Going to political extremes in response to boredom

Boredom makes people attempt to re‐establish a sense of meaningfulness. Political ideologies, and in particular the adherence to left‐ versus right‐wing beliefs, can serve as a source of meaning. Accordingly, we tested the hypothesis that boredom is associated with a stronger adherence to left‐ versus right‐wing beliefs, resulting in more extreme political orientations. Study 1 demonstrates that experimentally induced boredom leads to more extreme political orientations. Study 2 indicates that people who become easily bored with their environment adhere to more extreme ends of a political spectrum compared with their less easily bored counterparts. Finally, Study 3 reveals that the relatively extreme political orientations among those who are easily bored can be attributed to their enhanced search for meaning. Overall, our research suggests that extreme political orientations are, in part, a function of boredom's existential qualities.     

The relationship between existential attitudes and professional quality of life among nursing students

This study examined the relationship between existential attitudes and professional quality of life among a sample of South African nursing students (N = 150; mean age = 21.19, SD = 2.77; female = 90%). The student nurses completed the Life Attitudes Profile-Revised (LAP-R) and the Professional Quality of Life Scale (PROQoL). The data were analysed using the Pearson product-moment correlation and multiple regression analysis. Existential attitudes significantly predicted scores on the PROQoL. The findings suggest that existential attitudes are an essential personal resource that could serve as a potential buffer against compassion fatigue and burnout while enhancing compassion satisfaction.     

The subjective quality of episodic future thought and the experience of meaning in life

Two studies assessed whether mentally simulating specific future events to occur in familiar (vs. unfamiliar) settings indirectly increases meaning life via the subjective quality of the simulations. Participants in both studies (N = 344) were randomly assigned to visualize themselves doing something in familiar (e.g. home) or unfamiliar (e.g. fantasy world) settings in the future. They then rated the subjective quality of these visualizations and completed a measure of meaning in life. We replicated previous findings by showing that mental simulations involving familiar settings were of greater subjective quality than simulations involving unfamiliar settings. However, we also found that simulating future events in familiar (vs. unfamiliar) settings indirectly increased the perceived meaningfulness of life. These findings integrate research in cognitive psychology with research on the psychology of well-being and reveal how mental time travel contributes to the perception that one’s life has meaning.     

Psychosis: New Existential, Systemic, and Cognitive-Behavioral Developments

Until recently, perhaps the major avenues of working with severely disturbed patients have been based upon either organic-chemical or intrapsychic determinants and treatment components. One recent development is an emphasis upon interpsychic and interpersonal factors and determinants in both the understanding and the treatment of extreme psychotic disturbances. Existential, systemic, and cognitive-behavioral conceptualizations and therapies maintain substantial independence of one another. Yet these three share at least two significant commonalities. One is that they each emphasise the interpsychic and interpersonal. A second is this first commonality has led to some exciting new developments in the understanding and treatment of psychosis.     

Existential Marital Psychotherapy and the Experience of Managed Care

ABSTRACT

In this article the experience of managed care is over-viewed from the perspective of existential marital therapy. It is concluded that managed care disrupts the experiential nature of participation between couple and therapist, dilutes the authentic nature of the treatment relationship, decreases the importance of subjectivity, disturbs the discovery of meaning and purpose in marital life and deters existential communication.     

Telling lies? An exploration of self-deception and bad faith

If self deception is a lie that one tells to oneself, then paradoxically the deceived is also simultaneously the deceiver. This paper considers two contrasting conceptualizations of self-deception: A.R. Mele's () account of cognitive functioning and J.P Sartre's () existential exploration of ‘bad faith’. Both writers seek to resolve the ‘paradox’ of self-deception or bad faith without recourse to the positing of mental partitioning or the Freudian unconscious. Mele uncovers and lays bare the underlying structure of self-deception, revealing it to consist in desire-driven perceptual and interpretational shortcomings. Sartre's analysis of bad faith emerges from his ontology and is bound up with his notions of ‘being-for’ and the tension between personal ‘transcendence’ and ‘facticity’. Finally, the implications for psychotherapy of Mele's and Sartre's accounts are considered.     

Intrinsic religiosity protects believers from the existential fear of a human Jesus

ABSTRACT

The present study examined the role of internalised religious beliefs in defending against existential concerns aroused from a creaturely Jesus. Prior work has found that biologically human traits (e.g., vomiting, sweating, etc.) can increase death concerns when applied to both humans and a god. Intrinsic beliefs, however, have been shown to reduce mortality awareness. In the current study, religious participants were primed with thoughts of either a human or neutral Jesus followed by a single item measure about fear of death. A moderated regression analysis found that whereas high intrinsic individuals were buffered from existential concerns, low intrinsic individuals experienced a greater fear of death when primed with a human Jesus. These results replicate prior work within terror management theory and the psychology of religion suggesting that internalised beliefs serve a protective function against existential anxieties.     

This new science of ours: a more or less systematic history of consciousness and transcendence. Part II

Part I of this paper having postulated the locus of consciousness as residing in a field between primitive mind in participation mystique with the world and a transcendent ground of being, Part II takes up the nature of mind itself in this field in terms of in vivo experiences. Operations and manifestations of consciousness are inexhaustively explored in four venues: 1) Jung's life experiences, 2) Joseph Henderson's theory of psychic development, 3) Eric Voegelin's theory of consciousness and 4) the experiences of analytic patients in far reaches of very long analyses.     

From neurotic guilt to existential guilt as grief: the road to interiority, agency, and compassion through mourning. part I

This study proposes through a case illustration that psychoanalytic patients who can process both aggression and loss through a mourning process are able to free themselves from pathological self attack when the object relations work of attachment, psychic holding, and separation transpires. In the case of Helen discussed here, transformation through a “developmental mourning process” results in the evolution of powerful psychological capacities for interiority, self agency, and interpersonal compassion. This developmental mourning process is endowed with the assimilation and psychic fantasy symbolization of aggression.Susan Kavaler-Adler, Ph.D., ABPP, is Founder and Executive Director, Training Analyst, Faculty Member, and Supervisor at the Object Relations Institute for Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, New York.     

Existential Family Trauma Therapy

In this article the process of existential family trauma therapy is outlined and described. This process includes the treatment elements of holding, telling, mastering and honoring the family's trauma experiences and trauma pain. Case illustrations are provided and previous research is reviewed.