The Efficacy of Adult Christian Support Groups in Coping with the Death of a Significant Loved One

Psychologists sometimes minimize important resources such as religion and spiritual beliefs for coping with bereavement. Alienation of therapeutic psychology from religious values contrasts to professional and public interest in religious experience and commitment. A supportive viewpoint has come about partially as a result of recognizing important values which clinicians have found absent in many of their clients. Until spiritual belief systems become integrated into the work of clinicians, clients may not be fully integrative in coping with loss. The key finding of this study was that individuals who participated in Christian and secular support groups showed no statistically significant difference in their mean endorsement of negative criteria on the BHS, and no statistically significant difference for their mean score endorsement of positive criteria on the RCOPE. However, a Christian-oriented approach was no less effective than a psychological-oriented one. In both groups, a spiritual connection to a specific or generalized higher power was frequently identified which clients ascribed to facilitating the management of their coping.     

An Ethic of Refusal: Simone Weil and the Choice of the Lesser ‘Lesser Evil’

In “On the Abolition of All Political Parties,” Simone Weil poses the hypothetical predicament of a person who is intent on solving highly complex mathematical problems but is flogged every time the answer he arrives at is an even number. The person will oscillate between his genuine desire for the truth and the painful cries of his body. “[I]nevitably,” Weil writes, “he will make many mistakes—even if he happens to be very intelligent, very brave and deeply attached to the truth.” She then asks: “What should he do?” Weil’s answer may surprise many readers, even though she claims it is “simple.” If possible, “he must run away” from those who wield the whip. It would have been best, she avers, had he avoided these associations in the first place. Elsewhere in her writings, Weil openly endorses the argument for the lesser evil, justifying active, potentially violent, resistance instead of a pacifist ethic of refusal. This essay analyses the tension between Weil’s ethic of “running away” and her acceptance of the lesser evil.     

Age Effects of Frames of Reference in Self-Reports of Health,Well-Being,Fatigue and Pain

Self-reports of health and well-being are central for population monitoring, so it is paramount that they are measured accurately. The goal of this study was to examine the impact of age on the use of the comparison standards or frames of reference (FoRs) in self-reports of health, life-satisfaction, fatigue, and pain, and to determine if the age-health outcome associations were affected by age differences in FoRs. Respondents (n = 2000) selected from the U.S. general population self-rated their life-satisfaction and health outcomes. Following this, they were asked to indicate if they used any comparisons (FoRs) when making their rating and the direction of these comparisons (upward, lateral or downward). Analyses examined (a) whether age groups differed in the type and direction of FoRs, and (b) whether age patterns in health, life-satisfaction, fatigue, and pain were altered when FoRs were statistically controlled. Compared to middle-aged and older people, younger respondents were more likely to compare themselves with other people when self-rating their health and life-satisfaction. They were also more likely to use a hypothetical situation when evaluating their pain and fatigue. Younger participants used lateral comparisons less often and downward comparisons more often than middle-aged and older participants. When these age differences in FoRs were statistically controlled, the observed age patterns in self-reported health outcomes were somewhat reduced. The results show that people of different ages use different FoRs when self-reporting their life-satisfaction and health outcomes.

     

The impact of socioeconomic status on teenage mothers and children who received early intervention

To determine the early school age effects of an intervention program for low SES, black teenage mothers and their term and preterm infants, a subsample of 61 mother-child dyads was assessed when the children were 5 to 8 years of age. The mothers and children were videotaped in a storytelling interaction together and then interviewed and tested. The child interviews included the Pictorial Scale of Perceived Competence, the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test, the Wide Range Achievement Test, and the Bender Visual Motor Gestalt Test. The maternal interviews included a demographic questionnaire, the Rosenberg Self Esteem Scale, the Eyberg Child Behavior Inventory, the Parenting Stress Index, and the Vocabulary subtest of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale. Analyses of variance yielded no intervention effects and no effects of prematurity on any of the child or mother measures. Correlation analysis, however, yielded a number of significant relations between socioeconomic status and child and maternal outcome measures. These findings suggest that the effects of intervention may be short-term for this population, and that low socioeconomic status (SES) may override the effects of early intervention and prematurity by the time children reach school age.     

Glucose attenuation of paradoxical sleep deficits in old rats.

Glucose administration enhances memory in several amnestic populations, including old humans and rodents. The present experiment demonstrates that glucose also enhances measures of sleep in old rats. Three-hour day-time sleep EEGs were assessed in 3- and 24-month-old rats. The animals received injections of saline or glucose (100, 500, and 1000 mg/kg) on different days in a counter-balanced order. At doses of 100 and 500 mg/kg, glucose augmented the duration of paradoxical sleep bouts and total paradoxical sleep time in old, but not young, rats. Within 2 weeks after the sleep tests, measures of several brain neurotransmitter functions were obtained. Glucose was more effective in enhancing paradoxical sleep in those individual aged rats with high levels of hippocampal choline acetyltransferase and occipital cortex serotonin concentrations than in aged rats with lower levels on these neurochemical measures. The findings suggest that glucose attenuates selective age-related sleep deficits in old rats. More generally, these results add to a growing body of evidence indicating that moderate doses of peripheral glucose can influence a variety of CNS measures.     

Preverbal children with autism understand the intentions of others

There is a ‘theory of mind’ theory of autism. Meltzoff has recently developed a procedure that gives a nonverbal assessment of ‘theory of mind’. A group of children with autism and a matched control group of normally developing infants were given three of Meltzoff’s tasks and three conventional, gestural imitation tasks. The children with autism showed the expected deficits on gestural imitation, but were significantly better than the normally developing infants on the Meltzoff tasks. The implications of these results for a number of theoretical issues are discussed.