In Concert and Alone: Divorce and Congregational Experience

Sociologists have paid little attention to the experience of divorce in religious congregations. Numerous quantitative studies suggest that religion can provide health and wellness during such life disruptions, but we know little about the social and individual processes that might foster these benefits. I address this gap in the literature drawing from data collected in a four‐year ethnographic study of divorce and ending life partnerships across six religious traditions. I analyze the experiences of 41 individuals who ended life partnerships while active in their congregations. Despite intense points of communal connection through ritual, respondents named largely private strategies for settling heightened emotion, physical and psychological pain, and creating a new self. Permeating their communal experiences was a marked sense of aloneness, resulting from individual shame and congregational silence, as well as their understanding of divorce‐work as ultimately private self‐work.     

How Resources (or Lack Thereof) Influence Advice Seeking on Psychological Well-being and Marital Risk: Testing Pathways of the Lack of Financial Stability,Support, and Strain

Using the model of conservation of resources (Hobfoll in The ecology of stress. Hempshire, New York, 1988; Hobfoll in Am Psychol 44:513–524, 1989; Hobfoll in Stress, culture, and community: the psychology and philosophy of stress. Plenum, New York, 1998; Hobfoll in Appl Psychol Int Rev 50:337–421, 2001), we explore how advice seeking, as influenced by lack of financial stability and support and strain from others (i.e., spouse, friends, and family) predicts psychological well-being and marital risk. Married and committed individuals (n = 1,798) were drawn from a nationally representative sample, the MIDUS. We found that advice seeking predicted psychological well-being and marital risk, but that the relationships depended on the availability of resources (i.e., financial stability, support, strain) and from whom support or strain was received. For example, for individuals lacking financial stability, marital risk decreased with advice seeking for those reporting high support from friends, whereas for individuals with financial stability, marital risk increased with advice seeking for those reporting high support from friends. We explain how understanding advice seeking and its outcomes must be considered within the context of available resources (or lack thereof).     

“But I Like My Body”: Positive body image characteristics and a holistic model for young-adult women

Extant body image research has provided a rich understanding of negative body image but a rather underdeveloped depiction of positive body image. Thus, this study used Grounded Theory to analyze interviews from 15 college women classified as having positive body image and five body image experts. Many characteristics of positive body image emerged, including appreciating the unique beauty and functionality of their body, filtering information (e.g., appearance commentary, media ideals) in a body-protective manner, defining beauty broadly, and highlighting their body's assets while minimizing perceived imperfections. A holistic model emerged: when women processed mostly positive and rejected negative source information, their body investment decreased and body evaluation became more positive, illustrating the fluidity of body image. Women reciprocally influenced these sources (e.g., mentoring others to love their bodies, surrounding themselves with others who promote body acceptance, taking care of their health), which, in turn, promoted increased positive source information.     

Creating a Mentally Healthy Community Through the Use of Behavioral Health Indicators

Recent decades have seen the development of robust systems of community health indicators, but those indicator sets tend to have few indicators related to behavioral health. Gauging community behavioral health can be complex, but given the interconnectedness of health and behavioral health and the high social and financial cost of unaddressed behavioral health needs, it is essential to develop meaningful indicators. A community-based participatory research project in Austin, Texas developed behavioral health indicators based on a review of social indicators movements across the globe, existing sets of proposed key indicators of mental health and mental illness, and ongoing community initiatives in Austin relevant to behavioral health. The community behavioral health indicators have been refined through the challenging process of implementing them in the face of competing efforts and imprecise communication about their use. While indicators should always be adapted to suit local conditions, this indicator set should provide a good starting point for researchers and communities to assess and improve the behavioral health of their community.     

Empirically derived ability-achievement subtypes in a clinical sample.

