The shame of being undone by illness and the power of support through the body of Christ

This paper examines shame that arises from living with a body that has been undone by cancer or other serious illness. It draws on first-person narratives and social-scientific studies of cancer patients to explore how bodies undone by illness often cease to conform to cultural standards of health as well as gendered expectations of bodies, and how experiences of shame arise from those shifts in how sick bodies appear and perform. Analysis of narratives by and qualitative data about those who are seriously ill also reveals how the undoing of the body by illness often precipitates an undoing of one's sense of self that leads to experiences of shame over an inability to fill roles and expectations in ways that were possible in life before serious illness. The paper then utilizes biblical and theological resources to explore ways religious communities can make space for those living with serious illness to lament what it's like to be undone by illness, to hold them up amid their experiences of vulnerability through public lament and acts of accompaniment, and to affirm their worth in the eyes of God and in the body of Christ.     

Feeling safe at work: Development and validation of the Psychological Safety Inventory

Psychological safety, defined as perceptions that an individual within a team is supported and feels safe to take interpersonal risks, voice opinions, and share ideas, is vital for organizational effectiveness. However, there is no consensus on how workplace psychological safety should be measured. We developed the Psychological Safety Inventory (PSI) in response to organizational needs to accurately assess psychological safety. A 70-item version of the PSI was administered to 497 employees from Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Based on factor analytic findings, we reduced the preliminary PSI to a 30-item, five-factor scale. The PSI showed high reliability and correlated as anticipated with convergent measures. Overall, the PSI is a valid and reliable measure of workplace psychological safety.     

Understanding the language of reasoning: Cognitive,linguistic, and developmental influences

Certain linguistic structures imply speakers' beliefs about their utterances. Factuals imply that the speaker's hypothesis matches observed data; counterfactuals suggest that hypotheses and observations differ, and uncertainty implies that unclear observations make many hypotheses tenable. We examined how age(11-and 16-year-olds and college students) and syntactic structure (subordinating conjunctions, cognitive verbs, and verb modifications) affect the ability to specify the hypothetical and observational referents of expressions of factual, counterfactual, and uncertainty beliefs. There was considerable linguistic growth during adolescence. College students outperformed the younger students. Age differences were most pronounced on judging the hypothetical referents of counterfactuals and uncertainty structures. The two precollege groups often misinterpreted counterfactuals and uncertainty structures because they equated hypotheses with observations. They seldom understood that uncertainty meant that more than one hypothesis could account for observations. Verb modifications were easier to interpret than cognitive verbs, and subordinating conjunctions were hardest. Factuals were easier than counterfactuals and uncertainty structures.     

Effects of early alcohol use on adolescents' relations with peers and self-esteem: patterns over time

Strain or problem-solving models posit that deviance persists because it enhances youths' psychosocial properties and is therefore functional for adolescents. However, empirical tests of this assumption have been limited to determining whether a moderately social activity like delinquency produces time-ordered changes in self-esteem. This research examines whether a highly social activity like alcohol use improves adolescents' relations with peers and self-esteem over time. The results of a four-year panel study show that the effects of early alcohol use are limited to enhancing peer relations only among adolescents who use alcohol in order to be part of the group. Early alcohol consumption also has a delayed effect on boosting self-esteem, but this effect is restricted to youths who equate drinking with sophistication. The lack of generality of these findings and how the psychological functions of drinking might cancel these effects are discussed.     

Imaginary audience and personal fable: a brief review

A review of the literature was conducted on two aspects of adolescent egocentrism: the imaginary audience and the personal fable. Results yielded contradictory findings in most areas of the research. Reasons for these contradictions are explored and suggestions for future research presented.     

Automatic and effortful processing in Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder

Twenty-five boys with Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder and 23 age-matched controls were compared on verbal memory tasks differentiating automatic versus effortful information processing. Automatic processing tasks included the recognition of new or old words in a list and the recognition of frequency of occurrence of words in a list. Effortful tasks included free recall of lists of both related and unrelated words. Hyperactive boys did not differ from controls in automatic processing capabilities but demonstrated significantly poorer effortful processing. Intercorrelations of the variables revealed high correlations between scores on effortful measures and also raise questions about the purity of automaticity in some tasks employed. Stepwise discriminant analysis demonstrated that free recall of related words (an effortful task) best discriminated between groups. Effort-related processing in hyperactive and normal children is discussed in relation to variables of motivation, affect, arousal, and other higher-order cognitive processes.     

Classical conditioning of the eyeblink response in the delay paradigm in adults aged 18-83 years

To determine if age differences in classical conditioning of the eyelid response begin to appear in middle age in humans as they do in animals, adult subjects aged 18-83 years were trained in the delay conditioning paradigm. Large age effects occurred. Statistically significant differences first appeared in the decade of the 40s. Within-age-group variability was large. To reduce variability, subjects were classified by the magnitude of their unconditioned response (UR). Regardless of age, subjects with low amplitude URs conditioned poorly. In the normal UR amplitude group, the correlation between age and total percentage conditioned responses (CRs) was -.58. Eyeblink rate and voluntary responding did not account for age differences in conditioning, and it was unlikely that hearing acuity or corneal sensitivity caused the differences. Parallels between human and animal eyelid conditioning are considered, and it is suggested that age changes in the cerebellum may affect conditioning in aging mammals, including humans.     

A language effect in voice identification

Bilingual students recorded messages in English, Spanish, and English with a strong Spanish accent. Monolingual English-speaking subjects heard a single message and attempted to identify the voice in a six-person line-up 1 week later. The line-up message was delivered in the same language and accent as the initial message. Voices were identified best when speaking English and worst when speaking Spanish. Identification accuracy was intermediate for the accent condition. There were no reliable differences among conditions in false alarms when the target voice was absent from the line-up. The effect of language was replicated using a 30-min retention interval. Familiarity with the language and language constraints on voice characteristics were discussed as possible explanations of the language effect.