The Oswald Clergy Burnout Scale: Reliability, Factor Structure and Preliminary Application Among Australian Clergy

This study assesses the Oswald Clergy Burnout Scale (OCBI), the psychometric properties of which have not been previously described. Analysis of responses from a large number (N?=?3,012) of ministers in charge of Australian congregations showed that the scale’s internal reliability was satisfactory, and that the scale could be represented by two factors, identified, respectively, as the personal and social aspects of burnout. This structure was supported by confirmatory factor analysis. Several demographic and job-related variables that might relate to burnout were regressed on the total, personal and social factor scores. Age is the predominant (negative) predictor of burnout as measured by the total scale and the personal factor scores. All variables predict burnout as measured by the social factor. However, in all models, the predictor variables account for no more than 5% of the total variance. These findings suggest that demographic factors and working conditions are poor predictors of burnout among clergy.     

Personality and Religious Maturity

A sample of 226 students attending seminaries, theological colleges, and bible schools completed Newton Malony’s Religious Status Inventory (as a measure of religious maturity) alongside the short-form Revised Eysenck Personality Questionnaire. The data demonstrated some ways in which stable toughminded extraverts projected higher levels of religious maturity according to some of Malony’s criteria.     

Participatory Organizational Change in Community-Based Health and Human Services: From Tokenism to Political Engagement

Community psychologists have long worked with community-based human service organizations to build participatory processes. These efforts largely aim at building participatory practices within the current individual-wellness paradigm of human services. To address collective wellness, human service organizations need to challenge their current paradigm, attend to the social justice needs of community, and engage community participation in a new way, and in doing so become more openly political. We use qualitative interviews, focus groups, organizational documents, and participant observation to present a comparative case study of two organizations involved in such a process through an action research project aimed at transforming the organizations’ managerial and practice paradigm from one based on first-order, ameliorative change to one that promotes second-order, transformative change via strength-based approaches, primary prevention, empowerment and participation, and focuses on changing community conditions. Four participatory tensions or dialectics are discussed: passive versus active participation, partners versus clients, surplus powerlessness versus collective efficacy, and reflection/learning versus action/doing.     

There's more to emotion than meets the eye: A processing bias for neutral content in the domain of emotional prosody

Research on emotion processing in the visual modality suggests a processing advantage for emotionally salient stimuli, even at early sensory stages; however, results concerning the auditory correlates are inconsistent. We present two experiments that employed a gating paradigm to investigate emotional prosody. In Experiment 1, participants heard successively building segments of Jabberwocky "sentences" spoken with happy, angry, or neutral intonation. After each segment, participants indicated the emotion conveyed and rated their confidence in their decision. Participants in Experiment 2 also heard Jabberwocky "sentences" in successive increments, with half discriminating happy from neutral prosody, and half discriminating angry from neutral prosody. Participants in both experiments identified neutral prosody more rapidly and accurately than happy or angry prosody. Confidence ratings were greater for neutral sentences, and error patterns also indicated a bias for recognising neutral prosody. Taken together, results suggest that enhanced processing of emotional content may be constrained by stimulus modality.     

Courtship learning in Drosophila melanogaster: Diverse plasticity of a reproductive behavior

