Clergy Affairs: Emotional Investment,Longevity of Relationship and Affair Partners

While there has been a growing body of research on clergy infidelity behavior (Blackmon, 1984; Muck, 1988; Thoburn & Balswick, 1999), factors predicting infidelity (Blackmon, 1984; Steinke, 1989; Thoburn & Balswick, 1994) and attitudes related to clergy infidelity (Steinke, 1989; Thoburn & Balswick, 1999), little research has been done identifying the nature of clergy sexual misconduct relationships. Research with a multi-denominational group of male Protestant ministers examined a) whether clergy affairs are of short or long duration, b) the kinds of persons that clergy have affairs with i.e. counselees, church members, church staff, friends, strangers or prostitutes, c) whether there was an emotional quality to the affair, and d) the potential impact that marital dissatisfaction might have on the clergy affair.     

A receiver operator characteristics analysis of treatment outcome in binge eating disorder to identify patterns of rapid response

The purpose of this study was to perform a receiver operator characteristics (ROC) analysis on a treatment sample from a randomized controlled treatment trial of participants with binge eating disorder (BED). An ROC analysis was completed with 179 adults in a 20-week treatment trial for BED to predict abstinence from binge eating at end of treatment. Percent reductions in binge eating episodes were examined following weeks 1 through 10 of treatment. The rate of percent decrease in binge eating episodes during treatment for BED was a significant predictor of clinical outcome at end of treatment. Participants who demonstrated a 15% reduction in binge eating episodes at week one were more likely to respond positively to treatment and achieve clinical remission. Findings from the current study suggest that a significant reduction in binge eating during the first week of treatment may be predictive of end of treatment remission in those with BED.     

The effects of priming legal concepts on perceived trust and competitiveness, self-interested attitudes, and competitive behavior

Socio-legal scholars have suggested that, as a ubiquitous social system, law shapes social reality and provides interpretive frameworks for social relations. Across five studies, we tested the idea that the law shapes social reality by fostering the assumptions that people are self-interested, untrustworthy, and competitive. In Studies 1 and 2, we found that people implicitly associated legal concepts with competitiveness. Studies 3-5 showed that these associations had implications for social perceptions, self-interested attitudes, and competitive behavior. After being primed with constructs related to the law, participants perceived social actors as less trustworthy and the situation as more competitive (Study 3), became more against a political issue when it conflicted with their normative self-interest (Study 4), and made more competitive choices during a prisoner’s dilemma game when they believed that social relations were basically zero-sum in nature (Study 5). The implications and applications of these results are discussed.     

Moral virtue and practical wisdom: theme comprehension in children, youth, and adults

The authors tested 3 hypotheses about the relation of moral comprehension to prudential comprehension by contrasting comprehension of themes in moral stories with comprehension of themes in prudential stories among third-grade, fifth-grade, and college students (n = 168) in Study 1, and among college students, young and middle-aged adults, and older adults (n = 96) in Study 2. In both studies, all groups were statistically significantly better at moral theme comprehension than prudential theme comprehension, suggesting that moral comprehension may develop prior to prudential comprehension. In Study 2, all groups performed equally on moral theme generation whereas both adult groups were significantly better than college students on prudential theme generation. Overall, the findings of these studies provide modest evidence that moral and prudential comprehension each develop separately, and that the latter may develop more slowly.     

The Latent Structure of Substance Use Among American Indian Adolescents: An Example Using Categorical Variables

Researchers frequently have only categorical data to analyze and cannot, for theoretical or methodological reasons, assume that the observed variables are discrete representations of an underlying continuous variable. We present latent class analysis as an alternative method of measuring latent variables in these circumstances. Latent class analysis does not require the assumptions of factor analyses about the nature of manifest and latent variables, but does allow the use of more precise model selection than techniques such as cluster analysis. We modeled the lifetime substance use of American Indian youth. The latent class model of American Indian teenagers' substance use had four classes: Abstaining, Predominantly Alcohol, Predominantly Alcohol and Marijuana, and Plural Substance. We then demonstrated the usefulness of this latent variable by using it to differentiate levels of several variables in a manner consistent with Social Cognitive Theory.     

