A Tale of Two Congresses: The Psychological Study of Psychical,Occult, and Religious Phenomena, 1900–1909

In so far as researchers viewed psychical, occult, and religious phenomena as both objectively verifiable and resistant to extant scientific explanations, their study posed thorny issues for experimental psychologists. Controversies over the study of psychical and occult phenomena at the Fourth Congress of International Psychology (Paris, 1900) and religious phenomena at the Sixth (Geneva, 1909) raise the question of why the latter was accepted as a legitimate object of study, whereas the former was not. Comparison of the Congresses suggests that those interested in the study of religion were willing to forego the quest for objective evidence and focus on experience, whereas those most invested in psychical research were not. The shift in focus did not overcome many of the methodological difficulties. Sub‐specialization formalized distinctions between psychical, religious, and pathological phenomena; obscured similarities; and undercut the nascent comparative study of unusual experiences that had emerged at the early Congresses.     

Sisyphus,happiness and transcendence

What is the relation between transcendence and happiness? What type of transcendence can still be part of the concept happiness in our modern age? To answer these questions, I analyse the myth of Sisyphus from the existentialist perspective of Albert Camus, and investigate whether Sisyphus is (or can be) ‘truly’ happy and what role transcendence plays in this kind of happiness. This prompts a question about the relation between the concepts transcendence, meaning of life, and happiness. Taking Sisyphus as an exemplar, I argue that, although our contemporary culture has a flattening tendency regarding transcendence, various types of transcendence remain inextricably related to happiness.     

Stand Tall to Protect Students: School Counselors Strengthening School Connectedness

In an urban sample of 5,595 students in Grades 7–12, the authors found that (a) personalized counseling services that were responsive to student needs enhanced school connectedness, (b) risk factors (e.g., poverty, mobility rates, limited English proficiency) were associated with lower school connectedness scores, and (c) responsive counseling services acted as a protective factor that reduced some of the negative effects of risk factors on school connectedness, and consequently, student success in academic and nonacademic areas.     

Group‐level effects of forgiveness: Group cohesiveness and collective action in social dilemmas

Forgiveness research has predominately focused on individual/relational outcomes such as well‐being and closeness. Less research has examined group outcomes such as cohesiveness or collective action. Forgiveness studies have also emphasized the victim's or transgressor's perspective, neglecting the effects of forgiveness on ingroup members who have neither given nor received forgiveness. We theorize that forgiveness promotes collective action among ingroup members through group cohesiveness and that transgressors' apologetic reactions impact this process. In a laboratory experiment, 229 students (175 females) were led to believe they were in a social dilemma with three others. Some participants witnessed group members forgive an apologetic, obstinate, or neutral defector, whereas others witnessed an unforgiving response. Forgiveness of apologetic and neutral defectors increased later cooperation among ingroup members. This effect was generally mediated by group cohesiveness. Our findings suggest that forgiveness can impact cooperation on a group level, providing a path to successful resolutions to collective action problems. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

How Secure are Unproctored Pre-Employment Tests? Analysis of Inconsistent Test Scores

Employment tests have long been scrutinized for psychometric considerations such as validity and reliability, but the extent to which cheating may occur on pre-employment tests has generally been overlooked. With the rise of unproctored, on-demand, online testing, the need has never been greater to focus on design and process considerations that can help mitigate the potential for cheating on employment tests. This paper builds on the limited existing research on the detection of inconsistent test scores on unproctored Internet testing. Job candidates (n = 4,026) completed a computer adaptive cognitive ability test under two conditions: an unproctored screening test followed by a proctored confirmation test. Analyses focused on detecting instances of inconsistent test scores based on comparison of standard errors of measure for the unproctored and proctored test scores (Guo and Drasgow, Int J Sel Assess 18:351–364, 2010). Results revealed a relatively low number of inconsistent scores and are discussed in the context of future research, application, and theory building on the nature of cheating on pre-employment tests.     

