Closeness to God Among Those Doing God’s Work: A Spiritual Well-Being Measure for Clergy

Measuring spiritual well-being among clergy is particularly important given the high relevance of God to their lives, and yet its measurement is prone to problems such as ceiling effects and conflating religious behaviors with spiritual well-being. To create a measure of closeness to God for Christian clergy, we tested survey items at two time points with 1,513 United Methodist Church clergy. The confirmatory factor analysis indicated support for two, six-item factors: Presence and Power of God in Daily Life, and Presence and Power of God in Ministry. The data supported the predictive and concurrent validity of the two factors and evidenced high reliabilities without ceiling effects. This Clergy Spiritual Well-being Scale may be useful to elucidate the relationship among dimensions of health and well-being in clergy populations.     

Speaking freely: on free will and the epistemology of testimony

Peter Graham has recently given a dilemma purportedly showing the compatibility of libertarianism about free will and the anti-skeptical epistemology of testimony. In the first part of this paper I criticize his dilemma: the first horn either involves a false premise or makes the dilemma invalid. The second horn relies without argument on an implausible assumption about testimonial knowledge, and even if granted, nothing on this horn shows libertarianism does not entail skepticism about testimonial justification. I then argue for the incompatibility of (i) a view entailed by Open Theism, viz., that there are no true counterfactuals of freedom, (ii) a popular form of process reliabilism about justification and knowledge, and (iii) a weak anti-skepticism about testimonial justification and knowledge. I conclude that there is a costly tension between certain views about testimony and about free will.     

Opening Skinner’s Box: an Introduction

Behavior analysts have redefined the subject matter of psychology, redesigned the experiments used to study that subject matter, renamed almost every part of the world pertaining to that subject matter, and created specialized organizations and journals. It is not surprising, then, that only a happy few ever hear what behavior analysts say. One problem is that we need to publish outside of the box, so to speak. Preaching to the choir ensures that the products of our scientific behavior affect only a few people, limits the variety of reinforcers we are likely to encounter, and limits the likelihood that the products of our scientific behavior will reinforce the behavior of others. Publishing in a wider variety of outlets can lead to greater visibility for behavior-analytic research and practice, increase the impact of our published work, and build clout for scholars in colleges and universities.     

Counseling Outcomes for Youth With Oppositional Behavior: A Meta‐Analysis

This meta‐analysis of clinical trials explored the effectiveness of treatments targeted at changing oppositional behavior. The meta‐analysis included 31 peer‐reviewed treatment studies with school‐age youth ages 6–17 years identified as having oppositional defiant disorder. Results were synthesized using a random effects model for mean difference and mean gain effect size estimates. Findings suggest that counseling/psychotherapy is effective in treating oppositional behavior in school‐age youth at termination, but the long‐term efficacy of such treatment is less stable.     

Executive Function Among Preschool Children: Unitary Versus Distinct Abilities

Working memory (WM) and inhibitory control (IC) are considered related but separable executive functions (EFs) among adults and adolescents. Although available evidence suggests that these constructs have not diverged, especially among younger preschool children, questions remain regarding the age at which separable factors emerge.This study used confirmatory factor analysis to test a 2-factor model of EF among 289 preschool children whose ages ranged from 45 to 63 months (M?=?55.74, SD?=?7.56). As hypothesized, the model including separate but related factors provided a significantly better fit than a unitary model, indicating the presence of distinct WM and IC factors. Based on evidence that WM and IC measured during preschool relate differently to a variety of academic and behavioral outcomes, it was hypothesized that a model including separate factors for each EF would fit the observed data better than a single-factor model. Although the two-factor model provided the best fit for the full sample, the correlation between WM and IC factors was significantly higher for younger (??=?.95) than older (??=?.68) children, indicating increasing divergence as a function of age.     

