Chris Boyatzis

• Managing Director at Bucknell University

Using a longitudinal, mixed-methods design and building on Shults and Sandage’s (2006) relational spirituality model, we explored spiritual seeking, spiritual dwelling, and the dialectical process of balancing spiritual seeking and dwelling. Assessing a sample of 77 Christian emerging adults twice over a 2-year period (thirty-nine 2006 graduates an...

The construct of quest as measured by the Quest Scale raises complexities that this study addressed with online surveys measuring religiosity, ego identity, and well-being of graduates from two Christian colleges. Intrinsic questers (those above the scale midpoint in intrinsic and quest scores but below the extrinsic midpoint) made up over half of...

This study assessed emerging adults' attachment relationships with parents, peers, and God to explore the sufficiency of the correspondence and compensation models of attachment. We analyzed narratives of 119 (60 male) Christian college graduates describing their relational experiences with God. Narratives were coded for five relational patterns in...

Parental religiosity has been shown to predict child and adolescent religiosity, but the role of parents in emerging adult religiosity is largely unknown. We explored associations among emerging adult religiosity, perceived parental religiosity, perceived similarity to mother's and to father's religious beliefs, parental faith support, and parental...

Postmaterial spiritual psychology posits that consciousness can contribute to the unfolding of material events and that the human brain can detect broad, non-material communications. In this regard, this emerging field of postmaterial psychology marks a stark departure from psychology's traditional quantum measurements and tenets. The Oxford Handbo...

This chapter explores the scholarship regarding a further understanding of a child's agency, voice, and maturity in discussing spiritual matters. It argues that the dominance of cognitive-developmentalism and stage theory has impeded our understanding of religious and spiritual growth and subsequently our ability to impute to children agency, voice...

The purpose of this study was to explore the relationship between older adults' religiosity, sense of meaning in life, and health behavior. Three dimensions of religiosity were assessed: religious orientation (intrinsic and extrinsic), sanctification of the body, and relationship with God. Five health behaviors were measured: smoking, exercise, tak...

This short-term longitudinal study explored whether a secure relationship with God would protect young women (N = 231, M = 19.2) from the impact of four risk factors for eating disturbance: pressure to be thin; thin-ideal internalization, body dissatisfaction; and dieting. Analyses showed that women with secure attachment to God experienced reduced...

Research has confirmed a healthy link between young adults’ religiosity and body image. This study explored this relationship in 127 older men and women (mean=74years) who completed measures on two dimensions of body image (body satisfaction and anxiety about an aging appearance) and on different indices of religiosity. Men reported higher body sat...

What does “spirituality” look like in a child? Does religion make a genuine difference in the lives of children and youth? How do we measure spiritual and religious development in children and adolescents? How can we characterize religious and spiritual development in its processes, sequences, and stages? These are a few daunting challenges facing...

We examined in a random-assignment, pretest-posttest design whether college women's body image would improve after reading religious and spiritual affirmations about their bodies. The sample was predominantly white and Christian. In a pretest, women completed measures of religiosity and body esteem (how they felt about their weight and appearance)...

This special issue contains four original empirical articles that address links between religion and family functioning. The articles are marked by many desired attributes: a rich combination of novel variables and constructs, a sampling of a diverse set of religious groups, and multiple measures of religiosity. The data analyses here not only exam...

The college and early adulthood years-the period of emerging adulthood-entail dramatic changes in identity and faith, but little is known about age trends in Quest orientation across these years. Further, nothing is known about the links between Quest and body image and eating behavior. We addressed these issues in 3 groups of young women: college...

Cognitive-cultural foundations of spiritual development In ancient stories of origin, human beings are often conceived as an amalgam of matter and spirit (Berryman, 1991). Material substance is united with an immaterial spirit that can think and choose its own destiny. Cognitive developmental research has demonstrated that even young children recog...

The family as a context for religious and spiritual development in children and youth Our chapter addresses how the family promotes or hinders transcendence of the self in children, that is, how the family is a context in which spiritual development occurs. Due to space limitations, our emphasis is on socialization and interaction processes within...

Spirituality and religion are central dimensions of human experience. Youth and adults alike report high levels of religiosity. Adolescence may be a particularly important time period in which to study spiritual and religious development. In adolescence, many youth turn toward religion and greater civic involvement, and yet many others who turn awa...

We analyzed the frequency, structure, and content of parent-child communication about religion to determine if parent-child communication is characterized by a unidirectional parent-to-child transmission or a bi-directional reciprocity in which children are active participants in their religious socialization. In two 1-week data collections. Christ...

