Christian Couple Counseling by Professional,Pastoral, and Lay Counselors from a Protestant Perspective: A Nationwide Survey

Couple counseling is widely practiced by Christian counselors, but there are almost no empirical data investigating it. The present study presents data from a national web-based survey of counselors from the American Association of Christian Counselors (AACC). We describe the nature of Christian couple counseling, as well as counselors' religiousness and their attitudes toward integrating religion and spirituality into couple counseling. Christian couple counselors were highly religious and their personal religiosity affected their attitude toward incorporating religion in counseling. There were differences between professional, pastoral, and lay counselors suggesting that each be treated separately rather than be lumped generically as Christian couple counseling.     

Summer Reading: Predicting Adolescent Word Learning from Aptitude,Time Spent Reading,and Text Type

Mostly low-income African American and Hispanic teens (N = 192) were tested in (a) passage comprehension, (b) vocabulary ability, (c) cloze task performance, and (d) listening comprehension in the spring and vocabulary in the fall. Students were surveyed about reading (a) narrative, (b) expository, (c) teen culture, and (d) online texts. Interaction terms created by the product of cloze task scores with the time and frequency of student narrative and expository reading were both significant predictors of fall vocabulary. Online reading was popular but did not predict vocabulary gains. Teen culture reading predicted vocabulary loss. Text type and student profiles both play a role in predicting fall vocabulary scores from summer reading.     

The Duty to Support Nationalistic Policies

We demonstrate that citizens perceive a duty to support policies that benefit their nation, even when they themselves judge that the consequences of the policies will be worse on the whole, taking outsiders into account. In terms of actions, subjects think they would do their perceived duty rather than violate it for the sake of better consequences. The discrepancy between duty and judged consequences does not seem to result from self‐interest alone. When asked for reasons, many subjects felt an obligation to help their fellow citizens before others, and they also thought that they owed something to their nation, in return for what it did for them. The obligation to help fellow citizens was the strongest predictor of perceived duty. In an experiment with Israeli and Palestinian students, group membership affected both perceived overall consequences and duty, but the effect of group on perceived consequences did not account for the effect on perceived duty. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Applicant Faking,Social Desirability,and the Prediction of Counterproductive Work Behaviors

Recent studies have pointed to within-subjects designs as an especially effective tool for gauging the occurrence of faking behavior in applicant samples. The current study utilized a within-subjects design and data from a sample of job applicants to compare estimates of faking via within-subjects score change to estimates based on a social desirability scale. In addition, we examined the impact of faking on the relationship between Conscientiousness and counterproductive work behaviors (CWBs), as well as the direct linkage between faking and CWBs. Our results suggest that social desirability scales are poor indicators of within-subjects score change, and applicant faking is both related to CWBs and has a negative impact on the criterion-related validity of Conscientiousness as a predictor of CWBs.     

Modeling the Indirect Association of Combat Exposure With Anger and Aggression During Combat Deployment: The Moderating Role of Perceived Unit Morale

Anger and aggression are common combat-related behavioral health problems. The impact of combat on anger and aggression appears to be largely attributable to symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Factors that moderate the purported pathway from combat to anger and aggression are poorly understood. We examined the conditional direct and indirect associations of combat exposure with self-reported anger and aggression using survey data collected from 592 U.S. Soldiers during a combat deployment in Afghanistan. Unit morale was examined as a moderator between combat exposure and PSTD symptoms, as well as the indirect association of combat exposure with anger and aggression via PTSD symptoms, controlling for depression symptoms. Results indicated that unit morale was negatively correlated with PTSD symptoms and self-reported anger and aggressive behaviors. Perceptions of unit morale moderated the direct association of combat exposure with PTSD symptoms. Unit morale also moderated the indirect association of combat exposure with anger and aggression through PTSD symptoms. Unit morale moderated the association of combat exposure with anger and aggression during combat operations by putatively mitigating the deleterious effect of combat on stress-related symptoms. The impact of policy and leadership on soldier and unit morale should be carefully considered given its protective role during combat operations.     

