Decline and Conflict: Causes and Consequences of Leadership Transitions in Religious Congregations

Changes in leadership can be difficult for any organization. Leadership transitions in religious congregations might be especially challenging given the personal relationships involved and the spiritual dimension of a leader's position. This complexity often makes it difficult to separate the reasons for the transition from the impacts of the transition. For example, loss of membership and congregational conflict can be both a cause and a consequence of leadership change. Using the 2006–2007 National Congregations Study, this research explores how membership decline and congregational conflict are associated with leadership transitions in religious congregations. Although we find that leadership transitions are associated with conflict and membership decline, we also find that certain factors, such as whether the leader comes from within the congregation and context of the transition, moderate these associations.     

Disclosing Extra-Dyadic Involvement (EDI): Understanding Attitudes, Subjective Norms, and Perceived Behavioral Control

Extra-dyadic involvement (EDI) is a complex issue that affects many individuals, couples, and families. One important, relatively unexplored issue concerns the disclosure of EDI. Despite some scholarly discourse on whether disclosure should be facilitated in a therapeutic context (e.g., Butler et al. in J Marital Fam Ther 35:125–143, 2009; Butler et al. in Am J Fam Ther 36:265–283, 2008), empirical research has not studied the intrapersonal or interpersonal processes related to disclosure. In this study, we explored potential factors involved in the decision to disclose EDI by looking at the relationships among attitudes towards EDI (in terms of perceived justifications and costs), subjective norms (obligation to disclose), and perceived behavioral control (difficulty) associated with EDI disclosure. Our sample included 337 individuals enrolled in at least one university course at one of three geographically distinct universities. Findings indicate that more permissive attitudes towards EDI are not significantly associated to the perceived difficulty in disclosing EDI or the obligation associated with disclosing EDI involving sexual intercourse. However, more permissive attitudes are related to lower felt obligation to disclose EDI that does not involve direct sexual intercourse. Conversely, more restrictive attitudes towards EDI (perceived severity, degree of perceived upset, and how detrimental it is perceived to be to the relationship) predicted greater difficulty but also greater obligation in disclosing all forms of EDI. Specific implications of these findings, including potential implications for therapy, are discussed. Overall, this study provides preliminary information regarding potentially useful factors to consider in understanding the EDI disclosure process that may also be useful in developing intervention points in therapy.     

Conceptual Resources for Questioning ‘Child as Educator’

This paper critically evaluates the ways we look to children to educate us and explores how we might depart from that dynamic, exploring how a range of conceptual frameworks from historical and cultural studies and psychoanalysis might contribute to understanding the problematic of childhood, its problems and its limitations. While ‘child as educator’ may appear to reverse the typical power relations between adults and children, it is argued that this motif in fact repeats many of the same problems as any claims about what children, and especially what ‘child’, is like. Specifically, the paper first reviews analyses of what is at stake in the figure of ‘child’; second, feminist engagement with the notion of ‘intersectionality’ is discussed in terms of how it might inform debates about childhood. Finally, drawing on Lacanian psychoanalytic approaches, analysis focuses on the notion of misrecognition structured in the ‘as’ connecting ‘child’ and ‘educator’.     

Relations Among Early Object Recognition Skills: Objects and Letters

Human visual object recognition is multifaceted and comprised of several domains of expertise. Developmental relations between young children's letter recognition and their 3-dimensional object recognition abilities are implicated on several grounds but have received little research attention. Here, we ask how preschoolers' success in recognizing letters relates to their ability to recognize 3-dimensional objects from sparse shape information alone. Seventy-three 2 1/2 to 5-year-old children completed a “Letter Recognition” task, measuring the ability to identify a named letter among 3 letters, and a “Shape Caricature Recognition” task, measuring recognition of familiar objects from sparse, abstract information about their part shapes and the spatial relations among those parts. Children also completed a control “Shape Bias” task, in which success depends on matching exact shapes but not on building an internal representation of the configuration of features characteristic of an object category or letter. Children's success in letter recognition was positively related to their shape caricature recognition scores, but not to their shape bias scores. The results suggest that letter recognition builds upon developing skills in attending to and representing the relational structure of object shape, and that these skills are common to both 2-dimensional and 3-dimensional object perception.     

