Fraser Watts

University of Lincoln · School of Psychology

Several accounts of the evolution of religion distinguish two phases: an earlier shamanic stage and a later doctrinal stage. Similarly, several theories of human cognition distinguish two cognitive modes: a phylogenetically older system that is largely intuitive and a later, more distinctively human system that is more rational and articulate. This...

This paper begins from empirical research relevant to the sense that there is something ‘beyond’ the everyday self, the work of David Hay in which he asked people whether they had experienced ‘a presence or power, whether you call it God or not, which is different from your everyday self?’ About a third of the population reported that they had. I s...

This article describes some key features of the distinctive approach to issues in science and religion of the Epiphany Philosophers (EPs), and introduces a set of articles from a recent meeting. The objective of the EPs is not merely to establish harmonious coexistence between science and religion. Rather, they are dissatisfied with both, and have...

This chapter takes an interdisciplinary approach, bringing together how place has been understood and experienced in the Judeo-Christian tradition with recent psychological approaches to the significance of place. The first part of the chapter focuses on natural environments, taking the Hebrew Bible as a significant cultural document providing insi...

This chapter clarifies the psychology of religion and place (PRP) by providing conceptual and operational definition of the concept as a first step in the systematic analysis of PRP for future research. Concept analysis is a method designed by Walker and Avant (Strategies for Theory Construction in Nursing. Pearson, Upper Saddle River, NJ, 2011) fo...

This chapter introduces the psychology of religion and place as a significant and emerging interdisciplinary field for understanding the constellation of subjective relational and spiritual experiences in spatial settings. We carefully consider ways readers can benefit from the study of religion and place as a psychological phenomenon involving per...

This book examines the role of religious and spiritual experiences in people’s understanding of their environment, and how their place experiences are transformed in the process. The contributors consider how understandings and experiences of religious and place connections are motivated by the need to seek and maintain contact with perceptual obje...

This rejoinder acknowledges the empirical gaps and theoretical/theological disharmony highlighted in the three selected commentaries on Place Spirituality (PS), but we defend our central argument about the developmental pathways of PS. First, we provide an overview of recent studies on PS, highlighting what has been done so far in the field. Second...

The approach to mental health and well‐being taken here illustrates the complementary perspectives approach and assumes that there are useful and intersecting contributions from science (including medicine) and from religion and spirituality. What counts as poor mental well‐being depends on the interaction of relatively objective criteria with cult...

This paper examines the role of place attachment in religious life by analyzing various significant place events in the Bible, using analysis of biblical discourse. The paper looks at various biblical places, and explores the implications of approaching these sacred settings in terms of place attachment theory. In the Old Testament we focus on Moun...

Recent developments toward a more holistic biology do not eliminate reductionism and determinism, but they do suggest more complex forms of them, in which there are multiple, interacting influences, as there are in complex or chaotic systems. Though there is a place in biology for both systemic and atomistic modes of explanation, for those with a t...

Religion is a multi-faceted phenomenon including cognition, behavior, experience and more. It is also very diverse; there are many different forms of religion, depending on evolutionary context, culture, personality and so on. In view of this it is misleading to make claims about anything as broad and general as “religion”, without specifying what...

Emotions are heterogeneous. So, in assessing their religious and theological significance, it is important to make distinctions between different kinds of emotion. One important distinction is between basic emotions that are universal and cognitively simple, and other more self-conscious emotions that depend on greater cognitive elaboration about b...

From the end of the nineteenth century, psychologists have had a keen interest in the empirical study of religion. Today, the psychology of religion is one among a family of social scientific approaches to the study of religion. Early interests in religious change through conversion and religious experience have continued in the contemporary psycho...

Coventry Cathedral in the 1960s developed a distinctive theology of society. There was not only a central focus on reconciliation but also a broader social theology that emphasized the theological interpretation of how God was at work in society as a whole. Coventry Cathedral made early contributions to a range of topics such as urban theology and...

Research on religious attributions has been limited by a preoccupation with disentangling “religious” from “naturalistic” attributions and a failure to capture the attributions that people make in response to meaningful events. Thirty years of research has shown that even under optimum conditions religious attributions are rare compared to naturali...

My paper in the first issue of this journal marked the beginning of a 20-year programme of work on the interface of psychology and religion, which is summarized here under three headings; (i) reductionism and beyond, (ii) the structure of mind, and (iii) psychology and theology. It is suggested that there can be fruitful cross-fertilization between...