Aging and reflective processes of working memory: binding and test load deficits

It was hypothesized that age-related deficits in episodic memory for feature combinations (e.g., B. L. Chalfonte & M. K. Johnson, 1996) signal, in part, decrements in the efficacy of reflective component processes (e.g., M. K. Johnson, 1992) that support the short-term maintenance and manipulation of information during encoding (e.g., F. 1. M. Craik. R. G. Morris. & M. L. Gick, 1990; T. A. Salthouse, 1990). Consistent with this, age-related binding deficits in a working memory task were found in 2 experiments. Evidence for an age-related test load deficit was also found: Older adults had greater difficulty than young adults when tested on 2 features rather than 1, even when binding was not required. Thus, disruption of source memory in older adults may involve deficits in both encoding processes (binding deficits) and monitoring processes (difficulty accessing multiple features, evaluating them, or both).     

The Role of Religious Leaders in Promoting Healthy Habits in Religious Institutions

The growing obesity epidemic in the West, in general, and the USA, in particular, is resulting in deteriorating health, premature and avoidable onset of disease, and excessive health care costs. The religious community is not immune to these societal conditions. Changing health behavior in the community requires both input from individuals who possess knowledge and credibility and a receptive audience. One group of individuals who may be uniquely positioned to promote community change but have been virtually ignored in the applied health and consulting psychology literature is religious leaders. These individuals possess extraordinary credibility and influence in promoting healthy behaviors by virtue of their association with time-honored religious traditions and the status which this affords them—as well as their communication skills, powers of persuasion, a weekly (captive) audience, mastery over religious texts that espouse the virtues of healthy living, and the ability to anchor health-related actions and rituals in a person’s values and spirituality. This article focuses on ways in which religious leaders might promote healthy habits among their congregants. By addressing matters of health, nutrition, and fitness from the pulpit and in congregational programs, as well as by visibly adopting the tenets of a healthier lifestyle, clergy can deliver an important message regarding the need for healthy living. Through such actions, religious leaders can be effective agents in promoting critical change in these areas.     

Narratives,mechanisms and progress in historical science

Geologists, Paleontologists and other historical scientists are frequently concerned with narrative explanations targeting single cases. I show that two distinct explanatory strategies are employed in narratives, simple and complex. A simple narrative has minimal causal detail and is embedded in a regularity, whereas a complex narrative is more detailed and not embedded. The distinction is illustrated through two case studies: the ‘snowball earth’ explanation of Neoproterozoic glaciation and recent attempts to explain gigantism in Sauropods. This distinction is revelatory of historical science. I argue that at least sometimes which strategy is appropriate is not a pragmatic issue, but turns on the nature of the target. Moreover, the distinction reveals a counterintuitive pattern of progress in some historical explanation: shifting from simple to complex. Sometimes, historical scientists rightly abandon simple, unified explanations in favour of disunified, complex narratives. Finally I compare narrative and mechanistic explanation, arguing that mechanistic approaches are inappropriate for complex narrative explanations.     

Backward and forward blocking in human electrodermal conditioning: Blocking requires an assumption of outcome additivity

Blocking was observed in two human Pavlovian conditioning studies in which colour cues signalled shock. Both forward (Experiment 1) and backward (Experiment 2) blocking was demonstrated, but only when prior verbal and written instructions suggested that if two signals of shock (A+ and B+) were presented together, a double shock would result (AB++). In this case, participants could assume that the outcome magnitude was additive. Participants given non-additivity instructions (A+ and B+ combined would result in the same outcome, a single shock) failed to show blocking. Modifications required for associative models of learning, and normative statistical accounts of causal induction, to account for the impact of additivity instructions on the blocking effect, are discussed. It is argued that the blocking shown in the present experiments resulted from the operation, not of an error-correction learning rule, nor of a simple contingency detection mechanism, but of a more complex inferential process based on propositional knowledge. Consistent with the present data, blocking is a logical outcome of an A+/AB+ design only if participants can assume that outcomes will be additive.