Religious coping,stigma, and psychological functioning among HIV-positive African American women

The present study examined the role of religious coping in psychological distress and adjustment both cross-sectionally and longitudinally among 141 HIV-positive African American women. Cross-sectional analyses showed that negative religious coping was associated with poorer mental health and functioning, and greater perceptions of stigma and discrimination. Longitudinal analyses revealed that greater negative religious coping at baseline significantly predicted greater changes in mental health in a negative direction 12 months later. Positive religious coping was not associated with any measures of psychological well-being, nor did it predict any mental health outcomes at 12 months. However, participants who experienced high levels of HIV-related stigma and reported high levels of positive religious coping were less depressed than those who reported lower levels of positive religious coping. These results suggest that for this population, negative religious coping was a more salient determinant of psychological distress than positive religious coping was of psychological health.     

Referral by clergy who counsel older adults

The purpose of this cross sectional study of clergy (N?=?493) was to examine the likelihood of referral to formal mental health providers by those clergy who counsel older adults. Responding clergy completed a brief questionnaire that included information on the amount of counselling they do with older adults, the Attitudes towards Older Adults and Mental Illness (AOAMI) scale, their relationships with mental health professionals, their knowledge of resources for referring people for additional help, and basic demographic data, such as race, age, years in the clergy, and education level. In logistic regression analysis, respondents with more education, those who felt less prepared to provide counselling, and those with more positive attitudes based on the AOAMI indicated that they were more likely to refer, and no differences were found based on their denominational affiliation race, relationships with mental health professionals, or knowledge of resources for referring people for additional help. We believe that public-private partnerships should be formed to help clergy recognise when referrals are appropriate, and to help improve relationships between clergy and mental health professionals.     

Rehabilitative Beit Midrash as a means for advancing the community integration of Ultra Orthodox Jewish persons with severe mental illness

ABSTRACT

Religious Jews with severe mental illness often encounter barriers to involvement in religious activities in their community affecting their ability to become integrated into their community. Therefore, a study was conducted in Israel examining the contribution to community integration through a programme providing religious persons with mental illness an opportunity to participate in religious studies. An A-B research design was implemented among 42 Ultra-Orthodox Jewish persons with severe mental illness utilising a culturally-oriented structured instrument. The study showed that the opportunity for involvement in religious studies could advance the participants’ sense of social interaction in their community as well as their sense of psychological integration with other religious people. It also strengthened their confidence in their ability to further get involved in religious studies in the community. Rehabilitation services providing persons with severe mental illness an opportunity for involvement in religious studies can act as a springboard for advancing their community integration.     

Thoughts and oughts

Many now accept the thesis that norms are somehow constitutively involved in people's contentful intentional states. I distinguish three versions of this normative thesis that disagree about the type of norms constitutively involved. Are they objective norms of correctness, subjective norms of rationality, or intersubjective norms of social practices? I show the advantages of the third version, arguing that it improves upon the other two versions, as well as incorporating their principal insights. I then defend it against two serious challenges: (1) If content is constituted by others' normative judgments, how can content be causally efficacious? (2) This account appears to make having contentful thoughts a matter of people having contentful thoughts about your thoughts. That appears to be viciously circular and so can't be naturalistic.     

Community Psychology: The Case of Cameroon

Community psychology in Cameroon is a budding discipline even its practice, given the scarcity of professionals with specialised training. However, this paper highlights public and private community-oriented projects that resonate with the principles of community psychology. The demands are high with the impact of globalisation, corruption, poverty and HIV/AIDS. Yet it is evident that professional responses to these demands will be slow because even the teaching, research and use of the main discipline of psychology face major problems, blocking its expansion and use. There is the need for strong academic and professional leadership that is usually blocked by tribalism, weakness in the pedagogy of programmes and underdevelopment and unawareness of social problems including the absence of structures for strengthening institutional capacity. These explain why only rudimentary psychological services exist for Cameroonians. There is therefore an urgent need for the rapid formalisation of community psychology in teaching, research and service for alleviating people's distress in Cameroon.     

