Welcoming the Stranger

Abstract. Thinking about teaching as an act of intellectual hospitality has the potential to shape productively how teachers conceive of their own roles in the classroom, their interactions with students, and their execution of crucial tasks. It also offers a path to helpful reflection about a persistent issue that arises particularly for the many faculty members who teach in small departments of religion and are therefore called upon to address a wide range of topics in their teaching. In addition, adopting an ethos of hospitality in the classroom provides a salutary counterpoint to the pervasive and often corrosive academic practices of critique, refutation, and dispute.     

Interaction of depression and bereavement on mental health in the elderly

Three hundred ninety-three elderly adults aged 55 and older were divided into 1 of 9 subgroups in a 3 (bereavement group: survivors of spouses who died by natural death or by suicide and nonbereaved control Ss) x 3 (depression group: none, mild, and moderate-severe) design over 4 times of measurement--1 month, 6 months, 1 year, and 2.5 years after death of spouse. Significant Bereavement x Depression Group effects were obtained on Brief Symptom Inventory scores. The moderate-severe depression/suicide subgroup had the greatest psychiatric complications with bereavement. Results indicated that elderly persons with significant clinical depression at the time of a spouse's death were at significant risk for psychological complications during the bereavement process, and survivors of spouses who had committed suicide were even more at risk within the greatest depression group.     

Effectiveness of filler items in disguising scale purpose.

Subjects (n = 246) were asked to identify the trait(s) measured by Rotter's Interpersonal Trust Scale with and without filler items, either by responding freely or by circling traits listed on a sheet. Half the subjects were informed prior to filling out the questionnaire that their task was to identify the traits being measured by the questionnaire; the remaining half of the subjects were informed of their task after they completed the questionnaire. Very few subjects were able to identify correctly the trait being measured by Rotter's scale regardless of the experimental condition. Most subjects named multiple traits. It was concluded that the use of filler items per se was not the key factor in disguising the true purpose of Rotter's test; rather item wording may have produced multiple interpretations.     

Adolescent vicissitudes and medical judgement: a case study

Professional concern about the widespread occurrence of adolescent pregnancy is based upon its negative impact on the social, developmental, and economic prospects of the mother and her infant. The usual presumption is that the pregnant adolescent is in good health but suffers from socioeconomic and cultural disadvantages, which the pregnancy will exacerbate. The problems of the pregnant adolescent are more complex when she also has a severe medical handicap. We draw upon such a case to illuminate the issues which arise when medical problems interact with the vicissitudes of adolescence. Although it is clear that the patient's own behavior contributed substantially to the tragic outcome of this case, we believe that greater professional anticipation of the contingencies of adolescent development might have produced a more favorable result.     

Thinking of threats: Economic threat appraisals and health threat appraisals predict differential racial attitudes during COVID-19

We examined whether perceptions of the health and economic threats posed by COVID-19 predict different patterns of intergroup attitudes, using data gathered during the early phase of the pandemic. Using data from 1339 geographically and politically diverse White US residents, we show that subjective economic threat predicted general anti-outgroup attitudes, while subjective health threat predicted negative attitudes towards both Asian and Latinx (“stereotypically foreign”) outgroups but not towards other outgroups. Among 303 geographically and politically diverse Black US residents, the pattern instead suggested that threat (regardless of type) was associated with reduced evaluative differentiation between racial ingroups and outgroups.     

Political orientation and occupational values of college youth, 1969 and 1981: a shift toward uniformity

McFalls and Gallagher (1979) have found a strong relationship between the occupational values and political orientations of college students. Their study was based on the results of a sample survey conducted in 1969. However, the political climate on college campuses has changed dramatically, and so has the nature of the job market. A new survey was conducted in 1981 which was identical to the 1969 survey. Its objective was to determine if the same political group differentials in occupational values which existed in the politically tumultuous late sixties and early seventies still hold in the more placid 1980s. The findings are reported here.     

The prevalence of mental retardation: Cross-cultural considerations from Sweden and the United States

Recent reports from Sweden and other European countries have shown a sharp disparity between their incidence and prevalence figures on mild mental retardation and similar figures in the U.S. (Grunewald, 1979; Martin, Blodgett, Edwards, Geer, & Melcher, 1974; Robinson & Robinson, 1976).The purpose of this paper is to provide a model of intellectual performance that might explain such disparities and predict future levels of occurrence of mild mental retardation. Such explanations should have relevance for our views on the development of intellectual ability as well as, on a practical level, planning the allocation of treatment resources. Such planning clearly depends upon the number of children having the condition in question.Over the past few decades we have progressed substantially in our ability to describe mental retardation and to differentiate it from conditions that superficially resemble it; such as, autism, learning disabilities, schizophrenia, etc., (Baroff, 1974; Robinson & Robinson, 1976). Our ability to identify variables that relate to mild mental retardation also has developed substantially, but correlation does not necessarily lead to understanding. One of the large set of variables that often is associated with mild mental retardation in the U.S. is poverty. But “poverty” is too broad a variable to be explanatory. Such a dimension is a surrogate factor standing in the place of other variables, not yet understood, that control, in part, the actual process, by which the child develops the condition of mild mental retardation (Kirk & Gallagher, 1983). A series of papers has been presented by psychologists in Sweden that allow us to address this issue.The ability to observe two cultures, Sweden and the U.S., that have both substantial similarities and differences provides a natural comparison of the prevalence of mental retardation that would be impossible to achieve through experimental manipulation. Prevalence is used here as the total number of cases present in a population group during a specific interval of time (Kramer, 1975).