Intelligence and fertility in the United States: 1912-1982

Results are presented for the 1st analysis of the relationship between IQ and completed fertility using a large, representative sample of the US population. Correlations are predominantly negative for cohorts born between 1894 and 1964 but are significantly more positive for cohorts whose fertility was concentrated in the baby boom years. Previous studies reporting slightly positive correlations appear to have been biased in their restriction of samples to atypical cohorts. The National Opinion Research Center (NORC), a nonprofit research organization affiliated with the University of Chicago, conducted the General Social Survey (GSS) in the US each year from 1972 to 1982, except for 1979. A combination of block quota and full probability sampling was employed. Hour-long interviews were completed with 12,120 respondents who were English-speaking, noninstitutionalized adults (18 years or older) living within the continental US. Such questions as age, place of birth, income and occupation, were asked in each interview. Other questions about attitudes on various social, political, and moral issues were rotated in different years. The unique opportunity this data set affords is an overview of the relationship between intelligence and fertility for a nationally representative sample of Americans whose major reproductive years fell between 1912 and 1982. Data were consolidated from the 4 surveys in which the vocabulary test was given (1974, 1976, 1978, and 1982). Respondents were divided into 15 birth cohorts of 5-year intervals ranging from before 1894 to 1964. Correlations between vocabulary scores and number of siblings are markedly negative across all 15 cohorts. Vocabulary sibling correlations are more negative in every cohort than vocabulary offspring correlations. Previous reports of a neutral or slightly eugenic relationship appear to be due to the nature of the samples used, in part because the cohorts chosen were atypical, and in part because they did not include nonwhites. Childless respondents averaged slightly higher scores than did those with 1 or more children, indicating that the automatic exclusion of the childless from sibling-IQ studies has not spuriously inflated negative correlations.     

The stability of status orientations among young,white, rural women from three southern states

This paper reports the results of a panel study of young, white, rural women from Georgia, South Carolina, and Texas (N = 138). The study was primarily concerned with how social origin variables affected early educational and occupational orientations and how early states of these orientations affected the orientations themselves at a later point in time. The results indicated that mother's education had a greater effect than father's education, but in either case the effect is mediated by intervening influences such as early aspirations and expectations. These young women held very traditional status orientations (with 60% projecting the occupations of beautician, nurse, stenographer, or school teacher), and their orientations were quite stable between their sophomore and senior years in high school. Since there has been so little work reported on the status attainment process for women, and rural women in particular, this study does offer a limited insight into this phenomenon.     

Occupational change in mid-career: An exploratory investigation

Twenty-five people who had made voluntary, radical occupational changes in mid-career were interviewed and compared and contrasted with people remaining in matched occupations. Four categories of factors emerged from the data as being important to mid-career occupational change: factors associated with the first occupation, factors associated with the second occupation, obstacles to change, and personal factors. Dissatisfaction with the first occupation and attraction to a second occupation are both necessary for change to occur but do not in all cases cause change. Dissatisfaction results from a lack of congruence between a person's work orientations and the rewards of an occupation, and attraction results from a perceived congruence between the two. Obstacles to change are most financial in nature and can deter or delay change even when dissatisfaction and attraction exist. Differing personal beliefs about the control one has over one's life and one's ability to succeed in new areas in large part determine whether obstacles deter change or not.     

Authoritarian personalities in the natural and social sciences

This research is an extension of a previous finding, that authoritarian personalities are predisposed to the social sciences and nonauthoritarians to the natural sciences. Two hypotheses were tested: (1) Within the social sciences, more authoritarian personalities enter economics and geography than psychology, social work, or sociology; and (2) between the first and last years in college, in “authoritarian departments” there is an increase, while in “nonauthoritarian departments” there is a decrease in the students' authoritarianism.     

Losing My Religion as a Natural Experiment: How State Pressure and Taxes Led to Church Disaffiliations between 1940 and 2010 in Germany

The sociological literature has produced a remarkably consistent picture of the quantitative patterns of religious disaffiliations in Western countries. This article argues, and demonstrates, that strong changes in a social context may lead individuals to disaffiliate rapidly, leading to very different aggregate effects from those in the “western model.” We use the unique situation of the separation of Germany from 1949 to 1989 and its subsequent reunification as a “natural experiment” to show just how much the relationships routinely found can be disrupted under changed conditions. The state socialist “treatment” affected religious disaffiliations in East Germany profoundly as it (a) made disaffiliations 10 times more probable in the East than in the West in the 1950s and 1960s, (b) shielded East German church members from factors that led to mass disaffiliations in the West in the late 1960s and early 1970s, (c) reversed the education‐disaffiliation link in the East, thus making disaffiliation more likely among the less educated, and (d) led to an especially strong increase in disaffiliations in the East right after the reunification     

