Imagine no religion: Heretical disgust,anger and the symbolic purity of mind

Immoral actions, including physical/sexual (e.g., incest) and social (e.g., unfairness) taboos, are often described as disgusting. But what about immoral thoughts, more specifically, thoughts that violate religious beliefs? Do heretical thoughts taint the purity of mind? The present research examined heretical disgust using self-report measures and facial electromyography. Religious thought violations consistently elicited both self-reported disgust and anger. Feelings of disgust also predicted harsh moral judgement, independent of anger, and were mediated by feelings of “contamination”. However, religious thought violations were not associated with a disgust facial expression (i.e., levator labii muscle activity) that was elicited by physically disgusting stimuli. We conclude that people (especially more religious people) do feel disgust in response to heretical thoughts that is meaningfully distinct from anger as a moral emotion. However, heretical disgust is not embodied in a physical disgust response. Rather, disgust has a symbolic moral value that marks heretical thoughts as harmful and aversive.     

A Family Affair: Examining the Impact of Parental Infidelity on Children Using a Structural Family Therapy Framework

Infidelity has a permeating impact on social systems, but no system is more impacted by infidelity than the nuclear family. This paper examines the impact of parental infidelity on the family using a structural family therapy (SFT) framework. Conceptualizing and treating infidelity from an SFT approach provides a systemic understanding of how interactions between the parental units about infidelity impact parent–child dynamics. Clinical recommendations are outlined for couple and family therapists to help families find healthy and adaptable ways to create and maintain structures that minimize the harmful impact of infidelity on the family system.     

Ask and You Shall Find Out: Some Multicultural Dynamics in Catholic Theological Education

The theological classroom is a place where dynamics of diversity and multiculturalism enter not only the understanding and interpretation of the course material, but also the very processes of teaching and learning. But how is one to learn and assess what students and professors are experiencing as cultural differences, and how is one to sort out the personal characteristics from the cultural? This essay, underscoring the importance of asking students about cultural issues, discusses a few such issues via some anecdotal data.     

Case illustration: Moving along…and,is change gradual or sudden?

A sequence of analytic sessions of a professional woman in her forties is used to illustrate the moving along process. The material shows a gradual change, where the patient's experience of her sense of agency is altered through a particular kind of interactive sequence. The example is intended to make it clear that the group's view of how change occurs is not strictly or primarily in terms of sudden changes, and that the problem of assessing moments of meeting as well as quantitative and qualitative shifts is one with which the group continues to struggle. © 1998 Michigan Association for Infant Mental Health     

Underneath the Mask of the Strong Black Woman Schema: Disentangling Influences of Strength and Self-Silencing on Depressive Symptoms among U.S. Black Women

Sex Roles - Recent investigations have elucidated the influence of the Strong Black Woman (SBW) Schema on the mental health and treatment seeking behaviors of Black women in the United States....     

The explanatory structure of unexplainable events: Causal constraints on magical reasoning

A common intuition, often captured in fiction, is that some impossible events (e.g., levitating a stone) are “more impossible” than others (e.g., levitating a feather). We investigated the source of this intuition, hypothesizing that graded notions of impossibility arise from explanatory considerations logically precluded by the violation at hand but still taken into account. Studies 1–4 involved college undergraduates (n = 357), and Study 5 involved preschool-aged children (n = 32). In Studies 1 and 2, participants saw pairs of magical spells that violated one of 18 causal principles—six physical, six biological, and six psychological—and were asked to indicate which spell would be more difficult to learn. Both spells violated the same causal principle but differed in their relation to a subsidiary principle. Participants’ judgments of spell difficulty honored the subsidiary principle, even when participants were given the option of judging the two spells equally difficult. Study 3 replicated those effects with Likert-type ratings; Study 4 replicated them in an open-ended version of the task in which participants generated their own causal violations; and Study 5 replicated them with children. Taken together, these findings suggest that events that defy causal explanation are interpreted in terms of explanatory considerations that hold in the absence of such violations.     

So Why Do You Think That Way?: Examining the Role Implicit Attitudes and Motivation Play in Audience’s Perception of a Racially Charged Issue

Events in Ferguson (MO), the Eric Garner incident, and most recently Chicago (IL), have again brought perceptions of race to the forefront of the public’s conscience. Often perceptions of racially charged events are split along racial lines with Whites often siding with law enforcement and Blacks seeing a miscarriage of justice. Bifurcated perceptions along racial lines are nothing new, dating back to the early 1900s. Despite this schism, few analyses have examined the genesis of this difference in perceptions on racial issues. This analysis looks to fill that gap. Specifically, we examine the role media frames and people’s preexisting attitudes and motivations play in determining what they think of contentious race issues and the people involved in them. Using the Jena Six incident as a case study, we find that people with less egalitarian racial attitudes—and low motivation to hide those attitudes—are less likely to blame race-related problems on mitigating cultural factors. They are also more likely judge news stories about a racial issue as being low quality. However, thematically framed stories that include discussion of the cultural aspects of the event may help to reduce this process.     

Stress Management for College Students: An Experiential Multi-Modal Approach

This quasi-experimental study evaluated the effectiveness of a multi-modal experiential stress management course for college students. Experiential approaches included yoga, mindfulness hiking, and equine-assisted stress management activities. Univariate analysis of covariance revealed significantly lower perceived stress for the experimental group at the conclusion of the stress management course. Repeated measures univariate analysis of variance revealed that the stress management course significantly reduced present moment stress over time and that equine-assisted activities were as effective as yoga and mindfulness hiking in reducing student stress.     

Choices or Rights? Charter Schools and the Politics of Choice-Based Education Policy Reform

Simply put, charter schools have not lived up to their advocates’ promise of equity. Using examples of tangible civil rights gains of the twentieth century (e.g. Brown v. Board, Lau v. Nichols) and extending feminist theories of invisible labor to include the labor of democracy, the authors argue that the charter movement renders invisible the labor that secured civil protections for historically marginalized groups. The charter movement hangs a quality public education—previously recognized as a universal guarantee—on the education consumer’s ability to navigate a marketplace. The authors conclude that the neoliberal agenda of positioning choice as the best mechanism for securing an education rolls back the rights that were already secured through the labor of democracy.