Enduring as Lived Experience: Exploring the Essence of Spiritual Resilience for Women in Late Life

The purpose of this study was to explore spirituality and its relationship to resilience for women in late life. Over thirty interviews with six women aged 80 and older provide a dataset allowing for the phenomenological investigation of spiritual resilience. Themes emerged illustrating the components of spiritual resilience. The components of spiritual resilience are having divine support, maintaining purpose, and expressing gratitude. These factors are essential to the women’s resilience and act as mechanisms that promote high levels of subjective well-being and an overall good quality of life. Essentially, participants articulate how their experiences of enduring hardships are informed by spiritual resilience.     

Social identity,group processes,and helping in emergencies

Using insights from a review of recent research on social identity approaches to helping, the Chapter sets out four key elements of a social identity approach to helping in emergencies: the salience of social identity, the boundaries of social identity, the contents of social identity, and the strategic interests of social identity. Evidence that illustrates the impact of social identity processes on group size and helping, which has traditionally focused on the inhibition of helping in the presence of others, is then reviewed. Finally, recent developments in the literature on intergroup emotions are considered, and their impact on a social identity approach to helping in emergencies is explored, highlighting the relatively neglected social identity relationship between bystanders and perpetrators. The review concludes by considering the current state of knowledge of a social identity approach to helping in emergencies, and identifies important questions that remain to be addressed.     

“Moving to the beat” improves timing perception

Here, we demonstrate that “moving to the beat” can improve the perception of timing, providing an intriguing explanation as to why we often move when listening to music. In the first experiment, participants heard a series of isochronous beats and identified whether the timing of a final tone after a short silence was consistent with the timing of the preceding sequence. On half of the trials, participants tapped along with the beat, and on half of the trials, they listened without moving. When the final tone occurred later than expected, performance in the movement condition was significantly better than performance in the no-movement condition. Two additional experiments illustrate that this improved performance is due to improved timekeeping, rather than to a shift in strategy. This work contributes to a growing literature on sensorimotor integration by demonstrating body movement’s objective improvement in timekeeping, complementing previous explorations involving subjective tasks.     

When mitigation evidence makes a difference: effects of psychological mitigating evidence on sentencing decisions in capital trials

Little empirical research has addressed the effects of psychological or psychosocial evidence on sentencing decisions. The present study found that death-qualified mock jurors were more likely to sentence a defendant to death without mitigating evidence than in a case with mitigating evidence present. Mock jurors were less likely to assign a death sentence in cases that contained one of the following types of mitigating evidence: The defendant was (i) diagnosed with schizophrenia, not medicated, and suffered from severe delusions and hallucinations, (ii) drug addicted and high at the time of the murder, (iii) diagnosed as borderline mentally retarded during childhood, or (iv) severely physically and verbally abused by his parents during childhood.     

Second to fourth digit ratio and numerical competence in children

The ratio between the 2nd and 4th fingers (2D:4D)-a potential proxy for prenatal testosterone (T) exposure-shows a sex difference, with males usually having lower mean values; the latter potentially indicates higher prenatal T exposure. We studied relations between 2D:4D and competencies in the domains of counting, number knowledge, and visual-number representation in 73 children aged 6-11 years. Significant negative correlations between numerical performance in all of these areas and right and left hand 2D:4D ratios were found for boys but not girls. To the extent that 2D:4D ratios reflects prenatal exposure to T, the implications are (i) high prenatal T may be associated with better performance on some basic numerical measures for boys, and (ii) prenatal exposure to T may affect boys and girls differently with respect to some numerical competencies.     

A personal construct psychology view of relapse: indications for a narrative therapy component to stuttering treatment

Relapse following treatment for stuttering is a common problem for many clients. It has often been suggested that one factor contributing to relapse is the client's difficulty in adjusting to a new role as a fluent speaker. In this tutorial article, we first present a personal construct view of relapse, which suggests that this difficulty may be addressed by increasing the meaningfulness of the fluent speaker role for the speaker. Section 3 proposes that post-treatment success for persons who stutter may be facilitated by the use of a narrative approach to counseling in which the meaningfulness of the fluent speaker role is elaborated. In this approach, clients are guided through a process of deconstructing their stuttering-dominated personal narrative, followed by the reconstruction of an alternative narrative that is more compatible with being a fluent speaker. EDUCATIONAL OBJECTIVES: The reader will (1) learn about a personal construct psychology perspective on resistance and relapse in stuttering therapy, (2) be able to describe a narrative approach to counseling for people who stutter that is directed toward the long-term maintenance of fluent speech and the steps of deconstruction of the dominant stuttering narrative and reconstruction of a new, more fluent personal narrative, and (3) be able to prepare a series of narrative interview questions with which to engage clients in conversations that may facilitate the deconstruction and reconstruction processes.     

Anterograde and retrograde enhancement of 24-h memory by glucose in elderly humans.

The present experiment examined anterograde and retrograde enhancement of memory storage by glucose in elderly humans. Glucose (50 g) or saccharin was administered shortly before or immediately after acquisition of a narrative prose passage. Recall was tested 24 h later. Glucose administration before or after presentation of the material to be learned significantly improved recall 24 h later compared to performance in the saccharin condition. These findings suggest that glucose retroactively enhances memory storage processing in elderly humans and that the enhancement of memory outlasts the transient elevations in blood glucose levels after glucose ingestion.     

The effects of recoding and presentation format on recency and suffix effects

The primary linguistic theory of Shand and Klima (1981) hypothesizes that stimuli that cannot be directly processed without recoding are not in the primary linguistic mode of the subject and thus should lead to lesser recency and associated suffix effects. In three experiments, different normal hearing subjects learned to pair American Sign Language (ASL) stimuli, visual "quasivocables" (QVs), word-like letter strings, and auditory QVs with common English words. In the first experiment, the subjects were given sequences of ASL or QV stimuli and required to recall the associated words in strict serial order. In two other experiments involving auditory and visual presentation, respectively, subjects who had never been given paired associate training were required to recall the English words that had previously been associated with the ASL and QV stimuli, in a standard suffix paradigm. The results showed recency and suffix effects to be present only with auditorily presented QVs and words. Contrary to the predictions of the primary linguistic hypothesis, greater recency and larger suffix effects were present with the auditory QVs than with the auditory words, although the QVs were not primary linguistic and the task involved forced recoding. Previous results showing recency with ASL stimuli in normal subjects were not replicated. It is concluded that recency and suffix effects are not related either to the primary linguistic mode of the subject or to stimulus recoding, as we and Shand and Klima have defined them.     

EFFECTS OF SPACED RESPONDING DRL ON THE STEREOTYPED BEHAVIOR OF PROFOUNDLY RETARDED PERSONS

Stereotypic responding and social behaviors of three profoundly retarded children were measured before and during application of a DRL contingency for stereotypic responding. A variant of the standard DRL procedure, spaced responding DRL, was used, in which reinforcement is delivered following a response if that response has been separated from the previous response by at least a fixed minimum time interval. Three children were treated by using a reversal design. Results showed that: (a) during baseline sessions, the children engaged in high rates of stereotypic responding and very low rates of appropriate social behavior; and (b) during DRL sessions, appropriate behavior increased markedly as stereotypic responding was reduced. The data suggest that spaced responding DRL may be effective in increasing appropriate social behavior as well as in reducing stereotypic responding.