Religion and Reproductive Genetics: Beyond Views of Embryonic Life?

Advances in new reproductive genetic technologies have spawned a very polarized public and political debate. As with the abortion debate, most formal opposition to these technologies comes from religious organizations that are concerned about embryonic and fetal life. In this article we conduct an analysis of the first nationally representative opinion survey on religion and reproductive genetics. We find, as in the abortion debate, that evangelicals, fundamentalists, and traditionalist Catholics are more opposed than more liberal religious groups. When we compare respondents with the same views on embryonic life, we find that differences remain in the level of approval for genetic technologies, suggesting that there is more to this debate than concern about embryos. We also find that religious conservatives are more distinct from the religious nonattenders in their views of health objectives of reproductive genetic technologies and less distinct in their views of improvement objectives.     

Negative Life Events, Patterns of Positive and Negative Religious Coping, and Psychological Functioning

Religious coping may or may not be adaptive depending upon whether such coping is positive or negative. We investigated the potential moderating effects of positive and negative religious coping patterns on the relationship between negative life events and psychological functioning. Questionnaires included measures of negative life events, positive and negative religious coping, and psychological functioning, and were completed by 336 adult, Protestant church members. Even after controlling for religious participation, negative events were related to increased use of positive and negative religious coping and decreased psychological functioning. Moreover, negative events and positive religious coping produced an interaction effect on depression, such that the high use of positive religious coping buffered the deleterious effects of negative events.     

Existential Group Therapy as a Treatment Modality for Exiting Christian Fundamentalists

This article suggests that existential concepts can be useful in group therapy with exiting Christian Fundamentalists.     

CONVERSATIONAL MEMORY

While there has recently been a notable increase in attempts by memory researchers to focus on more naturalistic stimuli little attention has been paid to conversations. Conversations represent stimuli that are distinctly different in a number of ways from most other stimuli that people are required to remember. Conversations are jointly created, constantly updated, and necessarily are readily accessible by participants. The present study, exploring people's memory for natural conversations in which they participate, finds that even after only five minutes people are able to recollect only about 10% of what was said in a social exchange. Further, the mode of recall (written versus oral) and the presence and type of memory goals affected what and how much of the interaction was recalled. Subjects also remembered more of their partner's comments in the interaction than their own. Finally, oral communication anxiety affected both the production of discourse in the conversations and recall of the interactions, while writing apprehension impacted subjects' written recalls of their conversations.