Leland Royce Harper: Multiverse deism: shifting perspectives of God and the world

International Journal for Philosophy of Religion -     

How Valuable Could a Person Be?*

We investigate the value of persons. Our primary goal is to chart a path from equal and extreme value to infinite value. We advance two arguments. Each argument offers a reason to think that equal and extreme value are best accounted for if we are infinitely valuable. We then raise some difficult but fruitful questions about the possible grounds or sources of our infinite value, if we indeed have such value.     

The association between vivid thoughts of death and authenticity

Many theoretical perspectives link death-related thoughts to authenticity; however, there is little empirical research directly examining this association. The current studies examined how recalling a vivid experience associated with mortality relates to outcomes indicative of authentic engagement. In Study 1, participants described an experience that made them think about their mortality, indicated how vivid their recollection was, and completed measures of authenticity and goal-pursuit. Results indicated that how vividly a mortality experience was recalled predicted greater authenticity and more important goal-pursuits. Study 2 replicated many of the findings and found a similar pattern when individuals vividly recalled a mortality experience of a close other. Study 3 again replicated these results after controlling for a host of death-related variables. Exploratory analyses further revealed that ruminating about death was often negatively associated with authenticity. Implications for the role of death-related thoughts in authentic and alienated becoming are discussed.     

Angels and Loners: An Examination of Abstainer Subtypes

Scholars speculate that there may be both prosocial and antisocial modes of abstention; however, few attempts have been made to examine this idea empirically. Using a pooled sample from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979, group-based trajectory analysis is presented to identify adolescents who abstain from marijuana, vandalism, violence, and theft during their teenage years, and latent class analysis is used to examine within-group heterogeneity among abstainers. A subset of abstainers report weak peer integration, psycho-emotional instability, worse academic performance, and more conflict with their parents. Implications of findings are discussed.     

Microaggressions and Perceptions of Cultural Humility in Counseling

The purpose of this study was to explore how microaggressions affect counseling outcomes. Participants were 128 racial/ethnic minority individuals who had been in counseling within the past year. Results indicated that identity attributions were associated with counseling outcomes (i.e., working alliance and perceived improvement in counseling). Furthermore, perceptions of cultural humility mediated the relationship between negative emotion due to rupture and counseling outcomes (i.e., working alliance and perceived improvement in counseling).     

Narcissism and Hypomania Revisited: a Test of the Similarities and Differences in Their Empirical Networks

The goal of the present research was to clarify the relationship between narcissism and hypomania, both of which are multidimensional in nature. More specifically, this study examines the relations between two narcissism dimensions (grandiose and vulnerable) and three hypomania dimensions (social vitality, mood volatility, and excitement) in relation to adverse developmental experiences, affective experiences, a multidimensional model of impulsivity, and general personality traits. The absolute similarities across the patterns of correlations manifested by the narcissism and hypomania subscales were then examined. Like the multidimensionality found in narcissism in which grandiose and vulnerable narcissism manifest unrelated or negatively related empirical networks, the same was true for the hypomania dimensions. Grandiose narcissism manifested substantially similar empirical profiles with the hypomania components of social vitality and, to a lesser extent, excitement. Conversely, vulnerable narcissism manifested a profile quite similar to a third hypomania component – mood volatility. These findings are discussed in the context of the difficulty in developing robust and coherent research literatures when using multidimensional total scores for either narcissism or hypomania.