Cultivating the Senses and Giving in to the Sacred: Notes on Body and Experience among Pentecostal Women in Salvador,Brazil

The article deals with the religious experience of poor Pentecostal women from the city of Salvador, Northeast Brazil. In centering the discussion of this experience on bodily engagement in place—and on the body's attunement to place—this article seeks to capture the social and existential dimensions of the sensibilities which women develop as members of the religious community and thus to address the question of how the sense experiences, which are awakened and cultivated in this religious setting, help shape embodied forms of attention to oneself, to others, and to context. We contend that concrete embodied experience of divine power fostered in ritual favors training attention to context in search of signs of divine presence and helps give shape to a disposition which extends, to other people and places, the power that flows from Pentecostal women's bodies.     

Psychosocial predictors of chronic Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in Sri Lankan tsunami survivors

This study aimed to determine whether psychological factors associated with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) identified in Western samples generalize to low Social-Economical-Status (SES) populations in an underdeveloped Asian country. The study included 113 survivors of the 2004-tsunami on the south coast of Sri Lanka, recruited from 4 preschools and 10 villages for displaced persons. With logistic regressions the relations between interview-based PTSD diagnosis and psychological factors were assessed, controlling for putative confounders. Fifteen months post-trauma the prevalence of PTSD was 52.2%. Multivariate analyses indicated that negative interpretation of tsunami-memories was significantly (P < 0.005) related to PTSD. Of the putative confounders, gender and (non-replaced) lost work equipment were related to current PTSD (P < 0.05). The results indicate that the relation between negative interpretation of trauma memories and PTSD is quite universal, suggesting that interventions focusing on this factor may be important in treatment of tsunami survivors who are suffering from chronic PTSD.     

Individuals high in neuroticism are not more reactive to adverse events

Numerous studies have related neuroticism to negative emotional outcomes of adverse life events, including post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms. However, the nature of the relationship between neuroticism and post-trauma symptoms is unclear. The purpose of this study was to prospectively examine whether individuals high in neuroticism, relative to low neuroticism individuals, show a larger increase in symptoms after an adverse event. A sample of infantry troops completed questionnaires before deployment to Iraq (n = 214) and about five months (n = 170; 76%) thereafter. The findings showed that, after controlling for an indicator of trauma severity, (a) higher neuroticism individuals reported more PTSD symptoms, depression symptoms, and somatic problems after negative events, and (b) these relationships disappeared after controlling for pre-trauma symptoms. There were no significant differences between individuals high and low in neuroticism in the increase in symptoms from pre to post-trauma. This suggests that individuals high in neuroticism are not more reactive to adverse events.     

Beyond the Primal Addiction: Food,Sex, Gambling,Internet, Shopping and Work,edited by Nina Savelle-Rocklin and Salman Akhtar,Routledge, Abingdon and New York, 2019, 192 pp.

The American Journal of Psychoanalysis -     

Has the feminist movement influenced adolescent sex role attitudes? A reassessment after a quarter century

The attitudes of adolescents toward sex role stereotyping in 1956 were compared with the attitudes of youth in 1982. Contrary to our prediction, sex role stereotyping was not significantly less in 1982 than in 1956. Boys emphasized both sex role differentiation, and the symbols of male dominance and female subordination, more than girls did. However, girls showed significantly less dissatisfaction with being a girl in 1982 than girls did in 1956. It may be that the basic power relationships of gender had not altered by 1982 but that the self-image of girls had improved.We wish to express our appreciation to the superintendent and to the teachers who generously assisted us.     

Personality types and motivational characteristics of academics versus professionals in industry in the same occupational discipline

The present study suggests that individuals belonging to different job categories—academics versus professionals in industry—differ in personality types and in motivational characteristics even though they are of the same occupational discipline. Subjects were 49 academics and 45 professionals in industry of two disciplines: engineering and management sciences. Holland's 6 personality types and 18 motivational characteristics measured in terms of Vroom's expectancy theory of motivation were used as the discriminant variables. Results indicate that academics are discriminated from professionals in industry by scoring significantly higher on the Artistic type and significantly lower on the Enterprising type even when the discipline is controlled. The distinction between the two groups is much deeper when motivational factors are examined: Academics are motivated by the opportunity for scientific contribution, for autonomy, and for the high status attained in their job. By contrast, professionals in industry are highly motivated by the opportunity for exercising power.     

Transactive memory in decision-making teams: implications for team effectiveness

The transactive memory system (TMS) construct is one of the most extended theoretical approaches to understand the role of cognitive processes at group level in the effectiveness of work teams. This study examined the relationships among TMS, performance, satisfaction and functional communication in decision-making teams. 40 four-person teams were asked to suppose they were expert consulting teams advising a fictitious organization on how to solve a problem with their employees. Results showed a mediating effect of TMS on the relationships between functional communication, perceived team performance and satisfaction. Contrary to our expectations, TMSs were not related to performance as evaluated by external raters. These findings suggest the importance of team communication in the formation of TMSs, as well as their implications for the effectiveness of decision-making teams.     

E-Hitz: A word frequency list and a program for deriving psycholinguistic statistics in an agglutinative language (Basque)

We describe a Windows program that enables users to obtain a broad range of statistics concerning the properties of word and nonword stimuli in an agglutinative language (Basque), including measures of word frequency (at the whole-word and lemma levels), bigram and biphone frequency, orthographic similarity, orthographic and phonological structure, and syllable-based measures. It is designed for use by researchers in psycholinguistics, particularly those concerned with recognition of isolated words and morphology. In addition to providing standard orthographic and phonological neighborhood measures, the program can be used to obtain information about other forms of orthographic similarity, such as transposed-letter similarity and embedded-word similarity. It is available free of charge from www .uv.es/mperea/E-Hitz.zip.