Application of Yoga as a Spiritual Practice to Enhance Counselor Wellness and Effectiveness

In this article, we explore potential benefits of yoga, an ancient Indian tradition for spiritual growth and development, for counselors. Counselors use themselves as instruments to support clients and are constantly exposed to the traumatic experiences of clients, which may leave them susceptible to secondary traumatic stress or compassion fatigue (Shallcross, 2011). Yoga can help counselors not only in achieving holistic wellness but also in developing a way of being consistent with the characteristics of an effective counselor. Furthermore, yoga, as a spiritual practice, can empower counselors to embark on a spiritual journey driven by their own personal experiences.     

Reaching Up,Down, In,and Around: Couple and Family Coping During the Coronavirus Pandemic

The worldwide coronavirus (COVID-19) has had profound effects on all aspects of life: physical health, the ability to travel locally or to more distant destinations, material and financial resources, and psychosocial wellbeing. Couples, families, and communities and individual persons in those relationships have struggled to cope with emerging depression, anxiety, and trauma, and the rise of relational conflict. In this article, we suggest that the existential nature of the pandemic’s challenges requires more than just the usual psychosocial interventions. We propose a taxonomy of responses to foster coping and resilience—“Reaching Up, Down, In, and Around.” “Reaching Up” includes accessing spiritual, religious, and ethical values. “Reaching Down” includes ideas and practices that foster a revised relationship with the Earth and its resources, and that engage families to participate in activities that aid the Earth’s recovery from decades of human-caused damage. “Reaching In” represents a turn towards experiences available in the mind and in shared minds in relationships that provide pleasure, excitement, joy, and peace, given that external sources of these emotions are of limited availability due to quarantine. “Reaching Around” involves reframing the mandate for “social distancing” as fostering social connection and support while maintaining physical distancing. The challenges for family therapists, whose practices are confined largely to online therapy, and who are struggling with the same fears and constraints as those persons they are attempting to help, are also discussed.     

Religiosity and obsessive-compulsive behavior in Israeli Jews

Individual differences in obsessive-compulsive (OC) behavior in various cultures correlate with religiosity. The current paper explored the so far unstudied relationship between religiosity and OC behavior in Israeli Jews. Two studies were conducted. Study 1 focused on the relationship between religiosity and OC behavior in a representative sample of Israeli students. Study 2 focused on religious change and OC behavior in a non-random sample of 31 individuals who had become more religious (the MR group), and 30 individuals who were less religious (the LR group) than their parents. Instruments used were the Maudsley obsessive-compulsive inventory (MOCI), the student religiosity questionnaire, and questions about parental home observance, upbringing, and changes in religiosity. In the first study, no association was found between religiosity and OC behavior. Religiosity was related to some degree to perfectionism and to the parental attitude to upbringing. In the second study, a significant difference was observed between the MR and the LR groups on OC behavior as measured by the MOCI. Conclusion, among Israeli Jews a lot of religious observance is non-reflective, and is not associated with individual differences in personality or OC symptoms. Those who undergo religious change may do so in response to their behavioral propensities. One such path is that the more OC become MR, and the less OC less religiously observant.     

宗教生态论

宗教生态论是用文化生态学的眼光研究不同范围中宗教文化生命系统总体态势、层次结构、内外关系、动态运行的机制,考察世界三大宗教生态模式:亚伯拉罕系统的一元分化式、印度系统的一元多神蝉变式、中国的多元通和模式,说明宗教生态论的理论价值,重点阐述中国宗教良性生态的失衡与重建。     

Religious Problem Solving and the Complexity of Religious Rationality Within an Iranian Muslim Ideological Surround

Comparative rationality analysis formally examines the incommensurable social rationalities that theoretically exist within religions and the social sciences according to the ideological surround model (ISM) of the psychology of religion. This study extended these procedures to a new cultural context: 220 Iranian university students responded to the Religious Problem‐Solving Scales developed by Pargament et al. (1988). As hypothesized, the Collaborative Problem‐Solving Style was consistent, and the Self‐Directing Style inconsistent, with Iranian Muslim religious and psychological adjustment. The Deferring Style had ambiguous implications. Comparative rationality analysis demonstrated that sample interpretations of these styles explained greater variance in adjustment than did the original scales. These procedures also yielded the unexpected discovery that the Deferring Style included a secular as well as a religious form of Iranian rationality. These data most importantly support the ISM claim that “future objectivity” requires empirical analyses of the incommensurable rationalities operating within the psychology of religion.