Sri Lanka's Informal Religious Economy: Evangelical Competitiveness and Buddhist Hegemony in Perspective

Existing religious economy models maintain that as religious regulation increases, levels of interreligious competition decrease. But new understandings of the market dynamics of religious oligopolies necessitate new understandings of religious competitiveness. A relational model of competitiveness using the case of evangelical Christianity in Buddhist‐majority Sri Lanka is proposed. In Sri Lanka the informal religious economy is defined by competitiveness among evangelical Christian groups and, although not recognized by the state, is closely regulated. The focus in this article is on the scalar determinations of evangelical competitiveness, patterns of secrecy and subterfuge, the formation of strategic extra‐group networks that enable competitiveness, and outcomes of a relational model. Three insights are offered that can be used as a starting point for further work on religious oligopolies, informal economies, and relational understandings of religious competition.     

Growth motivation as a moderator of behavioral self-handicapping in women

Behavioral self-handicapping is a strategy used to protect attributions about ability. People behaviorally self-handicap by creating an obstacle to their success so failure is attributed to the obstacle instead of to their ability. Although past research has observed behavioral self-handicapping exclusively in men, the current research revealed a moderator of behavioral self-handicapping in women: growth motivation, which reflects the desire to develop one's abilities and learn from failure. Participants (N = 100) completed a test purportedly predictive of successful careers and relationships, and some were given failure feedback about their performance. Participants could behaviorally self-handicap by choosing to complete another test in a performance-impairing environment. Although men self-handicapped more overall, women self-handicapped more after failure when they were low in growth motivation. These results highlight a novel moderator of behavioral self-handicapping in women.     

Social Traditionalism and Economic Conservatism: Two Conservative Political Ideologies in the United States

Abstract

The authors surveyed by telephone a random sample of voters in the 1996 presidential election from the Standard Metropolitan Statistical Area of Muncie, IN (“Middletown”; R. Lynd & H. Lynd, 1929) to test a model describing the nature of 2 conservative political ideologies–social traditionalism and economic conservatism. The model, based on functions of attitudes theory, predicted (a) that the 2 political ideologies would appeal to 2 rather distinct constituency groups–the former, to conservative Protestants; the latter, to people of higher incomes–and (b) that social traditionalists would be more dogmatic and economic conservatives would be more open-minded in their respective views. The findings were consistent with those predictions.     

Attitudes of Parents,Students, and Mental Hygien-Ists toward Children's Behavior

ABSTRACT

The literature on the relationship between religiosity and prejudice has shown inconsistent findings. We argue that it is necessary to distinguish between different types of religiosity and that its relationship with prejudice is mediated by different values. Results of two studies conducted in Italy show that identified religiosity and introjected religiosity predict different levels of prejudice toward Muslim immigrants. Moreover, the negative relationship between identified religiosity and prejudice was mediated by prosocial values, whereas valuing conformity mediated the positive relationship between introjected religiosity and prejudice. The results show that it is possible to better understand the relationship between religiosity and prejudice by disentangling the different ways of being religious.     

The study of American religion: looming through the glim

The study of American religion has been expanding to include new perspectives, previously neglected characters, and new geographic insights, driven by critical reflection on the assumptions and ideologies that historically have shaped the field, such as its focus on institutions, doctrines, and texts, its nationalistic westward-expansion historical narrative, and its Protestant biases. The past two decades have seen illuminating work emerge on race and gender, popular culture, class, and the marketplace. But we need to push beyond filling in gaps in the historical record to engage methodological and theoretical concerns in the academic study of religion. Exploring the development of theories of religion in the context of global networks of exchange shaped by 19^th-century seafarers is one example of how Tom Tweed's recent call in this journal for a geographic and temporal expansion of the study of religion in America might raise new questions and perspectives for the field.     

Spiritual Issues in Counseling: What Do Students Perceive They Are Being Taught?

Client religious and spiritual practices have recently emerged as beneficial to both mental and physical health. However, graduates of counseling programs indicate that they have not been adequately trained to address religious and spiritual issues with clients. This exploratory study focused on the perceptions of counselors‐in‐training regarding what messages they received about these issues during their training programs, as well as their potential behaviors when working with clients. Results indicated that potential behaviors are not always consistent with what they are taught. Implications for training and future research are discussed.     

Emerging effortful control in toddlerhood: the role of infant orienting/regulation, maternal effortful control, and maternal time spent in caregiving activities

Latent growth modeling (LGM) was used to examine the contribution of changes in infant orienting/regulation (O/R) to the emergence of toddler effortful control (EC), the contributions of maternal EC to the development of infant O/R and the emergence of toddler EC, the influence of maternal time spent in caregiving activities on toddler EC and the slope of infant O/R, and the contribution of maternal EC to subsequent maternal time spent in caregiving activities. Mothers from 158 families completed a self-report measure of EC when their infants were 4 months of age, a measure of infant O/R when their infants were 4, 6, 8, 10, and 12 months of age, and a measure of toddler EC when their children reached 18 months of age. Information concerning maternal time spent in various interactive caregiving activities was collected when infants were 6 months old. Results indicated higher maternal EC predicted interindividual differences in the intercept (i.e., higher intercepts), but not slope, of infant O/R and that higher maternal EC, higher infant O/R intercept, and higher infant O/R slope contributed to higher toddler EC. Furthermore, higher maternal EC predicted greater maternal time spent in interactive caregiving activities with their infants and greater maternal time in interactive caregiving with infants also contributed to higher toddler EC after controlling for maternal EC. These findings contribute to the understanding of the influence of maternal EC, directly and through caregiving, on toddler EC. Additional implications as they are related to early developing regulatory aspects of temperament are discussed.     

Commonly-defined and individually-defined posttraumatic growth in the US and Japan

Posttraumatic growth (PTG) is the experience of positive change resulting from the struggle with major life crises. Research on PTG has relied on instruments such as the Posttraumatic Growth Inventory (PTGI: Tedeschi &; Calhoun, 1996), in which items that describe positive changes are assumed to represent personal growth equally for all people. However, some positive changes may indicate greater growth for some people. Individually-defined PTG may differ from commonly-defined PTG. The purpose of this study was to explore the relationships between these two definitions of PTG and how culture affects them. Participants from the US (n = 456) and Japan (n = 279) indicated the degree to which each change in the PTGI represented personal growth. Results from mixed-model analyses of variance revealed that there were main effects for defined growth as well as interaction effects for all PTGI factors. For example, US participants reported greater growth on the factors Relating to Others and New Possibilities for the commonly-defined level, but once individually-defined PTG was considered, growth scores for US participants decreased substantially, and more so than for Japanese participants. Discussion addresses cultural and individual differences in the subjective definitions of PTG and highlights several directions for future research.     

Prayer as a cause of recovery from illness

This research aimed to examine the developmental trajectory of the beliefs about the power of prayer to aide recovery from illness. One hundred and sixty children and young adults divided in four age groups participated in the study. Participants were interviewed with vignettes presenting two sick individuals who differed in terms of prayers that they received from their friends in order to recover from their illness. The results showed that children and pre-adolescents strongly believe in the power of prayer to recover from illness while only about half of the university students share this belief. Thus, contrary to the framework theory approach, children, adolescents, and young adults did not replace these beliefs (as naive explanations), with the scientific explanations. Instead, they continue to hold these beliefs in parallel to their scientific explanations.