Does Religious Belief Matter for Grief and Death Anxiety? Experimental Philosophy Meets Psychology of Religion

It is commonly reasoned that religious belief moderates death anxiety and aids in coping with loss. However, a philosophical perspective known as meta‐atheism includes the claim that avowed religious believers grieve deaths and experience death anxiety as intensely as avowed atheists. Thus, we report a study comparing religious believers and nonbelievers on measures of death anxiety and grief. We further investigated the relationships between certain religious beliefs (views of God, afterlife belief, religious orientation) and death anxiety, as well as both painful grief reactions and grief‐related growth. We surveyed 101 participants across the United States, ranging in age (19 to 57), education, and ethnicity. Participants avowing some form of religious belief, in comparison to those not, did not demonstrate lower levels of death anxiety. They did, however, display higher levels of a certain type of death acceptance. Additionally, those professing belief reported less grief and greater growth in response to loss. Greater afterlife belief was not associated with less grief; however, it was associated with both greater grief‐related growth and lower death anxiety.     

Ecological and Dynamical Study of the Creative Process and Affects of Scientific Students Working in Groups

Although creativity has drawn the attention of researchers during the past century, collaborative processes have barely been investigated. In this article, the collective dimension of a creative process is investigated, based on a dynamic and ecological approach that includes an affective component. Dynamic means that the creative process is no longer considered as sequential, and ecological, that the individuals were observed in their normal place of creation. This study was conducted with science students that were required to carry on a research project during 15 weeks in small groups. The results tend to confirm the hypothesis of a nonlinear process, with important variations of the affects depending on the stage. Moreover, each group creative process seems to be specific. The relation between the social functioning of the group and the process is also discussed. Finally, because it is a part of any teamwork, verbalization is proposed as a new powerful tool to investigate creative process.     

Burnout,empathy and their relationships: a qualitative study with residents in General Medicine

Some studies have shown that burnout may have a negative impact on clinical empathy during internship. However, clinical empathy may also be a protective factor, preventing residents from experiencing burnout. Although several quantitative studies have been conducted to examine these relationships between burnout and empathy, no qualitative studies have been carried out. To examine how residents in general practice evaluate the link between burnout and empathy, 24 of them participated in a semi-structured interview. A thematic analysis was carried out to examine residents’ discourses and answers to closed questions. The results indicated that residents thought that empathy and burnout were clearly related in different ways. They identified five types of relationship: regulation strategy, empathy as protection, psychological balance/imbalance, fatigue and moderating factors.     

Bioethicists Can and Should Contribute to Addressing Racism

The problems of racism and racially motivated violence in predominantly African American communities in the United States are complex, multifactorial, and historically rooted. While these problems are also deeply morally troubling, bioethicists have not contributed substantially to addressing them. Concern for justice has been one of the core commitments of bioethics. For this and other reasons, bioethicists should contribute to addressing these problems. We consider how bioethicists can offer meaningful contributions to the public discourse, research, teaching, training, policy development, and academic scholarship in response to the alarming and persistent patterns of racism and implicit biases associated with it. To make any useful contribution, bioethicists will require preparation and should expect to play a significant role through collaborative action with others.     

Constructing Gender Incommensurability in Competitive Sport: Sex/Gender Testing and the New Regulations on Female Hyperandrogenism

The segregation of the sexes in sport still seems to be regarded as a matter of course. In contrast to other performance classes, e.g., age and weight, which are constructed on the grounds of directly relevant performance features, in the case of gender it is dealt with the merely statistical factor that women on average perform less well than men. And yet unlike weight or age classes, which can be interchanged if the required performances are provided, the segregation between the sexes in many types of sport seems to be quite impermeable. Contrary to popular beliefs women were not excluded from the beginning of modern sport. Hence, the meaning of gender differences varies in the course of time and in types of sport. Thus, this paper firstly gives a short summary of the different relevance of gender differences in high performance competitions of various types of sport. Then the historical construction of gender as central dimension in modern sport will be illustrated by using the example of soccer. Here in this paper, the elaborate processes of reproducing this incommensurability between women and men in sport is the main focus: At first big sport organisations tried to exclude women whose performances were well above the expectations by establishing so called “Gender verifications” which suspected them of fraud. Although it became certain that there is no clear differentiation between the sexes, gender segregation was not abolished. Instead new regulations have been invented to treat and “normalise” people who are difficult to categorise, e.g., transsexuals and women with Hyperandrogenism, in order to subsume them into the existent gender categories. So finally, gender segregation in sport seems to be just another example for Goffman’s institutional reflexivity: While the separation of the competitions are said to be a natural consequence of the differences between men and women, it actually is just a tool to create those differences.     

