Exploring New and Renewed Eco‐Spiritualities

This essay discusses five recent books, written in French, that contribute to refection in environmental ethics. Francophone literature on the topic is marked by resonant and divergent concerns, and rooted in a geography, politics, and history different from North America and marked by distinctive lines of intellectual influence. Jean‐Claude Eslin proposes recovering ecological resources from the Christian tradition and also suggests imagining new images of God: notably, God as pilote rather than artisan. Dominique Bourg takes a multi‐disciplinary approach that emphasizes the spiritual conditions for relating to the world ecologically and economically; he argues for sobriété (austerity) as a spiritual disposition and an economic model. Baptiste Morizot develops diplomacy as an ethical, political, and spiritual model for cohabiting with wolves, whose return to the French countryside has been highly controversial. Nastassja Martin offers an anthropological study of the indigenous Gwich’in community of Fort Yukon, Alaska that accentuates the mix of Protestant missional influences and Gwich’in spiritual affirmations and practices at play in their relationship to the nonhuman world. Attending to this literature may helpfully decenter anglophone debates and enrich their conceptual vocabulary.     

Patient-Informed Treatment Development of Behavioral Smoking Cessation for People With Schizophrenia

The objective of this study was to use qualitative methodology to tailor and refine an existing smoking cessation intervention for the population of people who use cigarettes and are diagnosed with schizophrenia, schizoaffective, or psychotic disorder. Successive cohort design methodology was used to iteratively modify the treatment in response to qualitative participant, therapist, and consultant feedback on the intervention. Qualitative methodology for participant feedback included analysis of semistructured interviews with participants, visualization of app utilization data, and stakeholder feedback from study therapists and consultants. Using the successive cohort design, a tailored multicomponent mobile health smoking cessation intervention was developed. The intervention included mobile contingency management (i.e., financial compensation for confirmed abstinence from smoking), pharmacotherapy for smoking cessation, cognitive-behavioral counseling sessions, and the Stay Quit app for relapse prevention. Two cohorts (N = 13) were completed in the study; after each cohort, the treatment protocol was revised. The intervention is described, as well as the qualitative findings from each cohort and subsequent changes made to the intervention based upon patient and provider feedback. Metrics of patient engagement included treatment adherence (40% in Cohort 1 and 63% in Cohort 2). Both participants and therapists reported that the intervention was helpful. Over one third of participants self-reported abstinence at posttreatment. Since qualitative methodology is often underutilized in mental health treatment development, this study demonstrates the utility of the successive cohort design for treatment development of behavior change interventions for at-risk, vulnerable populations.     

Rights, Wrongs, and Aristotelian Egoism: Illuminating the Rights/Care Dichotomy

Since the recent work of Carol Gilligan, Nel Noddings, and others, it has become commonplace in moral philosophy to employ a dichotomy between an ethics of "Care" and an ethics of "Rights." Gilligan claims that men and women view moral issues in fundamentally divergent ways. Responses to moral problems tend to divide along lines emphasizing respect for rights, in the case of men, and caring for others, in the case of women. Inspired by these findings, several authors have classified moral theories in two basic camps, revolving around the injunction to care or the mandate to respect rights. While many concede that the Care and Rights perspectives are not mutually exclusive, it is increasingly common to view ethicists as forced to choose between these two types of theories.     

Aggression Observation Scale for Group Psychotherapy

An observational scale to record aggressive behaviors, defenses, and interventions that occur during a psychotherapy group has been developed. Content and process items were included. The content items focus on the spoken material and are on a continuum of increasing group members' awareness of and responsibility for their anger. The process items are directed to underlying psychodynamic issues on a continuum from avoiding anger, to indirect and then expression of anger. Leader interventions (responses) are also included. The development of the scale, the Aggression Observation Scale for Group Psychotherapy (AOSGP), is described including pilot testing and reliability and validity findings.