In Search of a More Reliable Truth: Mourning and Donald Capps’s Psychological Portrait of Jesus

This article is an abridged version of a chapter in my dissertation. In my dissertation, I examine the relationship between personal experience and public theory within certain strands of contemporary psychology of religion and pastoral theology. My guiding theory is Peter Homans’s “mourning religion” thesis. In this chapter, I examine the life and work of Donald Capps, who is the most prolific contemporary writer in the fields of psychology of religion and pastoral theology. I argue that Capps addressed various personal losses in a deeply personal way during his fifties, and I believe that the key moment for Capps in overcoming his melancholia occurred after his application of his melancholia theory to Jesus, because there Capps was able to integrate and to sustain in a satisfying way his various selves and, therefore, open himself up to mourn in a non-defensive way—the way of humor.     

God’s Melancholia

Donald Capps’s (Capps 1997, 2001, 2002a, b) male melancholia theory has been of interest to me during the past few years (Carlin 2003, 2006, 2007), and Capps (2004, 2007a, b) himself has been publishing more on the topic. In his psychobiographical book on Jesus, Capps (2000) notes that psychologists of religion have been reluctant to psychoanalyze Jesus, and here I note that even fewer have been willing to diagnose God, one recent exception being J. Harold Ellens (2007). In this article, I explore the melancholia issue further, this time applying the theory to God by means of theological concepts that deal with the Trinity and the passion of God. And while this article is playful (Pruyser 1974; cf. Dykstra 2001), the upshot is more serious: If men are incurably religious and melancholic, as Capps argues, and if men, by and large, are the creators of religion, wouldn’t one expect to find traces of this melancholy in religion, particularly in its sacred texts and doctrines? By identifying these tendencies in religion, especially in God, the pastoral psychologist, I believe, is helping contemporary Christian men—especially fathers and sons—recognize their own melancholy selves and, perhaps, helping them get along a little better.     

Does Stevens’s Power Law for Brightness Extend to Perceptual Brightness Averaging?

The Psychological Record - Stevens’s power law (Ψ∝Φß) captures the relationship between physical (Φ) and perceived (Ψ) magnitude for many stimulus continua...     

Learning scenes from multiple views: Novel views can be recognized more efficiently than learned views

In two experiments, participants were trained to recognize a playground scene from four vantage points and were subsequently asked to recognize the playground from a novel perspective between the four learned viewing perspectives, as well as from the trained perspectives. In both experiments, people recognized the novel view more efficiently than those that they had recently used in order to learn the scene. Additionally, in Experiment 2, participants who viewed a novel stimulus on their very first test trial correctly recognized it more quickly (and also tended to recognize it more accurately) than did participants whose first test trial was a familiar view of the scene. These findings call into question the idea that scenes are recognized by comparing them with single previous experiences, and support a growing body of literature on the existence of psychological mechanisms that combine spatial information from multiple views of a scene.     

Impact of Behavioral Inhibition and Parenting Style on Internalizing and Externalizing Problems from Early Childhood through Adolescence

Behavioral inhibition (BI) is characterized by a pattern of extreme social reticence, risk for internalizing behavior problems, and possible protection against externalizing behavior problems. Parenting style may also contribute to these associations between BI and behavior problems (BP). A sample of 113 children was assessed for BI in the laboratory at 14 and 24 months of age, self-report of maternal parenting style at 7 years of age, and maternal report of child internalizing and externalizing BP at 4, 7, and 15 years. Internalizing problems at age 4 were greatest among behaviorally inhibited children who also were exposed to permissive parenting. Furthermore, greater authoritative parenting was associated with less of an increase in internalizing behavior problems over time and greater authoritarian parenting was associated with a steeper decline in externalizing problems. Results highlight the importance of considering child and environmental factors in longitudinal patterns of BP across childhood and adolescence.     

The UWBQ-I: An Adaption and Validation of a Measure of Instigated Incivility

Purpose

The purpose of this research was to adapt and validate a multidimensional instigated incivility scale. Previously, instigated incivility research has used unidimensional scales, measures designed for specific occupations (e.g., nursing), item subsets of larger scales, or scales designed for experienced incivility that assumes a change of referent will not impact the scale. This research formally validates the change of referent from experienced incivility to instigated incivility, and offers a scale designed for wide range of occupations with demonstrated advantages over a popular unidimensional scale.

Design

Study 1 proposes a second-order factor structure of the measure. Surveying a sample of 472 individuals, the study confirms the measure’s ability to predict additional variance in interpersonal deviance over a previous measure of instigated incivility, as well as provide greater detail relating to a multi-faceted personality dimension (narcissism). Study 2 uses a unique sample of 642 participants and expands the nomological network of the scale by demonstrating the correlational and predictive relationships to a network of related constructs identified by past research.