The purpose of the present study was to identify reliable and clinically meaningful patterns of ability and achievement using the WISC-III and WIAT. Cluster analysis was used to group the 182 WISC-III and WIAT profiles (10 WISC-III subtests and 4 WIAT subtests) of children between the ages of 9 and 14 years. Theoretical and empirical considerations were used to identify a cluster solution, which involved comparison of several five-, six- and eight-cluster solutions. A five-cluster solution was selected as being representative of the data, which was well replicated across three hierarchical clustering methods (i.e., complete linkage, average linkage-within groups, and average linkage-between groups (UPGMA)). The clusters were labeled based on their most salient characteristics, which included a group of predominantly low ability and achievement, a group demonstrating a pattern of verbal processing deficits, a group demonstrating a pattern of visual spatial/processing speed deficits, a group with low ability and achievement with average processing speed, and a group with deficits consistent with an ACID pattern. The external validity of the five subtypes was assessed through an evaluation of the relationship between cluster membership and neuropsychological test data. Most predictions regarding neuropsychological performance were supported by the data, providing further evidence of the validity of the five-cluster solution. Clinical implications of the ability-achievement typology and suggestions for future research are discussed.     

Agency and observation in knowledge of one's own thinking

This essay addresses the question how we know our conscious thinking. Conscious thinking typically takes the form of a series of discrete episodes that constitute a complex cognitive activity. We must distinguish the discrete episodes of thinking in which a particular content is represented in phenomenal consciousness and is present “before the mind's eye” from the extended activities of which these episodes form a part. The extended activities are themselves contentful and we have first‐person access to them. But because their content is not represented in phenomenal consciousness, this access cannot be broadly observational. Instead, I argue, it is agential. Furthermore, that extended activities are intentional explains the possibility of a nonobservational form of introspective access to the discrete episodes in consciousness.     

Going beyond the evidence: abstract laws and preschoolers' responses to anomalous data

Given minimal evidence about novel objects, children might learn only relationships among the specific entities, or they might make a more abstract inference, positing classes of entities and the relations that hold among those classes. Here we show that preschoolers (mean: 57 months) can use sparse data about perceptually unique objects to infer abstract physical causal laws. These newly inferred abstract laws were robust to potentially anomalous evidence; in the face of apparent counter-evidence, children (correctly) posited the existence of an unobserved object rather than revise the abstract laws. This suggests that children's ability to learn robust, abstract principles does not depend on extensive prior experience but can occur rapidly, on-line, and in tandem with inferences about specific relations.     

Conflicts of interest: The implications of roadside advertising for driver attention

There is growing concern that roadside advertising presents a real risk to driving safety, with conservative estimates putting external distractors responsible for up to 10% of all road traffic accidents. In this report, we present a simulator study quantifying the effects of billboards on driver attention, mental workload and performance in Urban, Motorway and Rural environments. The results demonstrate that roadside advertising has clear adverse effects on lateral control and driver attention, in terms of mental workload. Whilst the methodological limitations of the study are acknowledged, the overriding conclusion is that prudence should be exercised when authorising or placing roadside advertising. The findings are discussed with respect to governmental policy and guidelines.     

Competitiveness across the life span: the feisty fifties

Existing theories on life span changes in confidence or motivation suggest that individuals' preferences to enter competitive situations should gradually decline with age. We examined competitive preferences in a field experiment using real financial stakes in 25- to 75-year-olds (N = 543). The critical dependent variable was whether participants chose to perform a simple mental arithmetic task either under a piece-rate payment schedule (i.e., $.25 per solved item) or a competitive payment schedule ($.50 per solved item if the overall score is better than that of a randomly selected opponent, $0 otherwise). Results revealed that competitive preferences increased across the life span until they peaked around age 50, and dropped thereafter. We also found that throughout, men had a substantially larger preference for competing than women-extending previous findings on college-aged participants. The age/gender differences in preferences were neither accounted for by actual differences in performance nor individuals' subjective confidence. This first systematic attempt to characterize age differences in competitive behavior suggests that a simple decline conception of competitiveness needs to be reconsidered.     

Differential parenting and children's behavioral problems: curvilinear associations and mother-father combined effects

In this study the associations between mothers' and fathers' differential parenting and children's oppositional and emotional problems were examined. A curvilinear relationship between differential parenting and children's outcomes was hypothesized, as well as the combined effect of mothers' and fathers' parenting. Data came from a community sample of 599 two-parent families with multiple children per family and were analyzed using a cross-classified multilevel model. Results showed that both family average parenting and differential parenting explained unique variance in children's outcomes. The curvilinear hypothesis was supported for oppositional behavior but not for emotional problems. The effects of mother and father positivity were found to be additive for both family average parenting and differential parenting, but for negativity there was evidence for multiplicative effects.