Coping with anxiety and rebuilding identity: A psychosynthesis approach to culture shock

As the number of international students continues to increase worldwide, their experience of culture shock has been well-researched. Missing, however, from the culture shock literature is the perspective of psychosynthesis psychology and its methodology to deal with the affective, behavioral, and cognitive (ABC) aspects of shock and adaptation. This article illustrates two psychosynthesis techniques that student sojourners found helpful in their acculturation process. Firstly, the self-identification exercise eased anxiety, an affective aspect of culture shock. Secondly, the subpersonality model aided students in their ability to integrate a new social identity, the cornerstone of the cognitive aspect. With a new integrated identity, students changed their behavior (the second ABC component) and new creative energies were released. These qualitative findings are supported by the testimonies of nine international student sojourners in the Netherlands who received psychosynthesis counseling. In addition, a case study demonstrates subpersonality integration and its role in helping students to come into relationship with themselves as well as others. The self-identification exercise and subpersonality model are not only effective tools for aiding sojourners in their adaptation to a host country, but viable methodologies for anyone searching to synthesize a new personal and social identity.     

Progress Toward Understanding the Structure and Determinants of Job Performance: A focus on task and citizenship performance

Job performance criterion models have become more popular and more often investigated. The current research adds to this literature by testing performance models focusing on ability and personality predictors of task and citizenship job performance. Air traffic controllers (N = 928) completed cognitive ability and personality predictor measures, were administered a performance test assessing two possible mediators, and were evaluated using supervisor and peer ratings of two task performance, one citizenship performance, and an overall performance dimension. Path analyses largely confirmed that ability predicts primarily task performance and personality predicts primarily citizenship performance. The mediation related to task knowledge and skill on the task performance side was confirmed, and the overall fit of the performance models was quite good. Discussion focuses on how the present research furthers progress toward mapping relations among individual differences and individual performance constructs, beyond using overall performance as the endogenous performance variable.     

Subjective Well-Being of Older African Americans with DSM IV Psychiatric Disorders

This study examined demographic and mental health correlates of subjective well-being (i.e., life satisfaction, happiness) using a national sample of older African Americans with psychiatric disorders. We used a subsample of 185 African Americans, 55 and older with at least one of thirteen lifetime psychiatric disorders from The National Survey of American Life: Coping with Stress in the Twenty-first Century. The findings indicated that among this population of older adults who had a lifetime psychiatric disorder, having a lifetime suicidal ideation was associated with life satisfaction but not happiness. Further, having a 12-month anxiety disorder or a lifetime suicidal ideation was not associated with happiness. Having a 12-month mood disorder, however, was negatively associated with an individual’s level of happiness, as well as their life satisfaction. Additionally, there were two significant interactions. Among men, employment was positively associated with life satisfaction, and marriage was associated with higher levels of happiness among men but not women. The overall pattern of findings reflects both similarities and departures from prior research confirming that well-being evaluations are associated with multiple factors.     

Intersubject variability in fearful face processing: the linkbetween behavior and neural activation

Stimuli that signal threat show considerable variability in the extents to which they enhance behavior, even among healthy individuals. However, the neural underpinning of this behavioral variability is not well understood. By manipulating expectation of threat in an fMRI study of fearful versus neutral face categorization, we uncovered a network of areas underlying variability in threat processing in healthy adults. We explicitly altered expectations by presenting face images at three different expectation levels: 80 %, 50 %, and 20 %. Subjects were instructed to report as quickly and accurately as possible whether the face was fearful (signaled threat) or not. An uninformative cue preceded each face by 4 s. By taking the difference between reaction times (RTs) to fearful and neutral faces, we quantified an overall fear RT bias (i.e., faster to fearful than to neutral faces) for each subject. This bias correlated positively with late-trial fMRI activation (8 s after the face) during unexpected-fearful-face trials in bilateral ventromedial prefrontal cortex, the left subgenual cingulate cortex, and the right caudate nucleus, and correlated negatively with early-trial fMRI activation (4 s after the cue) during expected-neutral-face trials in bilateral dorsal striatum and the right ventral striatum. These results demonstrate that the variability in threat processing among healthy adults is reflected not only in behavior, but also in the magnitude of activation in medial prefrontal and striatal regions that appear to encode affective value.