Age and Gender Role Conflict: A Cross-Sectional Study of Australian Men

A total of 221 educated middle-class Australian males across three age groups (18–24, 36–45, and 60-plus years), responded to O'Neil et al.'s Gender Role Conflict Scales and a set of measures for psychological well-being. A MANCOVA design, with psychological well-being as the covariate, found significant age differences on two gender-role conflict scales. Results suggest that certain conflicts in a man's life to do with ambition, career, and family may be seen as developmentally functional rather than dysfunctional. No age differences were found on the Gender Role Conflict variables for emotional expressiveness and intimacy between males. These two variables are discussed as a function of mood rather than indices of dysfunction.     

False memories of having said the unsaid: some new demonstrations

In a series of four studies, subjects who were naive as to the true purpose of the research were asked if they had said aloud things that, at most, they had only intended to say. Often, subjects reported (incorrectly) that they had said them. Specifically, the procedures involved: showing a series of phrases, each being followed by a command to say it aloud or not (Study 1); asking a series of questions, each being followed by a request to answer it aloud or not (Study 2); asking a series of questions in a public polling situation and interrupting the subject before one of the questions was answered (Study 3); and having each subject participate in a debate, during the course of which the participant was induced to plan to use a particular point, but was prevented from doing so (Study 4). Subjects were confident of such erroneous reports; they had a lower tendency to make such errors for material that had not actually been presented, and such errors depended upon certain details of the manner in which such ‘source-monitoring’ searches were initiated. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Spiritual Dryness and Celibacy in Catholic Priests – Discernment of Ongoing Spiritual Journeys from Relational and Psychosexual Immaturities

Pastoral Psychology - The celibacy of Roman Catholic priests, in contrast to a single lifestyle, implies an existential choice for spiritual reasons as a conscious motivation. Nevertheless, several...     

Gender-sensitive training for substance use disorder treatment: Results and implications of a pilot health professionals needs assessment

This study explored mental health practitioner training needs in gender-sensitive substance use disorder (SUD) counselling genderqueer populations. Informants were health professionals in SUD practices and from the Eastern Cape, South Africa (females = 75%; black = 90%, 10% = white, clinical and counselling psychologists = 10%, social workers = 65%, auxiliary health workers = 25%). They completed focus group interviews regarding their needs for gender-sensitive (GS) training in SUD treatment. Thematic analysis of the data indicated training needs in how to deal with their own bias and prejudice beliefs about the genderqueer population. Furthermore, results indicated that they needed training on how to manage the treatment setting once genderqueer clients were integrated in treatment with cisgender clients. Training for SUD treatment and care with genderqueer clients should prioritise gender sensitisation. Health professionals’ need gender equality awareness training for health care equity with the genderqueer community.     

Cyber-apostasy: its repercussions on Islam and interfaith relations*

In relations between Islam and the West, apostasy has been an issue of perennial contention. Although the Qur’ānic perspective on apostasy is ambiguous, the ?adīths and later Islamic legal thought prescribe harsh sanctions against apostasy, making repudiation of Islam extremely difficult, if not impossible, in the Muslim world. Such a coercive approach contravenes the Western value of freedom of conscience and the correlative right to religious freedom. Moreover, the rise of a parallel form of Islam—online- or cyber-Islam—has complicated the issue of apostasy even further. For countless Muslims worldwide, this parallel expression of their religion, although virtual, is even more ‘real’ than its offline, analogue expression. In this new Islamic expression, freedom of conscience can indeed be exercised. Online dissent, even to the point of engaging in ‘cyber-apostasy’ and encouraging others to do likewise, has given rise to a new level of reciprocity between Islam and other religions interacting with it in the ‘marketplace of religions’, thus opening a new chapter in the history of Islamic interaction with other faiths in the contemporary world.     

