Personality maturity and Teresa's interior castle

The ego development stage model theory of Jane Loevinger is compared to the understanding of St. Teresa of Avila regarding development in spiritual life. The paper first presents Loevinger's theory, then goes through the mansions Teresa described in the interior castle of the soul, comparing each mansion with Loevinger's understanding. The paper concludes that a very similar line of development is traced in both understandings.This paper is a revision of a paper first presented to Division 36, Psychologists Interested in Religious Issues, at the annual meeting of The American Psychological Association.     

The Rorschach test for predicting suicide among depressed adolescent inpatients.

With the decreasing length of psychiatric hospitalizations, identification of test indicators of suicide risk becomes critically important. This Rorschach study was designed to model a clinical decision-making scenario concerning adolescent suicide risk. Using Psychiatric Evaluation Form (PEF) scores, we selected a sample of 25 severely depressed and suicidal adolescents; 26 severely depressed, not suicidal adolescents; and 28 not suicidal, not depressed adolescent inpatients at The Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital. A Rorschach Index using the Exner (1986) Comprehensive System for scoring was developed to predict group membership. Four of six of the features on this index selected 64% of suicidal subjects. This constellation included traditional affective variables (vista responses, color-shading blends, color dominated responses, and morbid content) as well as measures of cognitive distortion (inaccurately perceived human movement responses [M-] and special scores). We discuss the implications of these findings for the diagnosis and treatment of the suicidal adolescent.     

Developmental changes of parental-reported sleep disturbance symptoms in children with attention deficit disorder

The primary goal of this retrospective study was to assess parental report of current sleep disorders in school-aged attention deficit disorder (ADD) children, as well as recalled sleep problems from when the children were infants (0–12 months) and toddlers (1–3 years). Results of a sleep questionnaire completed by mothers of 48 ADD children and a comparison group of 30 patients with school problems indicate that ADD children were perceived to have significantly more sleep problems and that these problems had onset in infancy. Specific items in the questionnaire which were increased included latency to sleep onset of more than 30 min at least 3 nights per week, fatigue upon awakening, and recall of nightmares. Pediatric clinicians should be alert to possible sleep disorders in children suspected of attention disorders and should consider sleep hygiene measures as a component of treatment.     

Facilitative school leadership and teacher empowerment: Teacher's perspectives

In recent years, facilitative forms of leadership and teacher empowerment for the democratic restructuring of schools have been emphasized. However, no published studies seem to have examined teachers' perspectives of both facilitative school leadership and empowerment. This article describes the everyday strategies and personal characteristics of exemplary principals practicing facilitative leadership in shared-governance schools and how these principals influenced teacher empowerment. The date were drawn from a qualitative study of teachers in 11 schools in Georgia. An openended questionnaire was designed to provide teachers the opportunity to identify and describe in detail the characteristics of principals that enhanced their sense of empowerment and what being empowered means to teachers. Inductive analyses of the data generated seven major strategies, one set of personal characteristics identified with facilitative leadership, and two major dimensions of teacher empowerment: affective and professional. This article emphasizes the meanings teachers identified with empowerment.     

Peer review for journals: Evidence on quality control, fairness, and innovation

This paper reviews the published empirical evidence concerning journal peer review consisting of 68 papers, all but three published since 1975. Peer review improves quality, but its use to screen papers has met with limited success. Current procedures to assure quality and fairness seem to discourage scientific advancement, especially important innovations, because findings that conflict with current beliefs are often judged to have defects. Editors can use procedures to encourage the publication of papers with innovative findings such as invited papers, early-acceptance procedures, author nominations of reviewers, structured rating sheets, open peer review, results-blind review, and, in particular, electronic publication. Some journals are currently using these procedures. The basic principle behind the proposals is to change the decision from whether to publish a paper to how to publish it. The author, a professor of marketing at the Wharton School since 1968, was a founder editor of the Journal of Forecasting and the International Journal of Forecasting. This paper is based on a presentation at a workshop, “Advances in Peer Review Research”, American Association for the Advancement of Science Meeting, Baltimore, MD, February 9, 1996.     

Differential effects of stimulus context on perceived length: Implications for the horizontal-vertical illusion

Six experiments examined orientation-specific effects of stimulus context on the visual perception of horizontal and vertical lengths: Using a paired-comparison method, Experiments 1–5 showed that the probability of judging a given vertical line to be longer than a given horizontal line was relatively great when the stimulus set comprised relatively long horizontals and short verticals, and relatively small when the stimulus set comprised short horizontals with long verticals. To the extent that stimulus context exerts orientation-specific effects on perceived length, it thereby modulates the degree to which verticals appear longer than physically equivalent horizontals: the horizontal—vertical illusion (HVI). Under various contextual conditions, the HVI was as small as 3% (horizontals had to be 3% greater than verticals to be perceived as equally long) and as great as 15%, equaling about 12% in a “neutral” context. In Experiment 6, subjects judged the absolute physical length of each stimulus, and the results indicated that stimulus context acted largely by decreasing perceived lengths. The results are consistent with the hypothesis that differential effects of context reflect a process of stimulus-specific perceptual attenuation.     

Present time perspective as a predictor of risky driving

This research introduces a new individual difference variable, time perspective, as an important predictor of risky driving. Across three separate replications, with 2863 participants, present time perspective is significantly correlated with reported risky driving behaviors. Its effect is greater than, and independent of, the negative correlations between future time perspective and risky driving. Additionally, males are more present-oriented and report taking more risks than females, while females are more future-oriented. Regression analyses and discriminate validity assessments demonstrate that present time perspective remains an independent predictor of risky driving even when pitted against nine other measures previously reported as related to driving risk, such as, sensation seeking, impulsivity, and aggression. Although complicated by the number of factors potentially involved, it is imperative to attempt to predict such risk because of the enormous economic and psychological toll resulting from auto accidents and fatalities related to risky driving. Discussion centers on implications for education based on understanding the psychological dynamics of time perspective and links to general risk-taking and self-regulation.     

The impact of generic word choices: An empirical investigation of age- and sex-related differences

Previous studies of receivers' responses to generic words have found that adults generally develop masculine imagery for neutral words and that men do this more than women. The present investigation of school-aged children (n=471) found that they, like adults, develop sex-specific masculine imagery in response to apparently neutral messages. Early adolescents, however, reported significantly more inclusive imagery than 6–7-year-olds. Different pronoun conditions elicited different mental imagery for the receivers of the messages with he/she eliciting more of a balance between male and female images and they eliciting more inclusive imagery.This work was supported by a grant from the Indiana University—Purdue University at Fort Wayne Research and Instructional Development Support Program.     

Ethnicity and sex-role socialization: A comparative example using life history data from Hawaii

Hawaii's multiethnic society is explored as a field for researching the impact of ethnicity on the learning of female sex roles via the life history approach. Life history data collected by the author from women of Hawaii's Chinese and Portuguese communities is drawn on for a comparison of their socialization to sex-related roles in the domestic and selected public domains during their girlhoods in the 1920s and 1930s. Discussion examines six categories of information pertinent to research of the ethnicity/sex-role relationship which the case studies suggest life histories are rich in. Possible future directions for research of the topic via the life history approach are considered.