The Relationship Between Religious Coping Style and Anxiety over Breast Cancer in African American Women

In this study, we investigated the relationship between religious coping style and anxiety related to breast cancer and the use of mammography in a sample of African American women. We also assessed the relationship of breast cancer anxiety to related variables such as church affiliation and attendance, church teachings on health, and acceptance of those teachings.     

Intellectual Freedom and Economic Sufficiency as Educational Entitlements

This paper explores the historic philosophical contributions ofMill and Marx toward a comprehensive conception of intellectual freedomas a basic educational entitlement. In a perhaps surprising confluence,Marx's theory of a material base for freedom of thought is then extendedin a discussion of contemporary freedoms including, importantly,academic freedom and its implication for teaching, the profession andits training.     

A Dissociation between Symbolic Number Knowledge and Analogue Magnitude Information

Semantic understanding of numbers and related concepts can be dissociated from rote knowledge of arithmetic facts. However, distinctions among different kinds of semantic representations related to numbers have not been fully explored. Working with numbers and arithmetic requires representing semantic information that is both analogue (e.g., the approximate magnitude of a number) and symbolic (e.g., what / means). In this article, the authors describe a patient (MC) who exhibits a dissociation between tasks that require symbolic number knowledge (e.g., knowledge of arithmetic symbols including numbers, knowledge of concepts related to numbers such as rounding) and tasks that require an analogue magnitude representation (e.g., comparing size or frequency). MC is impaired on a variety of tasks that require symbolic number knowledge, but her ability to represent and process analogue magnitude information is intact. Her deficit in symbolic number knowledge extends to a variety of concepts related to numbers (e.g., decimal points, Roman numerals, what a quartet is) but not to any other semantic categories that we have tested. These findings suggest that symbolic number knowledge is a functionally independent component of the number processing system, that it is category specific, and that it is anatomically and functionally distinct from magnitude representations.     

Cultural Mistrust,Ethnic Identity,Racial Identity,and Self‐Esteem Among Ethnically Diverse Black University Students

Cultural mistrust, ethnic identity, racial identity, and self‐esteem were examined among African (n = 26), African American (n = 110), and West Indian/Caribbean (n = 24) university students. African American students' scores were statistically different from those of African and West Indian/Caribbean students on cultural mistrust, racial identity, and ethnic identity measures. There were no statistically significant differences on self‐esteem among the 3 groups. Results did indicate that cultural mistrust, ethnic identity, and racial identity accounted for 37% of the variance in self‐esteem for African American students. Implications for practice and future research directions are discussed.     

Religious Occupations and Stress Questionnaire (ROS): Instrument Development

The authors describe the development of the Religious Occupations and Stress Questionnaire (ROS), which attempts to fill the need for an appropriate measure of the stress experienced by individuals in religious occupations. The ROS has 4 stress‐related subscales (General Stress. Occupational Stress, Identity/Image Stress, and Gender Issues Stress) and a Coping subscale. Results of reliability and validity studies of the ROS with male and female Protestants, Catholics, and Jews who were in religious occupations indicated high internal consistency, test‐retest reliability, and construct validity.     

Stress and Immunity: Age Enhances the Risks

A competent immune response is central to good health. There is good evidence that both aging and psychological stress can dysregulate immune function, resulting in changes in various aspects of the immune response that are large enough to have consequences for health. Older adults appear to show even greater immunological impairments associated with stress or depression than younger adults. Thus, the data suggest that aging interacts with stress and depression to enhance risks for morbidity and mortality among older adults.     

EMPOWERING TOKEN WOMEN LEADERS

We hypothesized that, in a masculine task, only token women leaders who were empowered through position (by being appointed leader) and expertise (trained with task-relevant information) and legitimated by a male experimenter as credible would be more effective in influencing the performance of their all-male groups than appointed-only and appointed-trained leaders. Thirty women undergraduates each led a small group of male students on a moon survival task. The hypothesis was supported. Videotapes of group interactions revealed that appointed-trained leaders interrupted group members and used tentative tag questions in failed attempts to share their task-relevant knowledge. In addition, group members reported the most dissatisfaction with appointed-trained leaders who, without legitimacy, violated diffused gender roles by presuming to be expert on a masculine task. The importance of the organizational empowerment of token women is underscored.