Concerns about breast cancer and relations to psychosocial well-being in a multiethnic sample of early-stage patients.

Much work on psychosocial sequelae of breast cancer has been guided by the assumption that body image and partner reaction issues are focal. In a tri-ethnic sample of 223 women treated for early-stage breast cancer within the prior year, the authors assessed a wider range of concerns and relations to well-being. Strongest concerns were recurrence, pain, death, harm from adjuvant treatment, and bills. Body-image concerns were moderate; concern about rejection was minimal. Younger women had stronger sexual and partner-related concerns than older women. Hispanic women had many stronger concerns and more disruption than other women. Life and pain concerns and sexuality concerns contributed uniquely to predicting emotional and psychosexual disruption; life and pain concerns and rejection concerns contributed to predicting social disruption. In sum, adaptation to breast cancer is a process bearing on several aspects of the patient's life space.     

To Absent Friends: Classical Spiritualist Mediumship and New Age Channelling Compared and Contrasted

The paper compares Western Spiritualism in the period from the mid-nineteenth century to the Second World War and contemporary New Age channelling. It focuses on one important difference between the two: the presence of physical manifestations of the purportedly supernatural in the former and the absence of such manifestations in the latter. The claim by Spiritualists that they could tangibly manifest the supernatural precipitated conflict with secularising professions and individuals and led to numerous public exposures of mediums. New Age channels continue to be surrounded by opponents. By eschewing physical manifestations and relying solely on verbal communications, channels help to secure themselves from technologically-assisted and media-focused debunkers. Moreover, within the private sphere to which secularisation has confined channelling, the resulting subjectivism is consonant with normative practices within commodity culture and may even increase attractiveness of channelling to certain post-materialist consumers. Consumer culture further assists channelling by supporting the mass dissemination of the cultic milieu.