Toward Developing Laboratory-Based Parent–Adolescent Conflict Discussion Tasks that Consistently Elicit Adolescent Conflict-Related Stress Responses: Support from Physiology and Observed Behavior

Parent–adolescent conflict poses risk for youth maladjustment. One potential mechanism of this risk is that stress in the form of increased arousal during conflict interactions results in adolescents’ impaired decision-making. However, eliciting consistent adolescent stress responses within laboratory-based tasks of parent–adolescent conflict (i.e., conflict discussion tasks) is hindered by task design. This limitation may stem from how conflict topics are assessed and selected for discussion. Within a sample of 47 adolescents (ages 14–17) and parents, we investigated whether a modified version of a conflict discussion task could elicit physiological (i.e., arousal) and behavioral (i.e., hostility) displays of adolescents’ conflict-related stress responses. We assessed parent–adolescent conflict via structured interview to identify topics for dyads to discuss during the task. We randomly assigned dyads to complete a 5-min task to discuss either a putatively benign topic (i.e., control condition) or a conflict topic while undergoing direct assessments of continuous arousal. Trained raters coded dyad members’ hostile behavior during the task. Adolescents in the conflict condition exhibited significantly greater levels of arousal than adolescents in the control condition. We observed an interaction between discussion condition and baseline conflict. Specifically, higher baseline conflict predicted greater hostile behavior for adolescents in the conflict condition, yet we observed the inverse relation for adolescents in the control condition. Our modified laboratory discussion task successfully elicited both physiological and behavioral displays of adolescent conflict-related stress. These findings have important implications for leveraging experimental paradigms to understand causal links between parent–adolescent conflict and adolescent psychopathology, and their underlying mechanisms.     

Armstrong on Probabilistic Laws of Nature

D. M. Armstrong famously claims that deterministic laws of nature are contingent relations between universals and that his account can also be straightforwardly extended to irreducibly probabilistic laws of nature. For the most part, philosophers have neglected to scrutinize Armstrong’s account of probabilistic laws. This is surprising precisely because his own claims about probabilistic laws make it unclear just what he takes them to be. We offer three interpretations of what Armstrong-style probabilistic laws are, and argue that all three interpretations are incompatible either with some feature of Armstrong’s broader metaphysics or with essential features of his account of laws (or both).     

An attention account of neural priming

Repetition priming of familiar stimuli (e.g., objects) produces a decrease in visual cortical activity for repeated versus novel items, which has been attributed to more fluent processing for repeated items. By contrast, priming of unfamiliar stimuli (e.g., abstract shapes) produces an increase in visual cortical activity. The mechanism for priming-related increases in activity for repeated unfamiliar stimuli is unknown. We hypothesised that such increases in activity may reflect attentional allocation to these items. We tested this hypothesis using a priming-spatial attention paradigm. During Phase 1 of Experiment 1, participants viewed unfamiliar abstract shapes and familiar objects. During Phase 2, participants identified target letters (S or H). Each target letter was preceded by a non-informative shape or object cue that was repeated (from Phase 1) or novel in the same (valid) or opposite (invalid) hemifield. In Experiment 2, we manipulated shape familiarity by presenting shapes once or six times during Phase 1. For both experiments, at valid locations, target identification accuracy was higher following repeated versus novel unfamiliar item cues and lower following repeated versus novel familiar item cues. These findings support our hypothesis that priming-related increases in visual cortical activity for repeated unfamiliar items may, in part, reflect attentional allocation.     

When Avoidance Is Mutual Regulation: Disorganized Attachment and Analytic Attunement

This paper looks at and counters the notion that the analyst’s reluctance to know, to comprehend and interpret, the fuller meaning of a patient’s behavior is a countertransference avoidance. Drawing on attachment theory and infant research that has not yet been fully integrated into the clinical literature, the author believes that the movement from enactment to the expression of dissociated feeling is a process that leads to the creation of previously unknown meaning within an analytic impasse. The infant research literature and the literature on disorganized attachment is referenced to elucidate aspects of the clinical process. The clinical material presented involves the analyst’s failure to engage a patient’s chronic lateness, a failure that represented a mutual avoidance. The meaning of this enactment was locked in the patient’s traumatic past and could not be transmuted into new relational experience until the analyst had emerged from her own dissociative state. The therapeutic space created by their mutual avoidance, contrary to being a stalemate, became a protective space that held the meaning that was hibernating in dissociation. For the patient, the dissociated memory of traumatic abuse was linked, actually and symbolically, to her pervasive lateness. What was represented in the chronic lateness was discovered by analyst and patient together, along with the feelings engendered by “waiting.”