Parents' convergence on sharing and marital satisfaction,father involvement,and parent–child relationship at the transition to parenthood

This study examines determinants of father involvement, the parents' convergence on marital satisfaction, and mothers' and fathers' interactive behavior in dual‐earner families at the transition to parenthood. Sixty dual‐earner Israeli couples and their five‐month‐old firstborn child were interviewed and videotaped in infant–mother and infant–father interactions. Interactions were coded globally for 21 interactive behaviors and composited into measures of parent sensitivity and infant readiness to interact. Five determinants of each parent's involvement in house and childcare were assessed as predictors of parent–infant interactions: the sharing of household and childcare responsibilities, the amount of time each parent spends with the infant during the week and on weekends, and the range of childcare activities the parent typically performs. Marital convergence was indexed by the absolute difference score between mothers' and fathers' marital satisfaction. Father sensitivity was related to the sharing of household and childcare responsibilities, to the amount of time the father spends with the child on weekends (but not during the week), to the range of childcare activities father performs, and to marital convergence. Mother sensitivity was related only to the sharing of responsibilities between spouses. The range of the father's childcare activities predicted maternal interactive sensitivity. Infant readiness to interact with the father, but not with the mother, was related to the sharing of childcare responsibilities, to the range of father's childcare activities, and to marital convergence. Results further specify the differential associations between the marital and the parent–child relationship for mothers and fathers and point to the importance of the father's instrumental involvement in childcare to the development of fathering. © 2000 Michigan Association for Infant Mental Health.     

Affect regulation and synchrony in mother—infant play as precursors to the development of symbolic competence

This study examines relationships between organizing processes of affective communication in infancy and the development of symbolic competence. Thirty six mother—infant dyads were observed at 3 and 9 months, and 32 dyads were reassessed at 24 months. Mother's and infant affective states during face-to-face play at 3 and 9 months were coded in .25-second frames. The underlying structure of infant affect and the time-lag synchrony between mother and infant affective states were assessed with time-series analyses. In addition, interactions at 3 and 9 months were assessed for the global level of infant positive affect and maternal affect attunement. At 2 years, three dimensions of symbolic competence were evaluated: symbolic play, verbal IQ, and the child's use of internal states words. Infant affect regulation at 3 months, defined by the existence of a non-random, stochastic-cyclic organization of affective states, predicted all three domains of symbolic competence at 2 years. Maternal synchrony and attunement each had an independent contribution to the prediction of symbolic play and internal state talk. The microanalytic and global indices of affect each added meaningfully to the prediction of symbolic functioning. The organization of behavioral sequences into coherent affective configurations is discussed as a possible precursor to the general capacity to develop symbols. © 1997 Michigan Association for Infant Mental Health     

“We're not gonna be friends anymore”: Associations between viewing relational aggression on television and relational aggression in text messaging during adolescence

A number of studies suggest that adolescents who view relational aggression on television are more likely to engage in higher levels of subsequent relational aggression in social interactions. This study examined longitudinal associations between viewing relational aggression on television and relationally aggressive behavior in text messaging over a 1-year period during adolescence. Participants were 197 adolescents who completed a number of questionnaires regarding media use and aggression. Adolescents were each given a BlackBerry device and a sample of text messages was coded for aggressive behavior. Results revealed that exposure to relational aggression on television was associated with higher levels of relational aggression in texting one year later, but only for girls. Results are discussed with reference to the General Aggression Model.     

Intersectionality in Clinical Medicine: The Need for a Conceptual Framework

Intersectionality has become a significant intellectual approach for those thinking about the ways that race, gender, and other social identities converge in order to create unique forms of oppression. Although the initial work on intersectionality addressed the unique position of black women relative to both black men and white women, the concept has since been expanded to address a range of social identities. Here we consider how to apply some of the theoretical tools provided by intersectionality to the clinical context. We begin with a brief discussion of intersectionality and how it might be useful in a clinical context. We then discuss two clinical scenarios that highlight how we think considering intersectionality could lead to more successful patient–clinician interactions. Finally, we extrapolate general strategies for applying intersectionality to the clinical context before considering objections and replies.     

Protected or Unprotected Sex: The Conceptions and Attitudes of the Youth in Bolgatanga Municipality,Ghana

The youth in Bolgatanga municipality in Ghana have relatively less knowledge of sexual and reproductive health (SRH) compared to the youth in other parts of Ghana. More fundamental knowledge is needed of the factors that influence young people to have protected and unprotected sex in specific social and cultural contexts, in order to protect them from adverse consequences, such as sexually transmitted diseases (STIs), HIV/AIDS and unintended pregnancies. This study therefore analyzed the conceptions and attitudes of the youth toward protected and unprotected sex, and particularly condom use, in Bolgatanga municipality. Semi-structured and focus group interviews were held with 71 young males and females and 17 adults. The results indicated that many of them lack a comprehensive knowledge of STIs, contraceptives and pregnancy, while a group of them had a negative attitude towards contraceptives. Not all parents, schools and organisations provide young people with a comprehensive education about SRH, and some even discourage such education because they believe it would encourage young people to have sex before marriage. In addition, young people also inform each other about SRH issues, sharing stories and personal experiences with their peers. The information they exchange is not always correct, however; sometimes it merely reflects their own personal preferences. The unequal power in the sexual relationships of young people—related to the traditional value system that gives men, but not women, “sexual freedom, both in and outside marriage”—is another determining factor for unprotected sex.