An Interpersonal Approach to Religiousness and Spirituality: Implications for Health and Well‐Being

The interpersonal tradition (Horowitz & Strack, 2011) provides a rich conceptual and methodological framework for theory‐driven research on mechanisms linking religiousness and spirituality (R/S) with health and well‐being. In three studies, we illustrate this approach to R/S. In Studies 1 and 2, undergraduates completed various self‐report measures of R/S, interpersonal style, and other aspects of interpersonal functioning. In Study 3, a community sample completed a wide variety of R/S measures and a measure of interpersonal style. Many, but not all, aspects of religiousness (e.g., overall religiousness, intrinsic religiousness) were associated with a warm interpersonal style, and most aspects and measures of spirituality were associated with a warm and somewhat dominant style. Spirituality and related constructs (i.e., gratitude, compassion) were associated with interpersonal goals that emphasize positive relationships with others, and with beneficial interpersonal outcomes (i.e., higher social support, less loneliness, and less conflict). However, some aspects of R/S (e.g., extrinsic religiousness, belief in a punishing God) were associated with a hostile interpersonal style. R/S have interpersonal correlates that may enhance or undermine health and emotional adjustment. This interpersonal perspective could help clarify why some aspects of religiousness and spirituality are beneficial and others are not.     

Openness to Experience,Intellect, and Cognitive Ability

An instrument designed to separate 2 midlevel traits within each of the Big Five (the Big Five Aspect Scales [BFAS]) was used to clarify the relation of personality to cognitive ability. The BFAS measures Openness to Experience and Intellect as separate (although related) traits, and refers to the broader Big Five trait as Openness/Intellect. In 2 samples (N = 125 and 189), Intellect was independently associated with general intelligence (g) and with verbal and nonverbal intelligence about equally. Openness was independently associated only with verbal intelligence. Implications of these findings are discussed for the empirical and conceptual relations of intelligence to personality and for the mechanisms potentially underlying both Openness/Intellect and cognitive ability.     

Moving beyond counselling and psychotherapy as it currently is – taking therapy outside

Research was undertaken by the author in order to describe, interpret and explain what happens when counsellors and psychotherapists who have been trained to work indoors with their therapy clients take their therapy practice into outdoor natural spaces. A central research question addressed ‘What happens when counsellors and psychotherapists, who have been trained to work indoors with their therapy clients, take their therapy practice in to outdoor natural spaces?’ Semi-structured interviews were undertaken with therapists who practised outdoors. Three dominant themes emerged critiquing aspects of current counselling and psychotherapy practice. These were related to the unfolding ecological crisis, the context of the work and moving beyond current conceptions of distress and the role of therapy in addressing this.     

Auditory temporal pattern learning by songbirds using maximal stimulus diversity and minimal repetition

The sequential patterning of complex acoustic elements is a salient feature of bird song and other forms of vocal communication. For European starlings (Sturnus vulgaris), a songbird species, individual vocal recognition is improved when the temporal organization of song components (called motifs) follows the normal patterns of each singer. This sensitivity to natural motif sequences may underlie observations that starlings can also learn more complex, unnatural motif patterns. Alternatively, it has been proposed that the apparent acquisition of abstract motif patterning rules instead reflects idiosyncrasies of the training conditions used in prior experiments. That is, that motif patterns are learned not by recognizing differences in temporal structures between patterns, but by identifying serendipitous features (e.g., acoustical cues) in the small sets of training and testing stimuli used. Here, we investigate this possibility, by asking whether starlings can learn to discriminate between two arbitrary motif patterns, when unique examples of each pattern are presented on every trial. Our results demonstrate that abstract motif patterning rules can be acquired from trial-unique stimuli and suggest that such training leads to better pattern generalization compared with training with much smaller stimulus subsets.     

Measuring Epistemic Curiosity in Young Children

Epistemic curiosity (EC) is the desire to obtain new knowledge capable of either producing positive experiences of intellectual interest (I‐type) or of reducing undesirable conditions of informational deprivation (D‐type). Although researchers acknowledge that there are individual differences in young children's epistemic curiosity, there are no existing measures to assess the I‐ and D‐type constructs of EC in early childhood. The aim of this study was to develop and validate parent‐report scales that reliably assessed early expressions of I‐ and D‐ type EC in young children. To develop the I/D‐Young Children (I/D‐YC) scales, 16 potential items were administered to 316 parents of children aged 3 to 8. These items were adaptations of an existing adult self‐report measure of EC as well as newly developed items. Confirmatory factor analyses demonstrated that a 10‐item 2‐factor (5 I‐type, 5 D‐type) model had the best fit. Construct validity analyses and psychometric data indicated that our newly developed I/D‐YC scales are valid and reliable measures of individual differences in early expressions of I‐ and D‐type EC. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Teaching foundational perspective‐taking skills to children with autism using the PEAK‐T curriculum: single‐reversal “I–You” deictic frames

We taught basic perspective‐taking tasks to 3 children with autism and evaluated their ability to derive mutually entailed single‐reversal deictic relations of those newly established perspective‐taking skills. Furthermore, we examined the possibility of transfers of perspective‐taking function to novel untrained stimuli. The methods were taken from the PEAK‐T training curriculum, and results yielded positive gains for all 3 children to learn basic perspective taking as well as for 2 of the 3 to derive untrained single‐reversal I relations following direct training of single‐reversal You relations. All participants demonstrated a transfer of stimulus function to untrained stimuli after the single‐reversal deictic relations had been mastered.     

Openness to Experience and Intellect Differentially Predict Creative Achievement in the Arts and Sciences

The Big Five personality dimension Openness/Intellect is the trait most closely associated with creativity and creative achievement. Little is known, however, regarding the discriminant validity of its two aspects—Openness to Experience (reflecting cognitive engagement with perception, fantasy, aesthetics, and emotions) and Intellect (reflecting cognitive engagement with abstract and semantic information, primarily through reasoning)—in relation to creativity. In four demographically diverse samples totaling 1,035 participants, we investigated the independent predictive validity of Openness and Intellect by assessing the relations among cognitive ability, divergent thinking, personality, and creative achievement across the arts and sciences. We confirmed the hypothesis that whereas Openness predicts creative achievement in the arts, Intellect predicts creative achievement in the sciences. Inclusion of performance measures of general cognitive ability and divergent thinking indicated that the relation of Intellect to scientific creativity may be due at least in part to these abilities. Lastly, we found that Extraversion additionally predicted creative achievement in the arts, independently of Openness. Results are discussed in the context of dual‐process theory.