An examination of the new age movement: Who is involved and what constitutes its spirituality

Through substantial new quantitative research, I have found that participants of the New Age Movement are not young and not especially well‐off, but tend to be middle‐aged or older, and are represented throughout the entire economic spectrum. Moreover, their spirituality encompasses a wide variety of influences drawn from all religious traditions and spiritual concerns. While a great deal of social and spiritual common focus seems to exist in the Movement as a whole, my findings show that there is no one specific type of person who might be considered as being particularly active in the New Age. Furthermore, because of the wide variety of spiritual influences and the individual nature of participants’ spiritual quests, there does not appear to be a strong leaning to any one type of spirituality from which a more formalised New Age religious institution might arise. Through this new research, many claims about who is involved in the New Age Movement and what form their spirituality might take have been reviewed and I demonstrate that there are sizeable inaccuracies among the reports of some commentators.     

Family Interaction and Individual Psychological Health

Two studies explored the relationships between individual psychological health (PH) status and perceptions of family interaction and family climate variables as perceived by young adults. Psychological health was defined within inter- and intrapersonal domains, represented by social interest and psychological hardiness. Scores on social interest and hardiness instruments were standardized and added to put the construct of psychological health into practice. Family interaction variables were measured with Family Adaptability and Cohesion Evaluation Scales-III (FACES-III), the Children's Report of Parent Behavior Inventory-30 (CRPBI-30), Parent-Adolescent Communication Scale (PAC), Family Satisfaction Scale (FSS), and the Family Environment Scale (FES). Multivariate analyses indicated that PH status was associated with several family variables, with cohesion emerging as a key dimension. Implications for counseling are discussed.     

Testing message diffusion in harmonic logistic curves

The growth of a population of knowers of a message was studied to test a human interactance hypothesis. The conditions investigated involvedpeople interacting in time, with the population pairing off randomly (i.e., determined by many, small, different influences) and transferring an attribute (i.e., an all-or-none act) at either a steady rate or a waning rate, subsequent to the originating stimulus. The mathematical expressions for these pre-conditions were the differential equations for the linear logistic for steady acting and the harmonic logistic for waning acting. Variant forms of these curves were developed. Two exploratory experiments, or pretests, comprised launching a coffee slogan in a town and imitating a badge wearer in a boys' camp. Since the activity rate waned harmonically in both cases, the harmonic logistic fit best in both the town and the camp as expected by the hypothesis.A paper read before Section K sponsored by the Committee on Social Physics of the AAAS Conference in Boston, December 30, 1953. This research was supported in part by the United States Air Force under Contract AF 33(038)-27522, monitored by the Human Resources Research Institute (now, Officer Education Research Laboratory, Air Force Personnel and Training Research Center), Air Research and Development Command, Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama. Permission is granted for reproduction, translation, publication and distribution in part and in whole by or for the United States Government.     

Scaling the Security Staircase

Building on the U.N. human security taxonomy of 1994, this article aims to explore the constructability of a reliable, valid, parsimonious, useful measure of human security that is relevant to contemporary environments and situations? A seminal 1994 U.N. report, Human Security in Theory and Practice, outlined seven types of human security (personal, health, food, community, economic, environmental, political). A quarter-century on, we added two more, cyber and national security, and tested if a single measure could capture all nine security concerns. A national sample of N = 1033 New Zealanders completed a brief online measure in which participants reported yes or no to experiencing each type of security and basic demographics. Guttman scaling placed these needs in an ascending order of difficulty. Analogous to a staircase, security may be scaled from personal up to political security (coefficient of reproducibility = .88), with three distinct but interrelated flights: (1) proximal (personal, health, food security); (2) social (cyber, community, economic, environmental); and (3) distal (national, political). We confirmed this nine-step, three-flight measure in our sample (Χ² = 81.72; df = 24; RMSEA = .048, 90%CI [.037, .06]; CFI = .976; TLI = .964; SRMR = .028). The measure showed configural, metric, scalar, and factorial invariances (across random-split subgroups). Ethnic groups and the precariously employed scored significantly differently, in coherent ways, on the security staircase scale.     