The Edwards and Lowis (this issue) critique and revision of the Batson, Schoenrade, and Ventis (1993) model of religious experience is critiqued on the following major grounds: (a) It fails to circumscribe the topic adequately and relies on extreme cases and exceptional figures (e.g., Moses, Siddhartha) to illustrate religious experience while fail...

There are striking gender differences in boyS' and girlS' artistic styles. A naturalistic observation of children drawing sheds light on the sociocognitive and collaborative processes through which peers influence each other's art.

A longitudinal case study illustrates how artistic development can be understood as the interplay between the child's developing symbolic skills and the contextual social support for the child's artistic expression.

There are striking differences between boys' andgirls' art during the elementary school years, but it isunknown whether such artistic gender differences emergeearlier in childhood. We tested 20 preschoolers (12 boys, 8 girls) and 29 kindergartners (15boys, 14 girls), most White and middle-class, on threetasks to assess gender-stereotypicality in th...

Children's propensity for interacting with peersof their own gender is a robust phenomenon, evidentacross many contexts. This study investigated howchildren's gender-based peer preferences varied as a function of a contextual variable —type of children's game. Using naturalisticobservations, 242 first- to third-graders (identicalnumbers of boys and...

Effects of perceived attractiveness and academic performance on 9th graders' ratings of peers' popularity were investigated. Participants were 270 9th graders (152 girls, 118 boys) who read a vignette describing a hypothetical same-sex peer with whom the student had been assigned to complete a project. The partner's attractiveness and academic perf...

In this article. I describe a collaborative project that helps students understand the role of culture in child development and education through an in-depth study of math education in the United States and Asia. Students use Bronfenbrenner's (IR79, 1994) ecological model of development as a theoretical framework. The project entails independent an...

Describes a study of the effects of violence on elementary students which used the television program Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, and found increased aggression which parents should be concerned about. Offers suggestions for parents and teachers, including taking action against violent programming, utilizing technology which bans unwanted program...

Twenty-eight preschoolers (14 boys, 14 girls) ranging in age from 3 years 11 months to 5 years 8 months (M = 4 years 6 months) drew pictures of a person and then were randomly assigned to 1 of 2 conditions, to determine if they would change their human figure drawings after participating in tasks designed to make body parts more salient. Half of th...

Investigated effects of "The Mighty Morphin Power Rangers," currently the most popular and violent child TV program, on children's aggressive behavior. 26 boys and 26 girls (aged 5–11 yrs) were shown the Power Rangers or assigned to a control group. The number of aggressive acts by each child was recorded in a 2-min interval. Ss who watched Power R...

In this study children's emotional associations with colors were investigated. Sixty children (30 girls, 30 boys), equally divided into groups of 5-year-olds and 6 1/2-year-olds, were asked their favorite color and were then shown nine different colors, one at a time and in a random order. For each color, children were asked, "How does (the color)...

To promote understanding of children's social development during middle childhood, students select, view, and analyze a feature film using theory and research from the course. Students write papers analyzing the protagonist's social development, focusing on peer relations and friendship issues. The quality of these papers and student evaluations de...

This study examined preschool children's decoding and encoding of facial emotions and gestures, interrelationships between these skills, and the relationship between these skills and children's popularity. Subjects were 34 preschoolers (eighteen 4-year-olds, sixteen 5-year-olds), with an equal number of boys and girls. Children's nonverbal skill wa...

This study examined preschool children's ability to decode facial emotions. Subjects comprised 32 preschoolers (16 3 1/2-year-olds, 16 5-year-olds), with equal numbers of boys and girls, enrolled in a preschool. Children heard a brief story describing a boy's emotion and were shown three photographs of a boy, each displaying a different emotion (on...

To investigate the symbolic quality of preschoolers' gestural representations in the absence of real objects, 48 children (16 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds) performed 2 tasks. In the first task, they were asked to pretend to use 8 common objects (e.g., "pretend to brush your teeth with a toothbrush"). There was an age-related progression in the symbolic...

Reading lists of developmental psychology courses are replete with scientific theory and research. Narrative material from literature can supplement this theory and research by elucidating psychological concepts with real-life examples, while deepening students' appreciation for the complexity and diversity of development. In several courses I have...

Maternal behaviors within mother-infant games were examined to determine the amount, type, and functional value of maternal helping behaviors. 17 mother-infant pairs were videotaped on monthly visits from 8 to 16 months as they played 5 separate games. 2 of these games, roll the ball and peekaboo, were analyzed in terms of "rounds" of each game. Re...