Mechanisms for identifying appropriate mating partners are critical for species propagation. In many species, the male uses multiple sensory modalities to search for females and to subsequently determine if they are fit and receptive. Males can also use the information they acquire in this process to change their courtship behavior and reduce courtship of classes of targets that are inappropriate or unreceptive. In Drosophila, courtship plasticity, in the form of both nonassociative and associative learning, has been documented—the type of learning depending on the nature of the trainer. The conditions in which the male is presented with the training target can profoundly alter the cues that he finds salient and the longevity of the memory that he forms. With the exception of habituation and sensitization, these types of plasticity have an operant component in that the male must be courting to respond to the behavior-altering cues. Courtship plasticity is therefore a complex and rich range of behaviors rather than a single entity. Our understanding of these plastic behaviors has been enhanced by recent advances in our understanding of the circuitry underlying courtship itself and the identification of chemical cues that drive and modify the behavior. Courtship learning is providing a window into how animals can use a variety of sensory inputs to modulate a decision making process at many levels.When confronted with a potential mate, Drosophila melanogaster males perform a stereotyped courtship ritual. This behavior serves at least two obvious functions for the male. The first is to prime conspecific females for copulation. During courtship, the female is assessing the male''s suitability, and if the song he sings (Burnet et al. 1971; von Schilcher 1976a) and pheromones he emits (Grillet et al. 2006; Kurtovic et al. 2007) are correct for her species and of sufficient quality, her willingness to copulate is increased. She will slow her locomotion, present her abdomen to the male, and then spread her wings and genital plates to allow him to mount (Lasbleiz et al. 2006). A second function of courtship is that it allows a male to accumulate information about the target courtship object to assess its suitability and receptiveness. The male uses auditory, mechanosensory, visual, and chemosensory signals from the target to make this assessment (for review, see Villella and Hall 2008; Ejima and Griffith 2009).Since D. melanogaster males will avidly initiate courtship of a wide variety of inappropriate and/or unreceptive targets, including immature males, sexually immature virgin females, mated females, and heterospecific females, the information obtained during courtship is critical to deciding whether to increase the intensity of his effort or terminate pursuit of the target. In the last several years, courtship has become a favored model for those researchers interested in how the nervous system specifies “innate” behaviors. While it is true that a male does not have to be instructed to produce adequate courtship (Hall 1994; Clyne and Miesenbock 2008), this apparently stereotyped behavior is far from static: It can be modified in a dizzying number of ways by experience. In this paper, we will discuss how information gathered during courtship can allow males to learn about specific types of courtship objects and broadly modify future behavioral responses to a particular class of target.     

High-level athletes' perceptions of success in returning to sport following injury

ObjectiveFor many injured athletes, a safe and successful return to sport following injury is the ultimate aim of injury recovery. Little consensus exists however, regarding the meaning of a “successful” return to sport following injury recovery [Evans, L., Mitchell, I., &; Jones, S. (2006). Psychological responses to sport injury: a review of current research. In S. Hanton, &; S. D. Mellalieu (Eds.), Literature reviews in sport psychology (pp. 289–319). New York, NY: Nova Science Publishers]. The purpose of this investigation was to obtain greater insight into this issue by examining high-level athletes' perceptions of a successful return to play following injury.MethodUsing a longitudinal design, 12 elite athletes from Australia and Canada were interviewed on a total of 40 occasions over a six–eight month period.ResultsPerceptions of success centered on (but were not limited to): a return to pre-injury levels and attaining pre-injury goals, staying on the “right” path, creating realistic expectations of post-injury performance, and remaining uninjured.ConclusionsConsistent with previous research [Podlog, L., &; Eklund, R. C. (2007a). Professional coaches perspectives on the return to sport following serious injury. Journal of Applied Sport Psychology, 1, 44–68], findings from this investigation highlight the importance of self-determination theory (SDT) constructs – namely, competence, autonomy and relatedness – in relation to athlete perceptions of a successful return to sport from injury. Such findings support the value of an SDT perspective in guiding future research and intervention efforts aimed at facilitating successful return from injury.     

Ties that Bind: A Qualitative Study of Happy Long-Term Marriages

An abundance of literature exists concerning the marital relationship. While most research focuses on divorce and the social consequences of this phenomenon, more recently social scientists have focused on the marriages that remain intact. The purpose of this study was to gain insight into what factors make marriages last. This study used qualitative methodology to gain further insight into long-term marriages. Interviews were conducted with 15 heterosexual couples who had been married for at least 35 years and who identified their marriage as happy. Results indicate that for each couple the factors contributing to the longevity of their happy marriage were numerous and unique. While the most commonly mentioned factors included friendship, love, and similar backgrounds or interests, a wide range of responses were elicited.     

Learning: Association or Computation? Introduction to a Special Section

The fundamental nature of learning is a central problem in psychology. Traditionally, psychologists have assumed that learning must involve the formation of associations. Early last century, the pioneering work of Pavlov on conditioned learning in animals seemed to put this assumption beyond doubt. More recently, many psychologists came to believe that a different kind of process must underlie complex learning, such as language learning in humans, and that this process must be described as computational rather than associative. Whether complex human learning is associative or computational continues to be a subject of intense research. The articles in this Special Section turn this debate on its head by asking whether simple animal learning is associative or computational. Surprisingly, the question is still very much open, and excitingly, it appears quite tractable.