Religious involvement,helping others,and psychological well-being

This study has two goals. The first goal is to see if involvement in religion is associated with providing tangible support to family members and strangers. The second goal is to see if providing tangible support to family members and strangers is associated with well-being. A conceptual model, which was developed to address these issues, contains the following core relationships: (1) individuals who go to church more often will receive more spiritual support from coreligionists; (2) those who receive more spiritual support will provide more tangible assistance to family members and strangers; and (3) people who help family members and strangers will report greater life satisfaction and higher self-esteem. Findings from a nationwide survey support all but one of these relationships. More specifically, the results suggest that providing tangible support to family members is associated with greater well-being, but providing tangible support to strangers is not associated with well-being.     

Church service roles and anticipated support among older Mexican Americans

The purpose of this study is to see how feelings of anticipated support arise in church. Anticipated support refers to the belief that coreligionists will provide assistance in the future if the need arises. This model contains the following hypothesis: (1) people who affiliate with conservative Protestant congregations will be more deeply committed to their faith, (2) individuals who are more committed to their faith will attend church more frequently, (3) people who go to church more often will be more likely to occupy church service roles, (4) those who occupy church service roles will feel more highly valued by their coreligionists, (5) individuals who feel they are valued highly by fellow church members will receive more emotional support from them, and (6) people who receive more emotional support at church will have stronger anticipated support beliefs. Data from a nationwide survey of older Mexican Americans support these hypotheses.     

Correlates of colorectal cancer screening compliance and stage of adoption among siblings of individuals with early onset colorectal cancer.

Concepts from the health belief, transtheoretical, and dual process models were used to examine how siblings of individuals diagnosed with colorectal cancer (CRC) before age 56 made decisions about CRC screening. Siblings (N = 504) were assessed for CRC screening practices and intentions, pros, cons, processes-of-change, perceived risk of CRC, perceived severity of CRC, preventability of CRC, cancer-related distress, and sibling relationship closeness. Physician and family recommendation and knowledge were also assessed. Fifty-seven percent of participants (n = 287) were compliant with CRC screening. Logistic regression indicated that perceived pros and cons, perceived risk, commitment to screening, health care avoidance, and sibling closeness were associated with screening compliance. Physician and family recommendation were also strong correlates. A similar set of factors was associated with stage of adoption of CRC screening.     

Guest Editorial: Who's Afraid of Life After Death?

The evidence for an afterlife is sufficiently strong and compelling that an unbiased person ought to conclude that materialism is a false theory. Yet the academy refuses to examine the evidence, and clings to materialism as if it were a priori true, instead of a posteriori false. I suggest several explanations for the monumental failure of curiosity on the part of academia. First, there is deep confusion between the concepts of evidence and proof. Second, materialism functions as a powerful paradigm that structures the shape of scientific explanations, but is not itself open to question. The third explanation is intellectual arrogance, as the possible existence of disembodied intelligence threatens the materialistic belief that the educated human brain is the highest form of intelligence in existence. Finally, there is a social taboo against belief in an afterlife, as our whole way of life is predicated on materialism and might collapse if near-death experiences, particularly the life review, were accepted as fact.     

The Fascination of Islam

An Orientalist painting reproduced on the cover of the English translation of Rodinson's La fascination de l'Islam prompts some initial reflections about elements of distortion and projection in European perceptions of the Muslim world. The rest of the article charts the growth of the academic study of Islam and makes some suggestions as to how it might develop in the future. The second section surveys the history of Islamic Studies in Western Europe, dealing in turn with Christian scholarship, text-based Orientalism, and the contribution of the political sciences. It highlights the merits of these approaches but also explains why Muslim students find them problematic. The third section considers a traditional Muslim approach to the subject, as described by Ibn Khaldun. Because of its emphasis on the transmission of information on religious authority, this approach would be inappropriate in a modern Western university. Moreover, as a historian, Ibn Khaldun was already aware of its deficiencies. The fourth section opens by stressing that there is an urgent need to bring Western scholarship and traditional Muslim scholarship into constructive dialogue with each other. Despite the enormity of the task, it would be facilitated if Islamicists of all persuasions were prepared to learn from colleagues in Religious Studies and Theology. With this in mind, a number of suggestions are made as to how Islamic Studies stands to be enriched through contact with these two disciplines. Finally, the author states that Religious Studies and Theology also stand to benefit from the relationship. For example, he suggests that the rise of Islam raises important issues for those who are interested in the formative period of Christian doctrine.     

Forgiveness by God, Forgiveness of Others, and Psychological Well-Being in Late Life

The purpose of this study is to examine the relationships among forgiveness by God, forgiveness of others, and psychological well–being with data provided by a nationwide survey of older adults. Three main findings emerge from the analyses. First, the data suggest that forgiving others tends to enhance psychological well–being, and these salubrious effects are greater than those associated with forgiveness by God. Second, the findings indicate that how older people go about forgiving others is important: older adults who require transgressors to perform acts of contrition experience more psychological distress than those who forgive unconditionally. Third, the results reveal that forgiveness by God may be involved in this process because older people who feel they are forgiven by God are less likely to expect transgressors to perform acts of contrition.     

Effects of Accountability on Rating Behavior and Rater Accuracy

We tested whether improvements in rater accuracy on a performance-appraisal task attributed to rater accountability could be explained by variance in rater behavior. Data from Mero and Motowidlo (1995) were used initially to test whether observed improvements in rater accuracy could be explained by rating process behaviors of attending to relevant subordinate performance and taking better notes to record that performance. Results showed that both behaviors were correlated with accuracy and that these behaviors partially mediated the relationship between accountability and improved decision quality for participants who were held accountable for their rating decision and did not have any preconceived information about that rating from their supervisor. We then tested this process model on a new sample of participants and found that attentiveness and notetaking mediated the relationship between accountability and accuracy.     

Applicant Perceptions of Test Fairness: Integrating Justice and Self-Serving Bias Perspectives

The justice perspective is the current dominant framework for research on applicant perceptions of test fairness. Recently, an emerging perspective suggests that self-serving bias mechanisms may be operative in the development of test fairness perceptions. Using data from 494 actual applicants to an entry-level State Police Trooper position, this study integrates both the justice and self-serving bias perspectives to achieve a better understanding of test fairness perceptions. Results from structural equation modeling show that perceived job-relevance affects perceived fairness. In addition, test performance affects both perceptions indirectly through perceived performance.     

Short-term retention of superimposed and of spatially distinct multiletter visual arrays

On each trial, Ss attempted to retain a series of five visually presented letters while concurrently “shadowing” (repeating aloud) a rapid series of aurally presented letters. If serial-position accuracy is ignored, they were able to store more than only the last letter of a typical series, even though all five letters appeared on the same screen, and that performance was superior to the retention of five auditorily presented letters. Together, these findings suggest that a form of visual storage might have been employed for the retention of visual stimuli and, specifically, one that was relatively immune to erasure as compared to “iconic” storage. In further support of that hypothesis, retention of such visual series as measured by free-recall accuracy was not inferior to that of five letters, each of which was presented on a separate screen.     

Transfer and retroaction under conditions of changed organization

If the process of learning a response sequence is one of organizing the sequence into chunks, then two responses should be identical only if their organizations are the same. For example, if SBJFQLZ was chunked as SB JFQ LZ during original learning and SBJ FQLZ during interpolated learning, the two responses should he different from the Ss' point of view. Therefore, negative transfer and retroactive inhibition should be obtained.