CYBER COMMUNITY IN THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW OF DEATH

This article provides an examination of the communicative needs and practices of those who have survived the loss of a loved one to suicide. Based on a study of a face-to-face support group for parents of children lost to suicide, and over 10,000 e-mails from a number of online support groups for survivors of the loss of a loved one to suicide, this article discusses intense communicative relations, exclusion from the general society, self-accrediting of experts in grief, reconstruction of identity to include the loss, ownership of the suicide, and rebuilding community.     

Focusing on Patient Needs and Preferences May Improve Genetic Counseling for Colorectal Cancer

During cancer genetic counseling, different items which counselors consider important are discussed. However, relatively little empirical evidence exists regarding the needs and preferences of counselees. In this study needs and preferences were assessed from counselees with a personal and/or family history of colorectal cancer (CRC), who were referred for genetic counseling regarding CRC. They received a slightly modified version of the QUOTE-GENE^ca questionnaire prior to their first visit to the Hereditary Cancer Clinic. Response rate was 60 % (48/80 participants). Counselees rated the importance of 45 items assessing their needs and preferences regarding the content and process of genetic counseling. Participants rated the items regarding discussion of information about their familial CRC risk (100 %) and preventive options (98 %) as important or very important. Fewer participants rated items concerning general information on genetics as important. Sensitive communication during counseling was considered very important by a large percentage of counselees. Generally, no major differences were seen between participants in relation to individual characteristics. Our data suggest that focusing on familial CRC risk and surveillance options, in combination with sensitive communication may lead to better satisfaction with genetic counseling.     

Adult Psychological Distress and Self-Worth Following Child Verbal Abuse

Despite the proliferation of child maltreatment research over the last 30 years, there remains a dearth of research examining the long-term effects of child psychological maltreatment (CPM), particularly child verbal abuse (CVA). Using a college sample of 173 participants from a Southeastern university, this study examined the role of gender and perpetrator relationship in predicting psychological distress and self-worth of adults exposed to CVA. Maternal CVA emerged as a significant predictor of lower levels of self-worth in adult daughters and sons as well as greater psychological distress in adult daughters. Paternal CVA did not emerge as a significant predictor of greater psychological distress or lower levels of self-worth in either adult daughters or sons.     

Sticks and Stones May Break My Bones but Words Relate to Adult Physiology? Child Abuse Experience and Women's Sympathetic Nervous System Response while Self-Reporting Trauma

Child abuse predicts a wide range of long-lasting deleterious outcomes, including disruptions in the biological systems central to emotion arousal and regulation. However, little is known about the specific ways in which child abuse affects adulthood sympathetic reactivity and recovery. This study investigated the association between child abuse experience and adult skin conductance level and habituation in 85 at-risk women as they completed a self-report trauma questionnaire. Childhood emotional abuse was independently associated with blunted skin conductance habituation over the course of survey completion after controlling for other abuse subtypes and current trauma symptoms. These results suggest that women emotionally abused as children experience prolonged emotional arousal and poor physiological regulation of emotion in response to reminders of traumatic experiences.     

Psychological and criminological factors associated with desistance from violence: A review of the literature

Ample evidence exists that offenders eventually terminate their criminal careers, and this holds true for violent offenders. The causal mechanisms responsible for triggering and maintaining this process remain unclear; meaning that desistance from violence is poorly understood. This comprehensive review of the literature revealed that research in this area is hampered by definitional, operational, and measurement inconsistencies. Several of the conceptual frameworks used to explain desistance from delinquency have not been specifically applied in relation to violence. However, it was found that criminological enquiry suggests that informal social control (e.g., stable relationship and employment) play a role in desistance from violence and that theoretical frameworks which examine both internal and external change seem to show promise as an aid to understanding the desistance process. Psychological research has tended to focus on the role of risk and protective factors in relation to desistance but this, particularly protective factors, is currently under-researched. More knowledge needs to be assembled about how: (1) the mechanics of protective factors mitigate risk of future violence, and (2) how they play a role in the maintenance of violent free behaviors. Findings from criminology and psychology need to be expanded and integrated to extend our understanding of desistance from violence.