Personality patterns of adolescent poor and good sleepers

To determine whether poor sleepers have a unique personality constellation significantly different from that of good sleepers, a sample of 162 emotionally disturbed adolescent poor sleepers was compared to a sample of 153 emotionally disturbed adolescent good sleepers on standardized personality instruments. Poor sleepers were found to have a high incidence of neurotic psychopathology with personality patterns characterized by depression, fearfulness, inhibition, anxiety, and rumination. In contrast, good sleepers showed quasi healthy and/or characterological patterns. While this study does not resolve cause and effect relationships, it does establish a highly significant relationship between neuroticism and sleep disturbance for adolescent boys and girls, and also demonstrates a similarity of personality dynamics and patterns between adult and adolescent samples of patients with sleep disturbances.     

Directionally different expectancy theory predictions of work motivation and job satisfaction

Conventionally, expectancy theory has utilized a multiplicative combination of expectancy and value scores in predicting both job behavior (work motivation and job performance) and job-related affect (job satisfaction). An extensive clinical literature, however, suggests that affect is a function of the discrepancy between expectancies and values. Hence, two hypotheses were advanced and tested in organizational settings: (1) that the multiplicative formulation (EV) will yield superior predictions of work motivation and job performance in comparison to the discrepancy model (E-V), (2) that the discrepancy model (E-V) will yield superior predictions of job satisfaction in comparison to the multiplicative model (EV). Results from three studies (of 399 engineers, 202 librarians, and 1,777 engineers) were highly supportive of both hypotheses.An early version of this paper was presented at the 10th Annual National Meeting of the American Institute for Decision Sciences, November 1, 1978, and an abbreviated write-up appeared in the AIDSProceedings. The author is greatly indebted to the following people: Susanne P. Wahba, for allowing the use of her data (Study Two); Gene Dalton and Paul Thompson, for their contribution to the research in Study One; and Joe Folkman for his help with the data analysis in Study Three. Financial support was provided in part by the Research Foundation of the City University of New York (RF10662).     

Story and promise in pastoral care

The writer describes the pastoral office and considers the difference his theological orientation makes in understanding its work. The gospel is described as narrative and as promise. As narrative it concerns a particular person, Jesus, and especially his passion and resurrection. Becoming Christian means allowing one's own story and that of one's communities to be shaped and reshaped by Jesus. As promise, the gospel comments on the final outcome of the human enterprise. Ministers are those to whom the community grants the burden of tending the life of the gospel in the church. Their temptation in pastoral care is to lose the specificity of the gospel in slogans that are temporary and partial, e.g., identifying health care with the liberation of the gospel. Pastoral care is described as sacramental and as eschatological.He is the author ofStory and Promise: A Brief Theology of the Gospel About Jesus.     

Toward a task-centered christianity

The concepts of task-centered (intrinsic) and self-centered (extrinsic) religion have been found useful in a psychological understanding of Christianity. The task-centered dimension is related to a healthy, mature religion, and the self-centered dimension is related to much that has been found to be unhealthy about religion. Theologically the former concept implies a turning to God and His work and away from self. Implications are discussed in terms of the pastor as a model of a task-centered and not a self-centered Christian. In the pastor's role of promoting task-centered religion, special attention is given to worship and to implications for ministering to people's hurts and troubles.     

Explorations using computer simulation to comprehend thematic apperceptive measurement of motivation

The new theory of motivation by Atkinson and Birch (1970), based on conceptual analysis of a change in activity, has been programmed to allow computer simulation of effects of differences in motivation on the stream of operant behavior. Simulation of conditions that exist when people who differ in strength of achievement motive write imaginative stories in response to a sequence of pictures shows that construct validity does not require internal consistency as traditionally supposed. The theoretically deduced differences in total time spent imagining achieving (instead of something else) can postdict input differences in motive strength (i.e., construct validity) even when there is little or no internal consistency reliability as indicated by Cronbach's (1951) alpha computed from theoretically deduced time spent imagining achievement in response to particular pictures. This general point has already been amply documented in 25 years of productive empirical research using TATn Achievement. Now a definitive theoretical refutation of the repeated psychometric criticism of the method is provided. Those who have been moved to dispel fantasies about fantasy-based measures of achievement motivation (Entwistle, 1972) are invited, instead, to examine the shallow theoretical foudation of our traditional myths of measurement.This paper elaborates a report presented August 30, 1975, at the 83rd annual meeting of the American Psychological Association. The authors gratefully acknowledge early assistance by Mary M. Moffett, and financial support by a Rackham Faculty Research Grant (JWA), a National Science Foundation Fellowship (KB), and a Michigan Student Medical Research Grant (LHP). Intricate detail has been avoided in describing the several simulations for the sake of clarity in this overview of exploratory work.     

Avoidance behavior and perceived arousal

Previous investigations of the effects of bogus arousal feedback on approach toward an aversive stimulus have failed to separate two conceptual issues: (1) the influence of perceived anxiety on approach behavior, and (2) the degree to which perceptions of decreased anxiety are central to systematic desensitization. The present research deals with only the first of these issues. The procedure required each subject to attach a microphone to his or her chest and approach a snake. Bogus heartbeat feedback was presented concurrently with the subject's approach. In Experiments 1 and 2, self-reported snake phobics approached more with a constant than with an accelerating heartbeat. Nonphobics in Experiment 2 were not systematically influenced by the feedback. In Experiment 3, subjects with moderate fear, but who had stated that they could pick up a snake, behaved like the previously tested nonphobics; moderate fear subjects who had stated uncertainty about their ability to handle a snake behaved like previously tested phobics. In no case did postexperimental self-rated fear of snakes yield a difference between feedback conditions. The results are discussed in terms of the attributional analysis of emotional behavior.     

The effect of aversive consequences upon persistent behavior

It was hypothesized that if a behavior is freely engaged in with the expectancy that an aversive consequence will follow, the intrinsic motivation to perform that behavior will increase when the aversive consequence is no longer present. Subjects either worked on a list of anagrams while receiving electric shock on a VR schedule, while being threatened by electric shock, or in the absence of shock. The experimenter then left the subject alone for 10 minutes with a new list of anagrams. Subjects in the shock condition solved more anagrams on the posttest than subjects in the threat-of-shock and noshock conditions. Subjects in both the shock condition and the threat-of-shock condition reported that they spent more of their free time on the anagrams than subjects in the no-shock condition.     

Where has hope gone? Toward an understanding of hope in pastoral care

This paper questions the lack of a conceptual model or psychology of hope for pastoral theology and proceeds to develop such a psychology by surveying the theology of hope, by reviewing the dynamics of hoping of some contemporary philosophers and psychologists, and by proposing a hypothesis that hope is difficult to conceptualize because the mode of hoping is nonabstract, relational, nonlinear, and imaginative, all right-lobe brain functions more characteristic of Eastern than Western consciousness. Six implications of this hypothesis for pastoral care are suggested.Research for this paper and work on hope as it relates to pastoral care and counseling was made possible by a year's sabbatical leave from St. Paul School of Theology.