It is argued that there are good scientific grounds for accepting that cognition functions in a way that reflects embodiment. This represents a more holistic, systemic way of thinking about human beings, and contributes to the coordination of scientific assumptions about mind and body with those of the faith traditions, moving us beyond sterile deb...

The dialogue between theology and psychology is part of the broader dialogue between theology and science, but more two-way. Theology operates with a broader conceptual framework, and points to approaches that psychology may neglect. One of the principal points of intersection between theology and psychology concems human nature, though there is al...

This paper examines the central theoretical concepts in the work of Rupert Sheldrake. The first section examines Sheldrake's account of morphic fields and questions whether difficulties arise when these concepts are extended upwards from the biological level. The second section reviews Sheldrake's concept of extended mind and considers the criticis...

There have been few attempts to investigate the widespread assumption that short-term challenges can have beneficial effects on personality. An expedition to India organized by the British Schools Exploring Society provided such an opportunity. The Gordon Personal Profile Inventory showed that the expedition was associated with increased ascendancy...

There has recently been much interest in the relationship between science and religion, and how they combine to give us a 'binocular' perspective on things. One important phenomenon which has been neglected in recent work is the concept of spiritual healing. This edited collection explores a variety of approaches to spiritual healing from different...

This chapter is about the dialogue between psychology and theology. I will first briefly distinguish this specific topic from others to do more generally with the interface of psychology and religion. One of those is the practical application of psychology to the work of faith communities. Here the primary focus has been the area of pastoral care (...

Light is a topic of central importance for understanding the relationship between God and creation. Understanding the relationship and distinction between uncreated and created light helps us to understand better the relationship between God and creation. The scientific study of light, taking full account of the experience of light, may be a crucia...

Positive psychology is largely concerned with human qualities that have long been the subject of religious discussion and been encouraged through spiritual practices. We suggest that, rather than seeing positive psychology as replacing this earlier religious approach, it should be pursued in dialogue with it. We illustrate this with reference to wo...

IntroductionJealousyEnvyFinal Conclusions References

This article is devoted to examining theoretical issues on the interface of the psychology of religion and the psychology of emotion, something which recently has been surprisingly neglected. The broad range of psychological components involved in emotion, and the importance of emotional processes in religion, make it a particularly relevant area o...

The widely held legend of historical conflict between science and religion cannot be sustained on the basis of research. Different sciences show different relationships to religion; the physical sciences show rapprochement, whereas the human sciences often are antagonistic to religion. Reconciling science and religion by regarding each as applicabl...

Disorders of memory are among the most frequent and disabling symptoms of a wide range of clinical disorders. It is an area which has seen intensive research in recent years, producing results that are of considerable relevance to clinical practice and rehabilitation. In this handbook . . . scientists and clinicians [present] a critical, thorough...

There are two kinds of scientific questions about procedures such as yoga: ‘process' questions and ‘outcome’ questions. Research on the effectiveness of yoga indicates that it has a variety of beneficial effects, but there is more doubt about whether it has unique effects. A broad range of procedures which combine physical stillness with mental ale...

O'Connor is critical of Watts' suggestion that emotion can serve as a model for religion. The proposal arises from recent developments in the psychology of emotion that emphasize that it is socially embedded and dependent on processes of interpretation. Similar points have been made about religion: Neither religion nor emotion are purely private ma...

Of the various obsessive-compulsive phenomena it seems that compulsive checking may be particularly likely to repay an information-processing approach. There are indications that anxiety-targeted exposure methods are less appropriate to checking than cleaning. Also, repeated checking appears to result from an initial failure to process information...

A cognitive model of sleep onset was developed in 1994/5 by Watts and Barnard, using the Interacting Cognitive Subsystems framework (ICS). The model was presented by Barnard at the Annual Conference of the British Psychological Society in 1996. This working paper describes that model in detail. In a context where there has been a growing acknowledg...

It is widely assumed that insomniacs have poor self-efficacy for sleep and it is known that successful treatment is usually accompanied by improved self-efficacy. However, there has been little detailed investigation of insomniacs perceived lack of control over sleep. Insomniacs' perceived control over sleep itself is affected more than their perce...