What are the cognitive costs of racism? A reply to Gendler

Tamar Gendler argues that, for those living in a society in which race is a salient sociological feature, it is impossible to be fully rational: members of such a society must either fail to encode relevant information containing race, or suffer epistemic costs by being implicitly racist. However, I argue that, although Gendler calls attention to a pitfall worthy of study, she fails to conclusively demonstrate that there are epistemic (or cognitive) costs of being racist. Gendler offers three supporting phenomena. First, implicit racists expend cognitive energy repressing their implicit biases. I reply, citing Ellen Bialystok’s research, that constant use of executive functioning can be beneficial. Second, Gendler argues that awareness of a negative stereotype of one’s own race with regard to a given task negatively affects one’s performance of that task. This phenomenon, I argue, demonstrates that those against whom the stigma is directed suffer costs, but it fails to demonstrate that the stigmatizers suffer cognitively. Finally, Gendler argues that racists are less competent when recognizing faces of other races than when recognizing faces of their own race because, in the first instance, they encode the race of the face (taking up cognitive space that could have been used to encode fine-grained distinctions), whereas in the second instance they encode no race. I argue that in-group/out-group categorization rather than racism is the cognitive cost. I conclude that Gendler has failed to demonstrate that there are cognitive costs associated with being a racist.     

Conceptual overlap between moral norms and anticipated regret in the prediction of intention: Implications for theory of planned behaviour research

Moral norms and anticipated regret are widely used extensions to the theory of planned behaviour, yet there is some evidence to suggest that these constructs may conceptually overlap as predictors of intention. Two health-related behaviours with distinct moral implications (Study 1: organ donation registration, N?=?352 and Study 2: condom usage, N?=?1815) were therefore examined to ascertain whether moral norms and anticipated regret are indeed conceptually distinct. While evidence consistent with conceptual overlap was identified in Study 1, the evidence for such overlap in Study 2 was more ambiguous. In Study 3, a meta-analysis of existing literature revealed that the relationship between moral norms and anticipated regret was moderated by the extent of the moral implications arising from the behaviour under examination. Taken together, these findings suggest that conceptual overlap between moral norms and anticipated regret is more likely to occur among behaviours with obvious moral implications. Researchers wishing to examine the predictive utility of moral norms and anticipated regret among such behaviours would therefore be advised to aggregate these measures to form a composite variable (personal norms).     

Examining the effects of perceived social support on momentary mood and symptom reports in asthma and arthritis patients

Objective: Social support has been linked to beneficial effects on health directly (main effect) and as a buffer to stress. Most research, however, has examined these relationships using global and retrospective assessments of health and stress, which may be subject to recall biases. This study used ambulatory ecological momentary assessment (EMA) methods to test the main and stress-buffering effects of social support on the daily health and well-being of asthma and rheumatoid arthritis (RA) patients.

Design: Community volunteers with asthma (n?=?97) or RA (n?=?31) responded to EMA prompts five times daily for one week.

Main outcomes: Baseline perceived social support was obtained, and then, participants reported mood, stress and symptoms using EMA. Multilevel mixed-modelling examined whether social support predicted mood and symptoms directly or via stress-reducing effects.

Results: Supporting a main effect, more perceived social support predicted decreased negative mood and stress severity. Supporting a stress-buffering effect, more perceived social support resulted in fewer reported symptoms when stress was present.

Conclusion: Results suggest perceived social support directly relates to better ambulatory status and dynamically buffers individuals against the negative effects of stressors, and highlight the importance of studying social support across different temporal and contextual levels.     

Development of decisional balance and self-efficacy measures for adolescent sedentary behaviors

Writing about traumatic events can produce health benefits, yet emotionally non-expressive or cognitively avoidant individuals may be unwilling or unable to express their emotions. This study examined non-expression, cognitive avoidance, response to writing, and subsequent health. As part of a larger study, participants ( N = 71) with asthma or rheumatoid arthritis (RA) wrote about traumatic experiences for 20 min on three consecutive days. Alexithymia, denial, behavioral disengagement, mental disengagement, focus on/venting of emotions, avoidant thoughts, and health status were assessed at baseline, health status again 4 months after writing. Essays were coded for how personal and how emotional they were, and for narrative structure. Non-expression and cognitive avoidance were neither related to how personal or emotional essays were, nor to affective response to writing. High levels of denial or avoidant thoughts predicted less narrative structure. Avoidant thinking marginally predicted health improvements in RA patients. Results suggest that non-expression and cognitive avoidance do not interfere with writing in terms of emotional engagement, but may influence narrative use.