Narrating and Navigating Authorities: Evangelical and Mainline Protestant Interpretations of the Bible and Science

Research on the way Protestants interpret the Bible in relationship to science has tended to focus on biblical literalists; less research, however, has examined the heterogeneity of how nonliteralists interpret the Bible. Utilizing data from semi‐structured interviews with 77 evangelical and mainline Protestants who attend high‐SES congregations, we find that members of both groups draw on similar interpretation strategies in discussing the Bible and evolution. Both eschew literal interpretations of the Bible, demarcate boundaries between the Bible and science, and subsume evolution under broader theological beliefs. Mainline Protestants and evangelicals differ in the way they interpret miracles, with mainline Protestants revealing more openness to scientific and social interpretations of the Bible's miracles, while evangelicals emphasize God's authority over nature. Findings show that different strategies are evoked depending on the issue discussed, revealing implications for a deeper understanding of the way different traditions provide resources for interpreting the Bible and its relationship to scientific issues. Finally, findings contribute to a more robust knowledge of boundary work between the Bible and science as institutional and epistemic authorities.     

Accumulation of Risk and Promotive Factors Among Young Children in US Military Families

In the families of the new cohort of war veterans now entering the civilian population in the United States are over two million young children (Cozza, Haskins & Lerner, 2013; Institute of Medicine, 2013). Several noteworthy studies have shown that children exposed to separation from a parent due to combat‐related deployment are at elevated risk for a variety of negative consequences (Lester & Flake, 2013). Cozza et al. (2013) argue that existing studies of military children focus too much on the stresses or deficits they experience, failing to give sufficient attention to their strengths, the strengths of their families, or the supports around them. In the current study we focus on risk and promotive factors in the lives of children aged 0–10 in military families. We examine the likelihood of negative outcomes as functions of additive, cumulative, and interactive relationships between risk and promotive factors and children's outcomes. Risk factors, particularly parental depression, community poverty, and cumulative risk, were more strongly associated with children's outcomes than promotive factors. There was, however, a significant risk‐protective relationship between accumulations of risk and promotive factors, consistent with promotive conditions operating in a protective fashion under conditions of elevated risk.     

Social Competence and Child-to-Parent Violence: Analyzing the Role of the Emotional Intelligence,Social Attitudes,and Personal Values

This study examined some variables of the so-called social competence, such as the emotional intelligence, social attitudes, and personal values in adolescents who had committed a parent-abuse offense, analyzing whether there were some differences with respect to non-offender adolescents. The sample included 60 participants. From them, 30 were adolescents who had been charged with committing a parent-abuse offense and 30 were non-offender adolescents. Results revealed that parent-abuse offenders showed lower levels of emotional intelligence, more antisocial and less prosocial attitudes than non-offender adolescents, as well as higher scores in hedonism and power values.     

The Role of Language Skill in Child Psychopathology: Implications for Intervention in the Early Years

In this narrative review, we suggest that children’s language skill should be targeted in clinical interventions for children with emotional and behavioral difficulties in the preschool years. We propose that language skill predicts childhood emotional and behavioral problems and this relationship may be mediated by children’s self-regulation and emotion understanding skills. In the first sections, we review recent high-quality longitudinal studies which together demonstrate that that children’s early language skill predicts: (1) emotional and behavioral problems, and this relationship is stronger than the reverse pattern; (2) self-regulation skill; this pattern may be stronger than the reverse pattern but moderated by child age. Findings also suggest that self-regulation skill mediates the relation between early language skill and children’s emotional and behavioral problems. There is insufficient evidence regarding the mediating role of emotion understanding. In subsequent sections, we review evidence demonstrating that: (1) particular kinds of developmentally targeted parent–child conversations play a vital role in the development of language skill, and (2) some current clinical interventions, directly or indirectly, have a beneficial impact on children’s vocabulary and narrative skills, but most approaches are ad hoc. Targeting language via parent–child conversation has the potential to improve the outcomes of current clinical interventions in the preschool years.     

Ethical Ambiguity in Science

Drawing on 171 in-depth interviews with physicists at universities in the United States and the UK, this study examines the narratives of 48 physicists to explain the concept of ethical ambiguity: the border where legitimate and illegitimate conduct is blurred. Researchers generally assume that scientists agree on what constitutes both egregious and more routine forms of misconduct in science. The results of this study show that scientists perceive many scenarios as ethically gray, rather than black and white. Three orientations to ethical ambiguity are considered—altruism, inconsequential outcomes, and preserving the status quo—that allow possibly questionable behavior to persist unchallenged. Each discursive strategy is rationalized as promoting the collective interest of science rather than addressing what is ethically correct or incorrect. The results of this study suggest that ethics training in science should focus not only on fabrication, falsification, and plagiarism and more routine forms of misconduct, but also on strategies for resolving ethically ambiguous scenarios where appropriate action may not be clear.     

The role of partners and children for employees' daily recovery

This multi-source diary study examined the role of partners for employees' daily recovery in a sample of dual-earner couples. We hypothesized that employees' daily psychological detachment from work during the evening should be positively associated with their partners' daily psychological detachment during the evening. Employees' affective well-being (serenity and negative activation) at bedtime should be influenced not only by their own psychological detachment, but also by their partners' psychological detachment. Moreover, we hypothesized that the presence of children in a couple's household should moderate the relations between partners' psychological detachment on the one hand, and employees' psychological detachment and affective well-being on the other hand. Fifty-three dual-earner couples completed daily electronic surveys via handheld devices at bedtime over the course of one work week. We used dyadic multilevel path modeling to analyze our data. Results showed that employees' and their partners' levels of daily psychological detachment were positively related. Employees' psychological detachment predicted their own negative activation, but not their serenity at bedtime. Partners' psychological detachment predicted employees' serenity and negative activation only in couples without children. Hence, our study provides support for the relevance of partners and children for employees' daily recovery after work.     

Systematic Analyses of the Effects of Acceptance on Tolerance of Radiant Heat Pain

The Psychological Record - Numerous studies have demonstrated the utility of acceptance-based strategies for coping with pain. The current research comprised three studies (N = 186)...