Spirituality and aging: How worship communities of older adults sustain their faith in the absence of traditional ordained leadership

ABSTRACT

This article considers how older Christians (aged over 70) exercise worship in an environment of shared ministry. Specifically, the Local Shared Ministry Units (LSMU) model of worship within the Auckland Diocese of the Anglican Church in Aotearoa/New Zealand and Polynesia (Auckland Diocese). A collective case study approach was used, and individual members of four LSMUs were interviewed with the resulting comments treated as a collective case study. The findings indicate these older adults are still seeking faith formation, do not regard themselves as fully formed spiritually, and use personal prayer in particular to enhance and nourish their faith growth.     

Cognitive bias modification as a strategy to reduce children's fears and concerns about the secondary school transition

Background and objectives: Cognitive Bias Modification of Interpretations (CBM-I) has emerged as an anxiety-reducing tool for children and adolescents, targeting maladaptive interpretations of everyday situations. This literature falls short of addressing whether the effects of CBM-I extend to worries about a real-life stressor, such as a school transition. Design: The study comprised a between-groups design comparing the effects of CBM-I to an active control (AC) intervention in children. Method: We recruited 38 children within two months of their primary–secondary school transition and investigated the capacity for multi-session, parent-administered CBM-I, compared to an AC condition, to modify cognitive style and reduce anxiety symptoms and school concerns. Results: While benign interpretations increased significantly and negative interpretations tended to decrease following CBM-I, both interventions significantly reduced anxiety symptoms and school concerns. Conclusions: These findings indicate that anxiety-reducing effects of CBM-I in children extend to a real life stressful event, but that equivalent anxiety reduction may be achieved through exposure to potentially worrying situations and parent–child interaction in the absence of bias modification.     

The effects of mindfulness interventions on prenatal well-being: A systematic review

Objective: Low well-being during pregnancy can have significant adverse outcomes for mother and child. The effects of mindfulness interventions on prenatal maternal well-being are increasingly examined but outcomes have yet to be systematically evaluated. The aims of the current paper are to systematically evaluate intervention effects and current research approaches with pregnant groups.

Design: A systematic review of eight studies examining mindfulness intervention effects on prenatal well-being.

Results: Findings indicate potential benefits of mindfulness interventions for reducing levels of depression, anxiety and negative affect during pregnancy. There is also evidence for improved self-compassion and perceived childbirth self-efficacy. Further, these effects may be more pronounced for vulnerable groups, such as women currently experiencing low prenatal well-being. Less consistent findings were observed for stress, and positive affect. Variations in research design, gestational characteristics, timing of assessments and outcome measurement may explain some inconsistencies in the extant literature.

Conclusion: Mindfulness interventions present a potentially useful means to improve prenatal well-being but improved methodological quality is essential to rigorously examine intervention effects.     

Specialised higher-level mechanisms for facial-symmetry perception: evidence from orientation-tuning functions

Bilateral symmetry is important in many perceptual analyses from low-level figure-ground segmentation to higher-level face and object perception. Despite the success of low-level, image-based symmetry-detection models, these may not provide a complete account of symmetry perception. Better symmetry detection and stronger preferences for symmetry in upright faces than comparable patterns (e.g. inverted faces) that do not engage specialised face-coding mechanisms suggest a contribution of higher-level mechanisms to symmetry perception. We replicated better symmetry detection and stronger symmetry preferences for upright than inverted faces in experiment 1, and examined their orientation tuning in more detail in experiment 2. Decreasing performance as faces are mis-oriented away from the canonical upright orientation is the signature of specialised face-processing mechanisms, which are engaged less effectively as faces are mis-oriented. Lower-level symmetry-detection mechanisms, which operate better with vertical than horizontal, and horizontal than oblique, axes of symmetry would produce a W-shaped orientation-tuning function. Identical orientation-tuning functions were obtained for symmetry detection and preferences. Both declined with increasing mis-orientation over the 0 degrees-135 degrees range, consistent with a contribution from specialised face-coding mechanisms. Both increased from 135 degrees to 180 degrees, consistent with reliance on lower-level image-based mechanisms for severely misoriented faces. Taken together, the results implicate specialised, higher-level mechanisms in the detection of, and preference for, facial symmetry.     

Exploring the specificity of age-related differences in theory of mind tasks

Tasks assessing theory of mind (ToM) and non-mental state control tasks were administered to young and older adults to examine previous contradictory findings about age differences in mental state decoding. Age differences were found on a verbal ToM task after controlling for vocabulary levels. Older adults achieved significantly lower scores than did younger adults on static and dynamic visual ToM tasks, and a similar pattern was found on non-ToM control tasks. Rather than a specific ToM deficit, older adults exhibited a more general impairment in the ability to decode cues from verbal and visual information about people.     

Book reviews

SCHIFF, W. AND FOULKE, E. (Eds.). Tactual Perception: A Source Book. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1982. Pp. 464. ISBN 0 521 24095 6. £25.00.

GILHOOLY, K. J. Thinking: Directed, Undirected and Creative. London: Academic Press. 1982. Pp. 178. ISBN 0 12283482 8. £5.50.

DEUTSCH, D. The Psychology of Music. New York: Academic Press, 1982. Pp. 542. $49.50. ISBN 0 12 2135601.