The new multidimensional and user-driven higher education ranking concept of the European Union

Higher education rankings constitute a important but controversial topic due to the methodologies applied in existing rankings and to the use being done of these interpreting their results for purposes which they were not designed for. At present there is no international ranking can responds to the needs of all users and that is methodologically sound by considering the various missions of higher education institutions, mainly due to a narrow focus on research giving less importance to other missions in which higher education institutions can excel beyond research such as teaching quality, knowledge transfer, international orientation, regional engagement etc. The European Commission is currently involved in the implementation of a new higher education ranking methodology, characterised by taking into account a diversity of missions and the diversity of existing higher education institutions. The final aim is to create a tool allowing users to choose the performance indicators of their interest and providing them with a personalised ranking according to their interests. This paper describes the motivation for designing such a tool, the principles of the methodology proposed, as well as the steps foreseen to have it ready for end users by 2014.     

On the origin of happiness by means of natural felicitation

The present study tested theoretical models of the forgivingness – well-being association with depression symptoms and social justice commitment as outcome measures and with differentiation of self (DoS) and dispositional humility as mediators. In doing so, we addressed the need to explicitly frame the study of virtues in a relational view of the self and extended the research on forgivingness and humility that moves beyond a focus on personal benefit and attends to the ways in which virtues also benefit other persons. The sample consisted of 213 graduate students from a religiously-affiliated university who completed a questionnaire of self-report measures. Results supported the proposed models as significant specific indirect effects were observed through DoS and humility. The findings support a self-regulating mechanism, as measured by DoS and dispositional humility, for the protective influence of forgivingness on depression symptoms and the promotive influence of forgivingness on prosocial relating.     

The bidirectional relation between positive mental health and psychopathology in a longitudinal representative panel study

Background: There is accumulating evidence that positive mental health and psychopathology should be seen as separate indicators of mental health. This study contributes to this evidence by investigating the bidirectional relation between positive mental health and psychopathological symptoms over time. Methods: Positive mental health (MHC-SF) and psychopathological symptoms (BSI) were longitudinally measured in a representative adult sample (N?=?1932) on four measurement occasions in nine months. A cross-lagged panel design was applied and evaluated with a latent growth model combined with an item response theory measurement model. Results: Psychopathological symptoms were longitudinally related to positive mental health and vice versa, controlling for initial levels. The changes over time were even more important than the absolute levels of psychopathological symptoms and positive mental health, respectively. Conclusions: The results underline the need for a comprehensive perspective on mental health, incorporating both the treatment of symptoms and the enhancement of well-being.     

Intensive mindfulness training-related changes in cognitive and emotional experience

This study examined the role of intensive mindfulness training on changes in day-to-day experiential processing, psychological symptoms, resilience, and well-being in two groups of community adults (N = 69). Using both quasi-experimental and longitudinal methods, the study found that intensive training, operationalized as 10–12 hours of formal mindfulness practice per day for 1 month, was significantly related to increases in training-specific experiential processing capacities, namely trait mindfulness and decentering (reperceiving), in comparison to pre–post-training wait-list controls. In both training groups combined, mindfulness, decentering, and acceptance increased over the pre-training to 1-month follow-up period. Intensive mindfulness training was also related to declines in anxiety and enhanced both subjective well-being and self-compassion from pre-training to follow-up in the two training groups. Finally, increases in trait mindfulness and acceptance were related to improvements in psychological symptoms, well-being, and resilience. Future directions for this novel area of mindfulness research are discussed.     

Adults see vision to be more informative than it is

Humans gain a wide range of knowledge through interacting with the environment. Each aspect of our perceptual experiences offers a unique source of information about the world—colours are seen, sounds heard and textures felt. Understanding how perceptual input provides a basis for knowledge is thus central to understanding one's own and others' epistemic states. Developmental research suggests that 5-year-olds have an immature understanding of knowledge sources and that they overestimate the knowledge to be gained from looking. Without evidence from adults, it is not clear whether the mature reasoning system outgrows this overestimation. The current study is the first to investigate whether an overestimation of the knowledge to be gained from vision occurs in adults. Novel response time paradigms were adapted from developmental studies. In two experiments, participants judged whether an object or feature could be identified by performing a specific action. Adult participants found it disproportionately easy to accept looking as a proposed action when it was informative, and difficult to reject looking when it was not informative. This suggests that adults, like children, overestimate the informativeness of vision. The origin of this overestimation and the implications that the current findings bear on the interpretation of children's overestimation are discussed.