Prevalence of childhood and adolescent sexual abuse among sex offenders.

A simple nonstandardized questionnaire was developed and administered to 150 men convicted of various sexual offenses currently on probation or parole, living in the community, admitting their offenses and attending treatment. The hypothesis that men who engaged in sexual activity as adolescents with women would be at a higher risk of committing statutory rape-type sexual offenses was not substantiated.     

The Personality Characteristics of Methodist Ministers: Feminine Men and Masculine Women?

A detailed questionnaire was mailed to every Methodist minister engaged in circuit ministry in Great Britain. Each of the 1,339 respondents completed the Revised Eysenck Personality Questionnaire (EPQR-S). The male ministers recorded lower psychoticism scores than the male population norms. The female ministers recorded lower neuroticism scores than the female population norms. These findings support the view that ministry may appeal particularly to men who value and display the tender-minded personality characteristics associated with femininity and to women who value and display the stable personality characteristics associated with masculinity. Implications of these findings for ministry are discussed.     

Protective Role of Spirituality from the Perspective of Indian College Students with Suicidal Ideation: “I am here Because God Exists”

Spiritual beliefs are found to be having a significant effect during times of struggles and trials in peoples’ lives. India being a multi-religious society, it is imperative to establish the relevance of spirituality in the lives of the college students with suicidal ideation. The current study therefore utilized focus group methodology to explore the Indian female college students’ perceptions on the protective role of spirituality as a factor contributing to their positive adaptation in times of adversity. Twenty students participated in the discussion. The results interestingly surfaced themes supporting the significance of them on how individuals rely on spiritual beliefs and the possible implications of the need to address it for positive adaptation. Most of the participants analogically stated the themes emerged as “something to stay afloat in the rough sea of life’s realities.”     

New Concepts in the 2014 ACA Code of Ethics

The 2014 revision of the ACA Code of Ethics (American Counseling Association [ACA], 2014 ) substantially raises the bar for the ethical practice of professional counselors. This article provides interviews with members of the ACA Ethics Revision Task Force that explore and clarify new imperatives in the areas of ethical decision making, professional values, managing and maintaining boundaries, technology (including social media), the nonimposition of counselor personal values, counselor education, legal issues, sliding scales, and fee splitting.     

Authenticity: a mediator in the relationship between attachment style and affective functioning

Attachment has been show to exhibit a strong effect on emotional well-being throughout an individual’s lifetime. This study examined individuals’ authenticity as a potential mediating variable in the relationship between insecure attachment and affective functioning. Authenticity was examined from multiple perspectives to better define its role as a mediating variable. Results showed that avoidant attachment is a predictor of affective functioning, and that authenticity acts as a mediating variable in this relationship. Anxious attachment showed no direct relationship with affective functioning, yet evidence was found for an indirect pathway from anxious attachment through authenticity on affective functioning. The differing results by attachment style support Mikulincer, Shaver, and Pereg’s theory suggesting a two-part model of emotional response style, wherein individuals with avoidant attachment deactivate emotion and individuals with anxious attachment show hyper-activation when coping with emotion. The study examines the construct of authenticity and its importance in affective functioning. Implications for therapists working with clients are made that highlight the importance of authentic relationships in therapy and life.     

Conceptualising and testing the Narnian Character Virtue Scales: a study among 12- to 13-year-old students

ABSTRACT

This paper sets out to examine and to operationalise 12 key character virtues identified within C. S. Lewis’ Narnian texts: courage, curiosity, forgiveness, fortitude, gratitude, hard work, humility, integrity, justice, love, self-control, and wisdom. A pilot study among 56 year eight students (12–13 years of age) generated nine five-item instruments displaying adequate internal consistency reliability, and suggested ways in which the other three measures (curiosity, integrity, and love) could be enhanced in future work. Construct validity was explored by examining the correlations between these 12 character virtues and sex, self-concept, and empathy, and by locating these 12 character virtues within the three-dimensional psychological space proposed by Eysenck’s model of personality.     

Toward a taxonomic model of attention in effortful listening

In recent years, there has been increasing interest in studying listening effort. Research on listening effort intersects with the development of active theories of speech perception and contributes to the broader endeavor of understanding speech perception within the context of neuroscientific theories of perception, attention, and effort. Due to the multidisciplinary nature of the problem, researchers vary widely in their precise conceptualization of the catch-all term listening effort. Very recent consensus work stresses the relationship between listening effort and the allocation of cognitive resources, providing a conceptual link to current cognitive neuropsychological theories associating effort with the allocation of selective attention. By linking listening effort to attentional effort, we enable the application of a taxonomy of external and internal attention to the characterization of effortful listening. More specifically, we use a vectorial model to decompose the demand causing listening effort into its mutually orthogonal external and internal components and map the relationship between demanded and exerted effort by means of a resource-limiting term that can represent the influence of motivation as well as vigilance and arousal. Due to its quantitative nature and easy graphical interpretation, this model can be applied to a broad range of problems dealing with listening effort. As such, we conclude that the model provides a good starting point for further research on effortful listening within a more differentiated neuropsychological framework.     

Detecting correlation changes in multivariate time series: A comparison of four non-parametric change point detection methods

Change point detection in multivariate time series is a complex task since next to the mean, the correlation structure of the monitored variables may also alter when change occurs. DeCon was recently developed to detect such changes in mean and\or correlation by combining a moving windows approach and robust PCA. However, in the literature, several other methods have been proposed that employ other non-parametric tools: E-divisive, Multirank, and KCP. Since these methods use different statistical approaches, two issues need to be tackled. First, applied researchers may find it hard to appraise the differences between the methods. Second, a direct comparison of the relative performance of all these methods for capturing change points signaling correlation changes is still lacking. Therefore, we present the basic principles behind DeCon, E-divisive, Multirank, and KCP and the corresponding algorithms, to make them more accessible to readers. We further compared their performance through extensive simulations using the settings of Bulteel et al. (Biological Psychology, 98 (1), 29-42, 2014) implying changes in mean and in correlation structure and those of Matteson and James (Journal of the American Statistical Association, 109 (505), 334-345, 2014) implying different numbers of (noise) variables. KCP emerged as the best method in almost all settings. However, in case of more than two noise variables, only DeCon performed adequately in detecting correlation changes.     

Correlations between attitude toward Christianity, prayer, and church attendance among 9- to 11-yr.-olds

Data provided by 150 9- to 11-yr.-old primary school pupils in England showed scores on the Francis Scale of Attitude toward Christianity more highly correlated with (personal) prayer (r = .57) than with (public) church attendance (r = .23), providing support for the view that attitude scales access a deeper level of religiosity less contaminated by those contextual and social factors which may influence public church attendance more than personal prayer.