Marketing the goods of salvation: Bourdieu on religion

Pierre Bourdieu's work has had a resounding impact on disciplines ranging from linguistics to anthropology to art history to literary criticism. Scholars of religion have, however, been relatively slow to catch on to the theoretical gold mine that academics in other fields have discovered in Bourdieu's work, doubtless in part because Bourdieu himself pays only limited attention to religion. The present article is intended to serve as an introduction to Bourdieu's theory of practice as it applies to his sociological theory of religion, which is especially serviceable for the analysis of the relationship among religion, class and power. Haitian religion and culture are used as a case study in the spirit of Bourdieu's own insistence that theory always be confronted with the substantive and never be exercised in a vacuum.     

A closer look at ability emotional intelligence (EI): What are its component parts,and how do they relate to each other?

In this review, we focus on two key questions about the nature of emotional intelligence (EI). First, we consider what the different parts of EI might be, suggesting a taxonomy that builds on the well‐known hierarchical four‐branch model to include six narrow abilities (emotion perception, emotion expression, emotion attention regulation, emotion understanding, emotion regulation of self, and emotion regulation of others). Second, we review evidence for the interrelations between these six narrow abilities. The interrelationships of the EI narrow abilities are a key criterion for viewing EI as a kind of intelligence, rather than a typical way of behaving. Our review concludes that the six narrow abilities comprising EI are all positively interrelated—the component parts of EI converge to form a whole. In addition, the level of interrelationships shows that emotion expression and emotion perception are clearly separate, with weaker evidence for the separation between emotion regulation of self versus emotion regulation of others. Using the older research tradition of emotion recognition (which predates EI), we present a detailed overview of the relationship between emotion perception and other narrow abilities of EI. We conclude that the narrow facets of EI converge with each other, providing one form of evidence to support the validity of EI as a type of intelligence.     

Meeting the Needs of Evidence-based Practice in Family Therapy: Developing the Scientist-practitioner Model

Effective models of clinical training have been and continue to be a primary topic of discussion in the field of family therapy, particularly given the needs of evidence-based practice. This article outlines the major historical and contemporary struggles of one such model of clinical training and practice: the scientist-practitioner model. Throughout the article, the principles of the scientist-practitioner model and evidence-based practices are compared and contrasted. Suggestions for overcoming the contemporary challenges faced by the scientist-practitioner in a family therapy practice or in an educational environment are discussed.     

What Women Want: A Discussion of “Childless”

Rebecca Harrington’s “Childless” breaks the cultural and psychoanalytic silence about the idiosyncratic meanings of maternality—challenging our pronatalist assumptions. Following suit, this discussion questions our understanding of what women want. Freud was famously confounded by that question, and still, the psychological processes leading to decisions about motherhood are largely absent from psychoanalytic theory. Because of this, the heteronormative, socially agreed-upon dictum that women must be, and want to be, mothers remains locked in place. The conflation of feminine, woman, and motherhood serve to negate female subjectivity, limiting the possibilities for other creative pursuits. Contemporary psychoanalysis eschews the primary importance of instinctual drives yet has not challenged the notion of a maternal instinct that drives women to desire motherhood. The cultural and psychoanalytic silence about the complexities of reproduction and child-rearing has rendered individual women silent and their desires toward and away from motherhood unarticulated.     

The cost‐effectiveness of family therapy: a summary and progress report

This paper provides a summary of the cost‐effectiveness research for family therapy. Data were available from four different sources in the United States: (1) a health maintenance organization with 180,000 subscribers; (2) the Medicaid system of the State of Kansas; (3) CIGNA Behavioral Health, a division of a health insurance company with nine million subscribers; and (4) a family therapy training clinic. Results suggest that family therapy reduces the number of healthcare visits, especially for high utilizers. The studies suggest that including family therapy as a treatment option does not significantly increase healthcare costs.     

The Chances for Children Teen Parent–Infant Project: Results of a pilot intervention for teen mothers and their infants in inner city high schools

Adolescent motherhood poses serious challenges to mothers, to infants, and ultimately to society, particularly if the teen mother is part of a minority population living in an urban environment. This study examines the effects of a treatment intervention targeting low‐income, high‐risk teen mothers and their infants in the context of public high schools where daycare is available onsite. Our findings confirm the initial hypothesis that mothers who received intervention would improve their interactions with their infants in the areas of responsiveness, affective availability, and directiveness. In addition, infants in the treatment group were found to increase their interest in mother, respond more positively to physical contact, and improve their general emotional tone, which the comparison infants did not. Importantly, these findings remain even within the subset of mothers who scored above the clinical cutoff for depression on the Center for Epidemiological Studies‐Depression Scale (CES‐D; L. Radloff, 1977), confirming that it is possible to improve mother–infant interaction without altering the mother's underlying depression. The implications of these findings are significant both because it is more difficult and requires more time to alter maternal depression than maternal behavior and because maternal depression has been found to have such devastating effects on infants.     

Neuroimaging evidence for agenda-dependent monitoring of different features during short-term source memory tests

A short-term source monitoring procedure with functional magnetic resonance imaging assessed neural activity when participants made judgments about the format of 1 of 4 studied items (picture, word), the encoding task performed (cost, place), or whether an item was old or new. The results support findings from long-term memory studies showing that left anterior ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (PFC) is engaged when people make source attributions about reflectively generated information (cognitive operations, conceptual features). The findings also point to a role for right lateral PFC in attention to perceptual features and/or familiarity in making source decisions. Activity in posterior regions also differed depending on what was evaluated. These results provide neuroimaging evidence for theoretical approaches emphasizing that agendas influence which features are monitored during remembering (e.g., M. K. Johnson, S. Hashtroudi, & D. S. Lindsay, 1993). They also support the hypothesis that some of the activity in left lateral PFC and posterior regions associated with remembering specific information is not unique to long-term memory but rather is associated with agenda-driven source monitoring processes common to working memory and long-term memory.