Rejoinder to Harold Blum2

The author's main disagreement with Harold Blum is over Blum's contention that symptomatic improvement is directly linked to the recovery of memories. The idea that memories are laid down in childhood and preserved until the time of their later recovery flies in the face of what we now understand as the creation of memories by the neurobiological systems underpinning this aspect of mental function. No evidence directly links symptomatic improvement to reconstruction and thus to outcome; care should be taken to avoid confusing co‐occurrence with causality. While reconstruction of how things actually were in childhood can significantly contribute to therapeutic action, it is the process rather than the outcome of this reconstruction that is therapeutic, due to the opportunity thus afforded to rework current experiences in the context of other perspectives. The author clarifies his definition of transference to show some areas of agreement between his position and Blum's. He disusses contemporary neuroscientific views on memory and identifies a number of psychoanalytic writers who have used these productively.     

Constitutional Privilege and Constituting Pluralism: Religious Freedom in National, Global, and Legal Context

Lori Beaman argues that religious freedom in Canada and the United States is well established in theory (or myth) but limited in practice, privileging Protestantism in particular and varieties of Christianity in general. Focusing on the treatment of other religions in the courts of the two countries, she defends the hypothesis that these legal systems tend to reinforce the hegemony of Christianity, using this as an implicit model of what constitutes a religion, and thereby maintaining the marginalization and restricting the freedom of other religions. The present article sets Beaman's arguments in a wider global context, exploring the extent to which Christianity does and does not serve as a global standard for religion; and addressing the question of why issues of religious freedom so frequently end up being the subject of legal judgment and political decision. The main conclusions drawn from this global contextualization are that maintenance of some kind of religious hegemony is the rule all across global society, not just in Canada and the United States, and that unfettered freedom of religion or genuine religious pluralization is correspondingly rare, if it exists anywhere. Moreover, it is argued that such limitations, frequently expressed in legal judgments and political decisions, are more or less to be expected because they flow from the peculiar way that religion has been constructed in the modern and global era as both a privileged and privatized, as both an encompassing and marginalized social domain. The article thereby simultaneously reinforces and takes issue with Beaman's position: the modern and global reconstruction of religion invites its infinite pluralization at the same time as it encourages its politicization and practical restriction. Religions act as important resources both for claims to inclusion and for strategies of relative exclusion.     

Imagining and Explaining Hypothetical Scenarios: Mediational Effects on the Subjective Likelihood of Health‐Related Outcomes1

Imagining and explaining hypothetical events have been shown to increase the subjective likelihood of those events occurring. At the same time, it has been suggested that reducing unrealistic optimism about health risks (i.e., increasing the subjective likelihood of negative health outcomes) might motivate health‐protective behavior. In exploring the implications of these issues for health‐promotion goals, 2 experiments (Ns= 334 and 328) involving postal questionnaires are reported in which attempts are made through the use of imagine‐and‐explain scenarios to manipulate the subjective likelihood of a negative outcome (heart disease) and of a positive outcome (reducing fat consumption). The greater success of the manipulation of dietary change expectations than of heart disease expectations suggests the potential benefits of focusing directly on planning goal strategies in relation to health beneficial behaviors.     

Dropping out of school: A review of intervention programs

This article reviews the literature on dropout prevention for school-aged children. A review of dropout prevention programs identified in the literature highlights methodological concerns, with a discussion of design, sampling, statistical analysis, and implementation issues. The interventions employed with greatest frequency in the studies reviewed emphasized academic enhancement, psychosocial skill development, mentoring, and parent/teacher behavior management training. Programs that were academically oriented or those that were multi-component programs emerged with the most promising empirical base. However, at the present time, there is a lack of consistent and persuasive outcome evidence that meet Kratochwill and Stoiber's [Sch. Psychol. Q. 15 (2001) 233] criteria for empirically supported interventions. This deficiency leads to the conclusion that there is no one particular best practice or beneficial treatment currently available to address the problem of school dropout even though a number of intervention programs appear to hold promise. Implications for school psychologists include both practice and research applications.     

Probability weights in rank-dependent utility with binary even-chance independence

We examine the effects of a weak version of expected utility's independence axiom on the probability weighting function in rank-dependent utility. Our weak independence axiom says that a 50-50 lottery between a two-outcome gamble and its certainty equivalent is indifferent to the certainty equivalent. A variety of nonlinear probability weighting functions satisfy this axiom, but most weighting functions proposed by others do not. Nevertheless, the axiom accommodates weighting functions that are quite similar to the inverse S-shaped concave-convex functions of others that overvalue small probabilities and undervalue large probabilities.     

Personality Testing in Personnel Selection: Adverse impact and differential hiring rates

Personality tests are often used in selection and have demonstrated predictive validity across a variety of occupational groups and performance criteria. Although different selection decision methods can be used to make selection decisions (e.g., compensatory top down, compensatory with sliding bands, noncompensatory) from personality test results, there is a paucity of research addressing the influence of these different selection decision methods on issues such as, adverse impact and differential hiring rates. This gap in the literature is redressed in the current study. Results from 398 bus operator candidates indicated that there may be adverse impact and differential hiring rate issues depending on the selection decision method used and the designated group being assessed. Implications and future research directions are discussed.