Clinical pastoral education and social structures

Since the contemporary church no longer reflects the simple and clear attitudes to social structure evident in the creeds and confessions, is it possible for clinical pastoral education (CPE) and the insights and understandings it represents to contribute to the quest for new structures? In the areas of motivation, power, confrontation, and conflict management, the possibility for contribution seems real. At the same time, CPE must take social structures more seriously and broaden its understanding of the minister's role.     

Meditation and the unconscious

This paper begins by describing the practice of meditation. It goes on to discuss George Kelly's view of the unconscious and uses meditation to illustrate this view. Some similarities between meditation and psychotherapy are also described within their mainly Kellian perspective. It is concluded, inter alia, that meditation practice sensitizes the world within, which includes subverbal and unconscious material. With increased adeptness its practice may lead to the temporary suspension of our habitual, dualistic, cognitive construing, and thus facilitate the experience of no-thought, tranquility and a sense of oneness or unity. In the long-term, meditation practice may elaborate both subverbal and transverbal construing.     

Child-care structure-->process-->outcome: direct and indirect effects of child-care quality on young children's development

With data from the NICHD Study of Early Child Care, we used structural equation modeling to test paths from structural indicators of child-care quality, specifically caregiver training and child-staff ratio, through a process indicator to child outcomes. There were three main findings: (a) Quality of maternal caregiving was the strongest predictor of cognitive competence, as well as caregivers' ratings of social competence; (b) quality of nonmaternal caregiving was associated with cognitive competence and caregivers' ratings of social competence; and (c) there was a mediated path from both caregiver training and child-staff ratio through quality of nonmaternal caregiving to cognitive competence, as well as to caregivers' ratings of social competence, that was not accounted for entirely by family variables. These findings provide empirical support for policies that improve state regulations for caregiver training and child-staff ratios.     

Taxonomic Examination of ADHD and Conduct Problem Comorbidity in Elementary School Children Using Cluster Analyses

Cluster analysis was used to investigate the classification of comorbid Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) +Conduct Problems (CP). Teachers rated 1394 elementary school children on symptoms of inattention, hyperactivity/impulsivity, opposition, and conduct problems using the ADS-IV behavior-rating scale. Results suggested that a seven-cluster solution, including two distinct comorbid clusters, was the most appropriate method of classifying children according to behavioral symptoms. A one-way MANOVA showed that overall cluster profiles differed significantly from each other, whereas one-way ANOVAs indicated that clusters differed on age and symptom scores. Chi-square analyses indicated that clusters differed on gender. Post hoc analyses and effect sizes calculations revealed that the comorbid clusters differed from each other and from their single-disorder counterparts on some variables, but not on all. These results provide support for an additive conceptualisation of ADHD +CP.     

Pathways to reading: the role of oral language in the transition to reading

What is the role of oral language in reading competence during the transition to school? Is oral language in preschool best conceptualized as vocabulary knowledge or as more comprehensive language including grammar, vocabulary, and semantics? These questions were examined longitudinally using 1,137 children from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development. Children were followed from age 3 through 3rd grade, and the results suggest that oral language conceptualized broadly plays both a direct and an indirect role in word recognition during the transition to school and serves as a better foundation for early reading skill than does vocabulary alone. Implications of these findings are discussed in terms of both theoretical models of early reading and practical implications for policy and assessment.     

Spirituality and the Successful Aging of Older Latinos

Using face‐to‐face interviews and a self‐report questionnaire, the authors investigated the contributions of spirituality and religiosity to the well‐being and levels of depression of 60 Latino adults ages 50 to 84 after controlling for age, health, education, and economic strain. Religiosity and spirituality predicted well‐being; however, increases in well‐being were associated with lower levels of externalizing religiosity and higher levels of spirituality. Economic strain overshadowed all other variables in predicting depression. Thus, 2 factors predicted the psychological health of Latino elders: Economic strain predicted depression, and spiritual health predicted well‐being. Several suggestions for implementing the findings are presented.     

Verelendung psychotherapeutischer Rahmenbedingungen

Relationships of dependence in psychotherapeutic training, its high training costs and the taboo against discussing money and power, result in therapists being unable to adequately deal with their counter-transference with the particularly rich and powerful and vice versa with poor patients. In this article characteristic types of counter-transference and its associated entanglements are discussed. Psychotherapy does not take place beyond social developments nor is it able to compensate for their consequences especially in poor, badly educated and disintegrated patients. The author states that psychotherapy cannot be a substitute for a failed social, family, migration or educational policy.