This experiment investigates Borkovec's theory that the function of worry is to protect people from potentially distressing emotional imagery. The experiment builds on a previous one of Borkovec and Inz (Behaviour Research and Therapy, 28, 153-158, 1990) comparing the frequency of thoughts and images in imagery and relaxation. The present experimen...

Previous research has found that participation by young people in an international expedition organized by the British Schools Exploring Society is associated with positive change in a variety of self-report personality dimensions. The purpose of the present study was to supplement self-report questionnaire data with observers' ratings made by expe...

Recent research has pointed to the importance of cognitive activity in interfering with sleep, and suggested a close relationship between worry and insomnia. To explore the relationship between worry and insomnia in more detail, a sample was studied in which worry and insomnia were combined in a 2 x 2 design. The content of sleep-interfering cognit...

An experiment was conducted on recall bias between words relating to stimulus and response aspects of spider phobia. In contrast to the experiment of Watts & Coyle (1992) mixed lists were used. Whereas Watts & Coyle had found no bias of phobics between stimulus and response words, the present experiment found that phobics were relatively impaired i...

Previous uncontrolled research has shown that participation by young people in an inter-national expedition organized by the British Schools Exploring Society was associated with positive change in a variety of self-report personality dimensions. The present study was a controlled investigation of the hypothesis that such positive personality chang...

Expeditions provide a valuable opportunity for studying processes of coping with a stressful situation. An expedition to India organized by the British Schools Exploring Society has already been reported as being accompanied by positive changes on self-report personality scales. This paper is concerned with detailed cognitive coping measures comple...

van Sommers, Peter (1988). Jealousy: What is if and who feels it? London: Penguin. ISBN 0-14-022712-1, 214 pp, £3.95/$6.95White, Gregory L. & Mullen, Paul E. (1989). Jealousy: Theory, research, and clinical strategies. New York: Guilford Press. ISBN 0-89862-385-5, 340 pp, £29.95/$49.95Salovey, Peter (Ed.) (19911. The psychology of jealousy and envy...

There have been few attempts to investigate the widespread assumption that short-term challenges can have beneficial effects on personality. An expedition to India organized by the British Schools Exploring Society provided such an opportunity. The Gordon Personal Profile Inventory showed that the expedition was associated with increased ascendancy...

After a period of neglect the psychological study of emotions is making good progress; work from the perspective of cognitive psychology is currently predominant. Key conceptual and theoretical topics from the psychology of the emotions are reviewed and their clinical implications considered. Particular attention is given to (i) the value of formul...

Determined whether 32 spider phobic adults would show diminished recall of anxiety-related words compared with 32 controls. Ss were exposed to a live spider and then were presented with 2 lists of words relating to a spider and to a baby. Contrary to the findings of F. N. Watts and T. Dalgleish (see record 1992-01780-001), phobic Ss showed better...

Previous work has shown that spider phobics have poor recognition memory for spiders. A parallel effect is demonstrated here for memory for spider words. The first experiment found that spider phobic subjects showed less free recall of spider words than control words. The second experiment confirmed this effect, showing additionally that phobin rec...

The prominence of intrusive thoughts in insomnia suggests the relevance of cognitive techniques to control them. It is suggested that the technique of Articulatory Suppression derived from Baddeley's model of Working Memory provides a relevant approach. The technique is presented as it was developed with a preliminary uncontrolled case series. A si...

Research into sleep problems has been dominated by a number of theoretical perspectives from each of which useful treatment applications have been derived. However, the rich diversity of problems that are subsumed under insomnia or sleep disturbance often remain unappreciated. This paper reports the results of a factor analysis performed on the com...

A case is described of intense aversion to personal body hair on the chest, legs and arms. Exposure methods of behavioural treatment were used, combined with interpretative ones. Exposure was found to facilitate self-exploration, which in turn led to the successful completion of exposure treatment. The circumstances under which exposure treatment c...

Theoretical frameworks and experimental paradigms derived from cognitive psychology provide a valuable approach to the investigation of cognitive aspects of disorders of anxiety and depression. Review of the literature provides strong evidence of attentional bias towards threat stimuli in anxiety, though evidence of comparable attentional bias in d...

Synopsis Resource theory predicts that the relative memory deficit shown by depressed patients should be greater with unstructured than structured material. Previous data using semantic categories word lists supports this, but lists approximating to text have produced the opposite result. Both types of structure were studied in this experiment. The...

