Religion as a resource for bereaved parents

This paper addresses the relationship between bereavement and religious beliefs for parents. In-depth, qualitative interviews of twenty-seven couples were used to address the question of the relative value of religion as a coping resource during grief. Also addressed were ways in which religion was a positive resource (enhancing recovery), a neutral resource (having no impact), or a negative resource (retarding recovery). Conclusions are presented regarding the resource value of religion and ways in which others, primarily clergy, family, and friends, can enhance positive and minimize negative impact of religion during bereavement.This is a revision of a paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the national Council on Family Relations in Nuvember 1989 in new Orleans.     

Pastoral response to marital alienation

Couples who seek pastoral help for their troubled marriages often display great hostility in their marital relationships. These negative feelings are the result of a cumulative process in which alienation builds over time through a series of hostile interactions by the distressed partners. Before assisting couples in solving the basic problems confronting them, the pastor must guide the couples in halting the destructive process of alienation and in establishing a climate of mutual cooperation in their marriages. Conventional marriage counseling techniques require a reasonable amount of positive couple interaction for the methods to be successful.Ch. Lt. Col. Gilbert W. Beeson, Jr., is a member of the United States Air Force Chaplain Resource Board. His address is: USAF Chaplain Board—LMDC/HCX, Bldg 814, Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama 36112.     

Ubiquity of schedule-induced polydipsia

Spaced feeding of individual food pellets to food-deprived rats induced excessive drinking after pellet delivery if water was continuously available. When access to water was restricted to a portion of the inter-pellet interval, and competition from food-reinforced bar pressing was removed, excessive drinking occurred whenever drinking was possible. This finding extends the generality of accounts of excessive behavior that implicate induction by apparently unrelated scheduling characteristics of the environment.     

Automated psychophysiology laboratory

A laboratory has recently been established in University Hospital based on a PDP-11 /40 processor running a real-time Executive (RSX-ll/D) which has storage and data acquisition peripherals to handle on-line processing of psychophysiological data from patients receiving biofeedback. A data acquisition program has been written which permits the sampling of eight simultaneous channels of data coming from a Hewlett-Packard 7700 electrophysiological recorder system. Input from the patient includes switch closures and variable resistors, thermistors, GSR, electrocardiogram, respiration rate, and a variety of others. Feedback to the patient includes a variety of types of lights, a cathode ray tube storage screen, a character-oriented CRT monitor, and a variety of audio signals. Developers are presently involved in writing the biofeedback section of the programs and an on-line decision-making dependent upon patient response. Simultaneously with laboratory operation, a number of other users are served. These include the Admitting Department and Respiratory Function Laboratory. A rat laboratory will be served also by this facility in the near future via a front-end microprocessor.     

Sex differences in response to physical and nonphysical instigators

One hundred and twenty subjects competed in a reaction-time task similar to that of Taylor (1967). Subjects were randomly assigned to a white noise, fine, or control condition. In the fine and noise conditions programmed opponents administered increasing provocation to subjects over a series of 24 trials. Control subjects were not provoked. As predicted, males retaliated with higher levels of noise than did females, while there were no sex differences in the fine condition. Contrary to prediction, sex of opponent had no effect. Subjects in all conditions tended to view the task as competitive but to devalue their opponent only in the noise condition. The prevalent assumption of female passivity in the face of instigation was rejected. Instead a dichotomy was proposed that while females are less likely than males to reciprocate to physical provocation, they are just as likely to respond to provocation of a nonphysical nature.Parts of this article were presented at the meeting of the American Psychological Association, Chicago, September 1975. Critical comments by Edward Donnerstein and Arnold Kahn on an earlier draft of this article are gratefully acknowledged.