Findings

The results of Study 1 identify that the multidimensional factor structure of UWBQ-I remains intact when changed from an experienced incivility scale. Regression and dominance analyses demonstrate that the UWBQ-I provides additional variance accounted for over Blau and Andersson’s (2005) scale, capturing a larger portion of the instigated incivility construct domain. Additionally, the advantages of a multidimensional framework are identified by relating the scale sub-facets to equally specific dimensions of narcissism. Study 2 further supported the validation of the UWBQ-I by replicating a large network of relationships that have been previously identified in incivility research.

Implications

Considerably less research has been dedicated to instigated than to experienced incivility research. The present studies offer a scale that may contribute to increased research by providing more specific relationships between facets of incivility and constructs such as personality. Greater understanding of the detailed relationships may help researchers further identify antecedents and consequences and aid practitioners in developing interventions to understand and quell instigated incivility in the workplace.

Originality

Although research has used a scale such as this, the validity of the scale has never been demonstrated. This research establishes the appropriateness of the past use of such scales and also offers researchers a standard, validated measure to incorporate in a broad range of occupations for future incivility research.

     

Mothers' perceptions of infant affect in a croatian sample: The IFEEL pictures assessment

Recent work demonstrates systematic variability in mothers' perceptions of infant affects in adolescent, depressed, abusive, and preterm mothers (Emde, Osofsky,&Butterfield, 1993). This Croatian study, completed before the war in the former Yugoslavia, reports cultural differences and similarities in mothers' interpretation of infant affect in 103 mothers of healthy, full-term Croatian infants when compared to an American sample. The IFEEL Pictures (IFP) were administered to assess mothers' perception and interpretation of infants' facial expressions. Comparisons of the IFP scores for Croatian and American mothers revealed significant differences in 3 of 12 affect categories, controlling for education. Croatian mothers with different educational backgrounds showed significant differences in their perceptions of infants' affects. Differences between American mothers and Croatian educated mothers were less marked than those between Croatian high-educated and low-educated mothers. Our work suggests that there are cultural differences and similarities in affect interpretation between Croatian and American mothers. If this finding holds, it suggests that studies are needed of the effects if any, on mother-child interaction and child-rearing patterns, and possible differences in cross-cultural affect development.     

Robust memory of where from way back when: evidence from behaviour and visual attention

Retention of events typically exhibits a sharp initial decrease followed by levelling off of forgetting. In an apparent exception to this general rule, college students have robust memory for their own locations in obscured versions of photographs of their entering classes taken during orientation-related activities, whether tested 2 months or 42 months after the event. Experiment 1 of the present research was a test for conceptual replication of this finding in photographs depicting more than twice the number of students (and thus potential distracters). There was no difference in memory accuracy for personal spatial location across retention intervals of 6–30 months. Experiment 2 featured 40-h and 2-month retention intervals, thereby providing a more fine-grained test of the forgetting function. The findings replicated Experiment 1. In Experiment 3, eye-tracking measures of visual attention revealed that participants rapidly fixated their own spatial locations within the photographs, even in the absence of explicit awareness. In all three experiments, memory for temporal features of the orientation activities (e.g., day and time the photograph was taken) followed the typical forgetting function. The findings suggest differential preservation of episodic memory for where relative to other aspects of events and experiences, such as when.     

Disparities in access to family physicians among transgender people in Ontario,Canada

Background: Informed by the Gelberg-Andersen behavioral model for vulnerable populations, this study examined the prevalence of and factors associated with not having a family physician among transgender (trans) people in Ontario, Canada.

Methods: Data were drawn from a respondent-driven sampling (RDS) survey of trans Ontarians age 16 and above (n = 433) conducted between 2009 and 2010. All analyses were weighted using RDS II methods. Prevalence ratios were estimated using average marginal predictions from logistic regression models.

Results: An estimated 17.2% (95% CI, 11.0 to 22.9) of trans Ontarians (median age = 28.7, 77.3% White) did not have a regular family physician. In multivariable analyses accounting for other predisposing and need-related factors, transfeminine persons (trans women and non-binary persons assigned a male sex at birth) who were Indigenous and/or persons of color were less likely than other transfeminine persons to have a family doctor. In addition, trans persons who were homeless or had unstable housing were less likely to have a family doctor than those who were adequately housed.

Conclusions: These results provide the first quantitative evidence of health disparities by race and gender within a Canadian transgender population and suggest a social gradient in access to care within Ontario's “universal health insurance” system.