Social Exclusion and the Desire to Reconnect

People have a fundamental need to belong that, when satisfied, is linked to a variety of indicators of well‐being. The current article discusses what happens when social relationships go awry, namely through social exclusion. It seeks to resolve discrepancies in the literature by proposing that responses to social exclusion depend primarily on the prospect of social acceptance. When people feel socially excluded, they want to regain acceptance and thus may respond in ways that can help them do so. When the possibility of acceptance is not forthcoming, however, socially excluded people become selfish and antisocial. Evidence for this pattern was found at behavioral, cognitive, and biological levels. The motivation to gain acceptance may drive people to engage in negative health behaviors, such as smoking. Thus, excluded people demonstrate sensitivity to possible social acceptance, but they can exude an air of selfishness and hostility when there is no possibility of satisfying their need to belong.     

The effectiveness of dialectical behaviour therapy in routine public mental health settings: An Australian controlled trial

Randomised controlled studies in research environments have demonstrated dialectical behaviour therapy (DBT) to be more efficacious than treatment as usual in reducing suicidal behaviour in patients with borderline personality disorder (BPD). Limited evidence exists for the effectiveness of DBT in the treatment of BPD within routine clinical settings. This study examines the clinical and cost effectiveness of providing DBT over treatment as usual in a routine Australian public mental health service. Forty-three adult patients with BPD were provided with outpatient DBT for six months with patient outcomes compared to those obtained from patients in a wait list group receiving treatment as usual (TAU) from the same service. After six months of treatment the DBT group showed significantly greater reductions in suicidal/non-suicidal self-injury, emergency department visits, psychiatric admissions and bed days. Self-report measures were administered to a reduced sample of patients. With this group, DBT patients demonstrated significantly improved depression, anxiety and general symptom severity scores compared to TAU at six months. Average treatment costs were significantly lower for those patients in DBT than those receiving TAU. Therapists who received intensive DBT training were shown to produce significantly greater improvements in patients’ suicidal and non-suicidal self-injury than therapists who received only 4 day basic training. Further clinical improvements were achieved in patients offered an additional six months of DBT. This study demonstrates that providing DBT to patients within routine public mental health settings can be both clinically effective and cost effective.     

Susan Myers-Shirk’s <Emphasis Type="Italic">Helping the Good Shepherd</Emphasis>: A Review Essay

In this essay, I review a recent book that deals with the history of pastoral counseling. I offer an overview of the book, some criticism of the book, and a discussion of how this book relates to my own work. I argue that what Susan Myers-Shirk has identified as a “liberal moral sensibility” among pastoral counselors seems to have certain affinities with Peter Homans’s “mourning religion” thesis. I suggest that this thesis can shed light on the divide between liberal and conservative pastoral counselors, a divide that Myers-Shirk identifies, and that this thesis can build on Myers-Shirk’s historical work by providing a rubric for understanding the relationship between private experience and public theory among liberal pastoral counselors. I also suggest that Myers-Shirk should write a sequel to this book.     

Freud’s Wolf Man: A Case of Successful Religious Sublimation

This article focuses on Freud’s view that the case of Sergei Pankejeff, commonly known as Wolf Man, is an example of an unsuccessful religious sublimation. Freud focuses on the efforts by Sergei’s mother and his nurse to educate him in the Christian faith. He points out that, although these efforts were successful in making him into a piously religious boy, they contributed to the repression of his sexual attraction to his father, the arrest of his psychosexual development, and to an obsessional neurosis reflected in blasphemous thoughts and compulsive acts of religious piety. The authors suggest, however, that there was one feature of his early religious behavior that reflected a successful religious sublimation and explain why it was successful. They conclude that even small children may experience a successful religious sublimation.     

Attention Biases to Threat Link Behavioral Inhibition to Social Withdrawal over Time in Very Young Children

Behaviorally inhibited children display a temperamental profile characterized by social withdrawal and anxious behaviors. Previous research, focused largely on adolescents, suggests that attention biases to threat may sustain high levels of behavioral inhibition (BI) over time, helping link early temperament to social outcomes. However, no prior studies examine the association between attention bias and BI before adolescence. The current study examined the interrelations among BI, attention biases to threat, and social withdrawal already manifest in early childhood. Children (N = 187, 83 Male, M _age  = 61.96 months) were characterized for BI in toddlerhood (24 & 36 months). At 5 years, they completed an attention bias task and concurrent social withdrawal was measured. As expected, BI in toddlerhood predicted high levels of social withdrawal in early childhood. However, this relation was moderated by attention bias. The BI-withdrawal association was only evident for children who displayed an attention bias toward threat. The data provide further support for models associating attention with socioemotional development and the later emergence of clinical anxiety.     

