-procrastinating students were given instructions to write approximately 500 words about their thoughts and feelings while they were in the process of actively putting off a specific, real event. While actually procrastinating, students logged on to a web site and made text entries describing what was going through their minds. Data were analyzed with the Psychiatric Content and Diagnosis Program Version 3 (PCAD 3; Gottschalk and Bechtel in Psychiatric content and diagnosis: the PCAD 3. GB Software, Brighton, MI, 2007). Procrastinators and non-procrastinators differed on relevant PCAD scales, supporting the hypotheses derived from REBT theory. Treatment implications and directions for future research are discussed.     

Conflicting perspectives mediate the relation between parents’ and preschoolers’ self-referent mental state talk during collaboration

We examined the relations between the referent of parents and preschoolers’ mental state talk during a collaborative puzzle-solving task (N = 146 dyads; n = 81 3-year-olds, n = 65 4-year-olds). The results showed that parents’ references to their own knowledge and beliefs (self-referent cognitive talk), and references to their child’s knowledge and beliefs (child-referent cognitive talk) were both related to children’s (primarily self-referent) cognitive talk. We then tested whether any of the observed relations could be explained by the presence of conflicting perspectives within the collaborative interaction. Mediational analyses revealed that conflicting perspectives mediated the positive relation between parents’ production of self-referent cognitive talk and child cognitive talk. By contrast, the positive relation between parents’ production of child-referent cognitive talk and child cognitive talk did not depend on the presence of this type of conflict. These findings highlight an important mechanism through which parents’ references to their own mind might promote children’s developing mental state talk in collaborative contexts.