SHEPARD, R. N. and COOPER, L. A. Mental Irnuges and Their Transfomutions. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. 1982. Pp. 364. ISBN 0 262 19200 4. £17.50

WADE, N. The Art and Science of Visual Illusions. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. 1982. Pp. 293. E1y. 95 ISBN 0 7100 0868 6.

REED, S.K. Cognition: Theory and Applications. Montery, Calif.; BrooksiCole Publishing Co. 1982. Pp. 394. $19.95 ISBN 0 8185 0462 5.

CAELLI, T. Visual Perception Theonl and Practice. Oxford: Pergamon Press. 1981Pp. 197. £8.50 (paper) ISBN 0 08 oz4419/0~4420.

A. M. UTTLEY. Infomation Transmission in the Nervous System. London: Academic Press. 1979.Pp. 111 £7.50 ISBN 0 12709750 3.

ANDERSON, J. R. (Ed.). Cognitive Skills and their-Acquisition. Hillsdale, New Jersey: Erlbaum. 1981. Pp. 386. 00.00. ISBN 0 89859 093 0.

KUCZAC, S. (Ed.). Language Development. Volume I: Syntux and Semantics. Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum. 1982. Pp. 492. ISBN 0 89859 1OO 7.

DEUTSCH, W. (Ed.). The Child's Construction of Languuge. London: Academic Press. 1981. Pp. 393. ISBN 0 12213580 6. £19.20.

BAKER, C. L. and MCCARTHY, J. J. (Eds). The Logical Problem of Language Acquisition. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. 1981. Pp. 358. ISBN 0 262 02159 5. £19.25.

DIXON, N. F. Preconscious Processing Chichester: Wiley 1981. Pp. 313. ISBN 0 471 27982 X. £14.95.     

Factors Associated with Support for Adolescent Access to Contraception Among Mexican Catholic Parents

Journal of Religion and Health - We used a nationally representative survey of 2186 Mexican Catholic parents to assess two outcomes: support for adolescent access to modern contraception and...     

Anxiety and depression and their links with delusions and hallucinations in people with a dual diagnosis of psychosis and substance misuse: a study using data from a randomised controlled trial

Rates of depression and anxiety have been linked to severity and distress associated with positive symptoms in psychosis. There is also tentative evidence to suggest that these concurrent symptoms might be related to delusional and hallucinatory content. Our aim was to assess the cross-sectional associations between anxiety and depression, and hallucination and delusion severity and distress in a sample of 327 people dually diagnosed with psychosis and substance misuse problems. In addition, the relationships between specific symptom content and levels of anxiety and depression were examined. Anxiety was associated with delusion distress and depression with hallucination distress, although neither was related to symptom severity. Auditory commands to harm or kill the self were associated with higher levels of depression. Delusions with themes pertaining to the paranormal, and those with references to celebrities were associated with lower levels of depression. No specific delusion or hallucination content was associated with level of anxiety, when other variables were controlled for. The results demonstrate that anxiety and depression are linked to distinct aspects of psychotic experience, highlighting the need to acknowledge the role of these concurrent symptoms in the context of psychosis. In addition, findings relating to specific types of delusions and hallucinations highlight avenues for further research.     

Concurrent drinking and smoking among college students: An event-level analysis

Cigarette smoking and drinking commonly co-occur among college students, a population that is at high risk for developing alcohol and nicotine use disorders. Several studies have been conducted that have examined predictors of drinking or smoking to gain a better understanding of the antecedents of engaging in these behaviors. Yet, few studies have examined specific factors that influence concurrent smoking and drinking in this population. The current study used data from a 21-day electronic diary-based study of college students (n=86) who engaged in concurrent drinking and smoking to examine event-level associations between alcohol use and cigarette smoking in the student's natural environment. We specifically focused on within-person analyses of contexts in which students reported smoking and drinking simultaneously in comparison to contexts in which students reporting drinking without smoking. Situational contexts included environmental setting, whether s/he was alone or with others, and changes in stress and urges to smoke before initiating drinking. Results indicated that students drank more while smoking and smoked three times as many cigarettes, on average, during drinking episodes. Being with others at a party or a bar was associated with increased odds of smoking while drinking. Likewise, increased stress since the prior assessment predicted a greater likelihood of smoking while drinking. Based on the findings from the present study, it is important for future prevention and intervention efforts to consider social settings and heightened stress among students as potential risk factors for engaging in concurrent drinking and smoking.     

Processing orientation and emotion recognition

There is evidence that some emotional expressions are characterized by diagnostic cues from individual face features. For example, an upturned mouth is indicative of happiness, whereas a furrowed brow is associated with anger. The current investigation explored whether motivating people to perceive stimuli in a local (i.e., feature-based) rather than global (i.e., holistic) processing orientation was advantageous for recognizing emotional facial expressions. Participants classified emotional faces while primed with local and global processing orientations, via a Navon letter task. Contrary to previous findings for identity recognition, the current findings are indicative of a modest advantage for face emotion recognition under conditions of local processing orientation. When primed with a local processing orientation, participants performed both significantly faster and more accurately on an emotion recognition task than when they were primed with a global processing orientation. The impacts of this finding for theories of emotion recognition and face processing are considered.