The Effect of Stigma on Criminal Offenders’ Functioning: A Longitudinal Mediational Model

Research has rarely considered criminal offenders’ psychological responses to stigma, but these responses may significantly influence behavior after release from jail/prison. Jail inmates’ perceived and anticipated stigma was assessed prior to release from jail/prison (N = 163), and outcomes were assessed one year post-release (N = 371). We hypothesized that perceived stigma would predict poor adjustment in several domains (i.e., recidivism, substance dependence, mental health symptoms, community adjustment) through anticipated stigma. Results showed that perceived stigma predicted worse community adjustment through anticipated stigma, and this varied by race. Results are explored from an interdisciplinary perspective.     

<Emphasis Type="Bold">On the Ancient Idea that Music Shapes Character</Emphasis>

Ancient Chinese and Greek thinkers alike were preoccupied with the moral value of music; they distinguished between good and bad music by looking at the music’s effect on moral character. The idea can be understood in terms of two closely related questions. Does music have the power to affect the ethical character of either listener or performer? If it does, is it better (or worse) as music for doing so? I argue that an affirmative answers to both questions are more plausible than it might seem at first.     

Teachers’ and Parents’ Perspectives on a Curricular Subject of “Religion and Spirituality” for Indian Schools: A Pilot Study Toward School Mental Health Program

Religious–spiritual (R/S) education helps medical students cope with caregiving stress and gain skills in interpersonal empathy needed for clinical care. Such R/S education has been introduced into K-12 and college curricula in some developed nations and has been found to positively impact student’s mental health. Such a move has not yet been seen in the Indian education system. This paper aimed to examine perspectives of teachers and parents in India on appropriateness, benefits, and challenges of including R/S education into the school curriculum and also to gather their impressions on how a R/S curriculum might promote students’ health. A cross-sectional study of religiously stratified sample of teachers and parents was initiated in three preselected schools in India and the required sample size (N = 300) was reached through snowballing technique. A semi-structured questionnaire, with questions crafted from “Religion and Spirituality in Medicine, Physicians Perspective” (RSMPP) and “American Academy of Religion’s (AAR) Guidelines for Religious Literacy,” was used to determine participants’ perspectives. Findings revealed that teachers’ and parents’ “comfort in integrating R/S into school curriculum” was associated with their gender (OR 1.68), education status (OR 1.05), and intrinsic religiosity (OR 1.05). Intrinsic religiosity was significantly (p = 0.025) high among parents while “intrinsic spirituality” was high (p = 0.020) among teachers. How participants’ R/S characteristics influence their support of R/S education in school is discussed. In conclusion, participants believe R/S education will fosters students’ emotional health and interpersonal skills needed for social leadership. A curriculum that incorporates R/S education, which is based on AAR guidelines and clinically validated interpersonal spiritual care tools would be acceptable to both teachers and parents.     

Religious versus Conventional Internet-based Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Depression

The accessibility and efficacy of two Internet-supported interventions for depression: conventional cognitive behavioral therapy (C-CBT) and religious CBT (R-CBT) were investigated. Depressed participants (N = 79) were randomly assigned to either active treatment or wait-listed control group. Self-report measures of depression, anxiety, and life quality were collected before, immediately after, and 6 months after the intervention. Significant differences among the three conditions emerged at post-intervention with medium to large effect sizes (Cohen’s d between 0.45 and 1.89), but no differences between the R-CBT and C-CBT were found. However, the addition of religious components to CBT contributed to the initial treatment appeal for religious participants, thus increasing the treatment accessibility.     

Spiritual Interventions in Veterans with PTSD: A Systematic Review

Journal of Religion and Health - This article reports the results of a systematic review on the effectiveness of religious/spiritually (R/S)-based interventions in veterans with post-traumatic...     

Relationship Between Private Religious Activity and Physical Functioning in Older Adults

This study sought to further understand the relationship between physical functioning and use of private religious activity in older adults. Subjects were age 65 or older from urban and rural counties in North Carolina who participated in the Duke University Established Populations for Epidemiologic Studies of the Elderly (Duke/EPESE). A total of 3,851 subjects responded to a question that inquired about their use of prayer, meditation, or Bible reading in 1986. Their response was correlated to number of impairments in activities of daily living (ADLs) (n = 3,791). Subjects who indicated use of private religious activity either dailyor neverhad the greatest number of impairments. Those who prayed or meditated one time per weekhad the least number of impairments. This cross-sectional finding is explained in terms of both changes in private religious activity in response to increasing physical disability and changes in physical disability in response to private religious activity. Previous research has found that prayer is often used as an effective coping mechanism with various sicknesses and chronic conditions. Further studies are needed to examine older individuals' health over time and evaluate their use of private religious activity to see its impact over time on physical disability.     

Visual attention and the apprehension of spatial relations: the case of depth.

Several studies have shown that targets defined on the basis of the spatial relations between objects yield highly inefficient visual search performance (e.g., Logan, 1994; Palmer, 1994), suggesting that the apprehension of spatial relations may require the selective allocation of attention within the scene. In the present study, we tested the hypothesis that depth relations might be different in this regard and might support efficient visual search. This hypothesis was based, in part, on the fact that many perceptual organization processes that are believed to occur early and in parallel, such as figure-ground segregation and perceptual completion, seem to depend on the assignment of depth relations. Despite this, however, using increasingly salient cues to depth (Experiments 2-4) and including a separate test of the sufficiency of the most salient depth cue used (Experiment 5), no evidence was found to indicate that search for a target defined by depth relations is any different than search for a target defined by other types of spatial relations, with regard to efficiency of search. These findings are discussed within the context of the larger literature on early processing of three-dimensional characteristics of visual scenes.     

Antecedent manipulations in a tangible condition: effects of stimulus preference on aggression.

After a functional analysis indicated that aggression of an 8‐year‐old boy with autism was maintained by access to preferred items, antecedent manipulations involving the relative preference of restricted and noncontingently available stimuli were conducted. Restricting highly preferred items evoked the highest rates of aggression regardless of the preference level of the noncontingently available alternative items. Restricting less preferred stimuli was associated with moderate rates of aggression even when the alternative items were more preferred.