Religion and the Survival of 1010 Hospitalized Veterans

Objective: To examine the effects of religious affiliation and religious coping on survival of acutely-hospitalized medically-ill male veterans following discharge. Sample and Methods: Between 1987 and 1989, comprehensive psychosocial and physical-health evaluations were performed on a consecutive sample of 1010 patients ages 20–39 and 65–102 years admitted to the general medicine and neurology services of the Veterans Administration (VA) Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina. Religious affiliation and religious coping (the degree to which a patient relied on his religious faith for comfort and strength) were among the variables assessed. Subjects or surviving family members were contacted by telephone in 1996–97 to determine vital status; dates of death were confirmed by the Veterans Administration's Beneficiary Identification and Records Locator Subsystem (BIRLS), death certificate, or the National Death Index. Cox proportional-hazards regression was used to model the effects of religious variables on time to death, controlling for demographic, social, psychiatric, and physical-health covariates. Results: Follow-up was obtained on all 1010 patients. During the observation period, 673 patients died. While a higher proportion of conservative Protestants than members of other religious groups died during this time (70.5% vs. 64.3%, p = .04), the association disappeared once covariates were controlled. Religious coping was unrelated to survival in both bivariate and multivariate analyses (hazard ratio 1.00, 95% CI 0.99–1.01). Conclusions: Neither religious affiliation nor dependence on religion as a coping behavior predicted survival in this sample of medically-ill male veterans. Several reasons for the absence of an effect are explored, notably the fact that the mortality force exerted by age, medical diagnosis, and severity of physical-health problems overwhelmed the weaker effects of psychosocial variables.     

Terror Management and Meaning: Evidence That the Opportunity to Defend the Worldview in Response to Mortality Salience Increases the Meaningfulness of Life in the Mildly Depressed

Previous terror management research has demonstrated that mildly depressed participants show a greater increase in worldview defense in response to reminders of their mortality than do nondepressed participants. Because the cultural worldview is posited to provide a meaningful conception of life, we hypothesized that mildly depressed participants who defend their worldview in response to mortality salience (MS) would increase their perception that the world is meaningful. A preliminary study first examined the Kunzendorf No Meaning Scale as a measure to assess perceptions of meaning. In the primary study, mildly depressed and nondepressed participants contemplated their own mortality or a neutral topic, evaluated two targets in a manner that either allowed them to defend their worldview or that did not, and then completed the Kunzendorf No Meaning Scale. As predicted, mildly depressed participants who had the opportunity to defend their worldview in response to mortality salience reported greater meaning in life than did mildly depressed participants who did not have the opportunity to defend their worldview, or mildly depressed participants not exposed to mortality salience. Implications for understanding and treating depression are briefly discussed.     

Integrated versus modular theories of number skills and acalculia

This paper contrasts two views of the cognitive architecture underlying numerical skills and acalculia. According to the abstract-modular theory (e.g., McCloskey, Caramazza, & Basili, 1985), number processing is comprised of independent comprehension, calculation, and production subsystems that communicate via a single type of abstract quantity code. The alternative, specific-integrated theory (e.g., Campbell & Clark, 1988), proposes that visuospatial, verbal, and other modality-specific number codes are associatively connected as an encoding complex and that different facets of number processing generally involve common, rather than independent, processes. The hypothesis of specific number codes is supported by conceptual inadequacies of abstract codes, format-specific phenomena in calculation, the diversity of acalculias and individual differences in number processing, lateralization issues, and the role of format-specific codes in working memory. The integrated, associative view of number processing is supported by the dependence of modular views on abstract codes and other conceptual inadequacies, evidence for integrated associative networks in calculation tasks, acalculia phenomena, shortcomings in modular architectures for number-processing dissociations, close ties between semantic and verbal aspects of numbers, and continuities between number and nonnumber processing. These numerous logical and empirical considerations challenge the abstract-modular theory and support the encoding-complex view that number processing is effected by integrated associative networks of modality-specific number codes.     

Cognitive Manipulation of GSR Extinction: Analogues for Conditioning Therapies

Cognitive determinants of GSR activity during extinction trials were examined following conditioning. Conditioned GSRs extinguished rapidly when subjects were informed the UCS would not again be administered, compared to subjects not given this information. Of greater interest was the finding that (false) high feedback concerning subjects' responsivity to the Cs+ during extinction served to maintain GSR activity at a higher level than subjects receiving (false) low feedback. The relationship was observed within both information conditions. Implications are drawn for both aversive conditioning therapy and systematic desensitization.     

Incorporating Muslim migrants in western nation states – a comparison of the United Kingdom, France, and Germany

This article analyses how nation states respond to religious diversity produced by migration. Drawing on research results from a comparative macro-sociological study on the incorporation of Muslims in the United Kingdom, France, and Germany, it is argued that both the claims of recognition and the modes of symbolic and organizational incorporation are shaped by varying institutional arrangements of political organization, collective identity, and religion. Yet recent convergences in the development of multicultural forms of incorporation and the inclusion of religion as a legitimate category of identity in the public sphere suggest that these institutional arrangements are equally transformed under the influence of transnational discourses of human rights.     

A blast from the past: The terror management function of nostalgia

According to terror management theory, people turn to meaning-providing structures to cope with the knowledge of inevitable mortality. Recent theory and research suggest that nostalgia is a meaning-providing resource and thus may serve such an existential function. The current research tests and supports this idea. In Experiments 1 and 2, nostalgia proneness was measured and mortality salience manipulated. In Experiment 1, when mortality was salient, the more prone to nostalgia participants were, the more they perceived life to be meaningful. In Experiment 2, when mortality was salient, the more prone to nostalgia participants were, the less death thoughts were accessible. In Experiment 3, nostalgia and mortality salience were manipulated. It was found that nostalgia buffered the effects of mortality salience on death-thought accessibility.     

The implications of death for health: a terror management health model for behavioral health promotion

This article introduces a terror management health model (TMHM). The model integrates disparate health and social psychology literatures to elucidate how the conscious and nonconscious awareness of death can influence the motivational orientation that is most operative in the context of health decisions. Three formal propositions are presented. Proposition 1 suggests that conscious thoughts about death can instigate health-oriented responses aimed at removing death-related thoughts from current focal attention. Proposition 2 suggests that the unconscious resonance of death-related cognition promotes self-oriented defenses directed toward maintaining, not one's health, but a sense of meaning and self-esteem. The last proposition suggests that confrontations with the physical body may undermine symbolic defenses and thus present a previously unrecognized barrier to health promotion activities. In the context of each proposition, moderators are proposed, research is reviewed, and implications for health promotion are discussed.     

Subtraction by addition

University students’ self-reports indicate that they often solve basic subtraction problems (13?6=?) by reference to the corresponding addition problem (6+7=13; therefore, 13?6=7). In this case, solution latency should be faster with subtraction problems presented in addition format (6+_=13) than in standard subtraction format (13+6=_). In Experiment 1, the addition format resembled the standard layout for addition with the sum on the right (6+_=13), whereas in Experiment 2, the addition format resembled subtraction with the minuend on the left (13=6+_). Both experiments demonstrated a latency advantage for large problems (minuend > 10) in the addition format as compared with the subtraction format (13+6=_), although the effect was larger in Experiment 1 (254 msec) than in Experiment 2 (125 msec). Small subtractions (minuend ≤ 10) in Experiment 1 were solved equally quickly in the subtraction or addition format, but in Experiment 2, performance on small problems was faster in the standard format (5?3=_) than in the addition format (5=3+_). The results indicate that educated adults often use addition reference to solve large simple subtraction problems, but that they rely on direct memory retrieval for small subtractions.