The Effects of Anxiety and Depressive Symptoms on Daily Positive Emotion Regulation

Individuals with anxiety and depressive symptoms exhibit disturbances in positive emotion regulation, which may hinder full recovery. By comparison, individuals with strong beliefs regarding their capacity to “savor” or maintain positive emotions (i.e., savoring beliefs) display more adaptive positive emotion regulation. The present daily diary study explores three momentary processes involved in positive emotion regulation, namely positive emotion reactivity, regulatory goals, and regulatory effectiveness, and examines the comparative effects of baseline anxiety and depressive symptoms versus savoring beliefs on such processes in real-life contexts. A sample of 164 nonclinical undergraduates provided baseline measures of anxiety and depressive symptom severity and savoring beliefs prior to completing 14 daily assessments of positive emotions and emotion regulatory responses to daily positive events. Results indicated that higher baseline anxiety and depressive symptom severity were associated with decreased positive emotion reactivity and increased down-regulation of positive emotions; higher baseline savoring beliefs were associated with increased positive emotion reactivity, decreased down-regulation and increased up-regulation of positive emotions. Potential clinical implications are discussed.     

Is There Life After DEBI? Examining Health Behavior Maintenance in the Diffusion of Effective Behavioral Interventions Initiative

The evidence-based interventions that are identified, packaged, and disseminated by the Division of HIV/AIDS Prevention at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as part of the Diffusion of Effective Behavioral Interventions (DEBI) initiative—commonly referred to the "DEBIs"—currently represent a primary source of HIV prevention interventions for community-based providers. To date, little attention has focused on whether the intended outcomes of the DEBIs, i.e., reductions in HIV-related risk behaviors, are maintained over time. This review summarized evidence for the sustainability of the effects of the DEBIs on HIV sexual risk behavior and intravenous drug use from studies of original and adapted DEBIs. Evidence of intervention decay or a lack of any intervention effect was identified in several original and adapted versions of the DEBIs included in this review. Recommendations include modifications to current criteria for inclusion in the DEBI portfolio, in addition to the development of remediation strategies to address intervention decay. Further, theoretical models that specify the processes that underlie the maintenance of health behaviors over time should be used in developing HIV prevention interventions.     

Effects of animacy and noun-phrase relatedness on the processing of complex sentences

Previous work has suggested that syntactically complex object-extracted relative clauses are easier to process when the head noun phrase (NP1) is inanimate and the embedded noun phrase (NP2) is animate, as compared with the reverse animacy configuration, with differences in processing difficulty beginning as early as NP2 (e.g., The article that the senator . . . vs. The senator that the article . . .). Two eye-tracking-while-reading experiments were conducted to better understand the source of this effect. Experiment 1 showed that having an inanimate NP1 facilitated processing even when NP2 was held constant. Experiment 2 manipulated both animacy of NP1 and the degree of semantic relatedness between the critical NPs. When NP1 and NP2 were paired arbitrarily, the early animacy effect emerged at NP2. When NP1 and NP2 were semantically related, this effect disappeared, with effects of NP1 animacy emerging in later processing stages for both the related and arbitrary conditions. The results indicate that differences in the animacy of NP1 influence early processing of complex sentences only when the critical NPs share no meaningful relationship.     

Development of a Cyber/Information Technology Knowledge Test for Military Enlisted Technical Training Qualification

An Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB) Review Panel, with expertise in personnel selection, job classification, psychometrics, and cognitive psychology developed recommendations for changes to the military enlistment test battery. One recommendation was to develop and evaluate a test of cyber/information and communications technology literacy to supplement current ASVAB content. This article summarizes a multiphased Cyber Test development process: (a) a review of information/computer technology literacy definitions and measures, (b) development and pilot testing of a cyber knowledge measure, (c) validation of test scores against final school grades (FSGs) for selected technical training courses, (d) development of an operational reporting metric and subgroup norms, and (e) examination of construct validity. Results indicate the Cyber Test has predictive validity versus technical training school grades and incremental validity comparable to the ASVAB technical knowledge tests when used with the ASVAB Armed Forces Qualification Test (AFQT) verbal/math composite as a baseline.