Religious Congregations as Mediating Structures for Social Justice: a Multilevel Examination

Scholars in the field of community psychology have called for a closer examination of the mediating role that religious congregations serve in society, especially in relation to the promotion of social justice. The current study provides such an examination, offering a multilevel examination of religious individuals (n = 5,123) nested within religious congregations (n = 62) with a particular focus on how individual and congregational level variables (i.e. theological orientation, frequency of religious attendance, bonding and bridging social capital) predict individual prioritization of and participation in congregational social justice activities. Findings indicated that individual level theological orientation was associated with prioritization, and demographics and social capital bonding were associated with prioritization and participation. Furthermore, congregational bridging social capital was associated with the prioritization of justice, whereas congregational theological orientation moderated the associations between frequency of religious participation for both prioritization of and participation in congregational justice activities. These findings show that specific aspects of the congregational setting (i.e., congregational theological orientation) are important to the individual prioritization of and participation in social justice activities. These findings provide support for the role of religious congregations as mediating structures for social justice. Implications for future research are also discussed.     

An examination of career indecision and application to dispositional authenticity

Authenticity has been viewed as a dimension related to life satisfaction, but we propose that authenticity is related to career outcomes. In this study, we examined the relation between authenticity and career indecision. Authenticity was assessed by the Authenticity Scale and it was found to be moderately related to different indices of career indecision in a sample of 537 undergraduate university students. Results are discussed in terms of their clinical and research implications and encourage a broader perspective in conceptualizing vocational concerns.     

View combination: a generalization mechanism for visual recognition

We examined whether view combination mechanisms shown to underlie object and scene recognition can integrate visual information across views that have little or no three-dimensional information at either the object or scene level. In three experiments, people learned four “views” of a two dimensional visual array derived from a three-dimensional scene. In Experiments 1 and 2, the stimuli were arrays of colored rectangles that preserved the relative sizes, distances, and angles among objects in the original scene, as well as the original occlusion relations. Participants recognized a novel central view more efficiently than any of the Trained views, which in turn were recognized more efficiently than equidistant novel views. Experiment 2 eliminated presentation frequency as an explanation for this effect. Experiment 3 used colored dots that preserved only identity and relative location information, which resulted in a weaker effect, though still one that was inconsistent with both part-based and normalization accounts of recognition. We argue that, for recognition processes to function so effectively with such minimalist stimuli, view combination must be a very general and fundamental mechanism, potentially enabling both visual recognition and categorization.     

Effects of organizational citizenship behaviors on selection decisions in employment interviews

This article reports on an experiment examining the effects of job candidates' propensity to exhibit organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs) on selection decisions made in the context of a job interview. We developed videos that manipulated candidate responses to interview questions tapping task performance and citizenship behavior content in 2 administrative positions. Results obtained from 480 undergraduates provided support for our hypotheses that job candidates who exhibited higher levels of helping, voice, and loyalty behaviors were generally rated as more competent, received higher overall evaluations, and received higher salary recommendations than job candidates who exhibited lower levels of these behaviors. These effects held even after taking into account candidate responses regarding task performance. We also found that candidate responses to OCB-related questions tended to have a greater effect on selection decisions for the higher level position (supervisor of administrative personnel) than for the lower level one (administrative assistant). Finally, content analyses of open-ended responses indicated that participants' selection decisions were particularly sensitive to candidates who exhibited low levels of voice and helping behaviors. Implications and future research are discussed.     

How leaders self-regulate their task performance: evidence that power promotes diligence, depletion, and disdain

When leaders perform solitary tasks, do they self-regulate to maximize their effort, or do they reduce effort and conserve their resources? Our model suggests that power motivates self-regulation toward effective performance-unless the task is perceived as unworthy of leaders. Our 1st studies showed that power improves self-regulation and performance, even when resources for self-regulation are low (ego depletion). Additional studies showed that leaders sometimes disdain tasks they deem unworthy, by withholding effort (and therefore performing poorly). Ironically, during ego depletion, leaders skip the appraisal and, therefore, work hard regardless of task suitability, so that depleted leaders sometimes outperform nondepleted ones. Our final studies replicated these patterns with different tasks and even with simple manipulation of framing and perception of the same task (Experiment 5). Experiment 4 also showed that the continued high exertion of leaders when depleted takes a heavy toll, resulting in larger impairments later. The judicious expenditure of self-control resources among powerful people may help them prioritize their efforts to pursue their goals effectively.