THE VICTORIA INSTITUTE,BIBLICAL CRITICISM,AND THE FUNDAMENTALS

The Victoria Institute was established in London in 1865. Although billed as an anti‐evolutionary organization, and stridently anti‐Darwinian in its rhetoric, it spent relatively little time debating the theory of natural selection. Instead, it served as a haven for a specific set of intellectual commitments. Most important among these was the Baconian scientific methodology, which prized empiricism and induction, and was suspicious of speculation. Darwin's use of hypotheses meant that the Victoria Institute members were unconvinced that his work was truly scientific, but even more concerning for them was the specter of biblical criticism. This approach to biblical studies incorporated techniques from literary criticism, treating it as any other document. Since it also relied on hypotheses, the Victoria Institute members were similarly skeptical that biblical criticism was scientific, and spent much of their time attempting to refute it. In this way, they functioned as an incubator for the concerns that would animate the fundamentalist–modernist controversies of the early twentieth century.     

Community Violence and Youth: Affect, Behavior, Substance Use, and Academics

Community violence is recognized as a major public health problem (WHO, World Report on Violence and Health, 2002) that Americans increasingly understand has adverse implications beyond inner-cities. However, the majority of research on chronic community violence exposure focuses on ethnic minority, impoverished, and/or crime-ridden communities while treatment and prevention focuses on the perpetrators of the violence, not on the youth who are its direct or indirect victims. School-based treatment and preventive interventions are needed for children at elevated risk for exposure to community violence. In preparation, a longitudinal, community epidemiological study, The Multiple Opportunities to Reach Excellence (MORE) Project, is being fielded to address some of the methodological weaknesses presented in previous studies. This study was designed to better understand the impact of children’s chronic exposure to community violence on their emotional, behavioral, substance use, and academic functioning with an overarching goal to identify malleable risk and protective factors which can be targeted in preventive and intervention programs. This paper describes the MORE Project, its conceptual underpinnings, goals, and methodology, as well as implications for treatment and preventive interventions and future research.     

Blunted amygdala activity is associated with depression severity in treatment-resistant depression

Up to 50% of individuals with major depressive disorder (MDD) do not recover after two antidepressant medication trials, and therefore meet the criteria for treatment-resistant depression (TRD). Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) is one promising treatment; however, the extent to which MBCT influences clinical outcomes relative to baseline neural activation remains unknown. In the present study we investigated baseline differences in amygdala activation between TRD patients and healthy controls (HCs), related amygdala activation to depression symptoms, and examined the impacts of MBCT and amygdala activation on longitudinal depression outcomes. At baseline, TRD patients (n = 80) and HCs (n = 37) participated in a functional magnetic resonance imaging task in which they identified either the emotion (affect labeling) or the gender (gender labeling) of faces, or passively viewed faces (observing). The TRD participants then completed eight weeks of MBCT or a health enhancement program (HEP). Relative to HCs, the TRD patients demonstrated less amygdala activation during affect labeling, and marginally less during gender labeling. Blunted amygdala activation in TRD patients during affect labeling was associated with greater depression severity. MBCT was associated with greater depression reductions than was HEP directly following treatment; however, at 52 weeks the treatment effect was not significant, and baseline amygdala activation across the task conditions predicted depression severity in both groups. TRD patients have blunted amygdala responses during affect labeling that are associated with greater concurrent depression. Furthermore, although MBCT produced greater short-term improvements in depression than did HEP, overall baseline amygdala reactivity was predictive of long-term clinical outcomes in both groups.     

Group Counseling with Male Underachieving College Volunteers

The effects of two different methods of group counseling on those personality characteristics that typify the male academic underachiever and on grade-point average (GPA) were studied. Eight groups (N = 81) of male underachievers who volunteered for counseling were equally divided between two counselors who each led two groups in the leader-structured (LS) method and two in the group-structured (GS) method. A like group served as a control. Men in the LS groups increased in ego strength when compared with those in the control group and had a significantly greater rate of positive change in GPA than men in either the GS or control groups. The GS groups' rate of change in GPA was also greater than the controls' after counseling. Counseled men were more able to overtly express hostile feelings than controls. Three months following counseling the LS groups' rate of positive change in GPA was significantly greater than the controls' but not greater than the GS groups'. The results indicated that the LS method of group counseling does significantly affect both the personality characteristics and academic achievement of male college underachievers who volunteer for counseling.