SYNOPSIS Three studies examine the role that provocative visual stimuli have in eliciting anxiety reactions in people with agoraphobia. Such stimuli elicit more anxiety in agoraphobic patients than control subjects. The effect of visual stimulation appears to be specific: (1) non-visual stimulation is without comparable effect; (2) both control and...

Investigated depressed patients' memory for stories. This indicated that although normal Ss showed particularly good recall for units central to the structure of the story, this did not hold for depressed Ss. In contrast, effects of centrality were comparable in high- and low-IQ Ss and effects of imageability of story units were comparable in both...

Investigated depressed patients' memory for stories. This indicated that although normal Ss showed particularly good recall for units central to the structure of the story, this did not hold for depressed Ss. In contrast, effects of centrality were comparable in high- and low-IQ Ss and effects of imageability of story units were comparable in both...

It is argued that the attentional strategies of phobic patients have important consequences for how they cope with anxiety. The literature indicates that focused attention to anxiety cues is important for long-term emotional habituation but that it is made difficult by anxiety. Questionnaire studies of agoraphobics reliably identified factors conce...

Recent research has suggested that depressive biases in personal memory may be due to an inability to progress beyond a general level when trying to retrieve specific positive memories. This study produced further evidence of this phenomenon. When trying to access specific hedonically toned memories, depressed patients more often responded with a g...

The paper explores a distinction between different kinds of lapse of concentration in depressed patients. The strategy is to begin with the phenomenological distinction between the mind (a) 'wandering' on to something else or (b) going 'blank'. Blanking, but not mind-wandering, is associated with longer planning times on the 'Tower of London' task....

Depressed patients complain of problems of memory and concentration, and it would be helpful to have a therapeutic procedure capable of reducing or alleviating these problems. The short-term effects of an imagery formation technique were compared with brief relaxation on a range of subjective and objective measures. Imagery formation substantially...

An appraisal is presented of Lang's theoretical and experimental work on emotional imagery. Lang has adopted a “propositionalist” theory of imagery which emphasises the role of the activation of cognitive structures associated with imagery. Questions are raised about the exact properties of these structures and the relation between their activation...

Research suggests that the poor performance of depressed patients on memory tests reflects cautious response criteria rather than reduced accessibility of memories. Studies of recognition memory enable this issue to be addressed. The present experiment provides the first clear demonstration of a deficit in recognition memory in depression that is n...

Research suggests that the poor performance of depressed patients on memory tests reflects cautious response criteria rather than reduced accessibility of memories. Studies of recognition memory enable this issue to be addressed. The present experiment provides the first clear demonstration of a deficit in recognition memory in depression that is n...

An experiment is reported in which a depressed and a control group were tested on free recall, cued recall and recognition memory for a prose passage. As expected from previous work the depressives tended to show less impairment on recognition than on free recall. However, contrary to what some theories would predict, cued recall performance was no...

The correlates of approaches to studying (as measured by the Approaches to Studying Inventory) were examined in a sample of undergraduate medical students (n = 38). It was found that “reproducing’ orientation had a number of trait correlates including Eysenckian Neuroticism (+), and that ‘achievement’ and “meaning’ orientations had correlates inclu...

The hypothesis tested in the present experiments is that phobics show poor focused attention for phobic stimuli. A test of the hypothesis was undertaken using spider phobics' performance in a recognition memory task involving dead spiders as an index of processing. The first experiment confirmed the hypothesis of poorer processing of spider stimuli...

A programme of research is described which investigates the cognitive processing of phobic stimuli. Phobics show good perceptual “pick-up” of phobic words on a version of the Stroop test. However, their encoding appears to be poor, as indexed by recognition memory for phobic stimuli. Consistent with this, cognitive representations of phobic stimuli...

Endocrine and psychological function (measuring both affect and attitudes to study) were studied in 38 male medical students 4 weeks and 1-2 h before a major examination. Anxiety (or tension) and emotionality increased just before the examination, as did the 'denial' subscale of a 'coping' questionnaire. Serum cortisol and prolactin increased; seru...

It is hypothesized that phobics have cognitive representations of phobic stimuli that are relatively lacking in detail and elaboration, and that this is reflected in imagery relating to them. In a study of verbal imagery for coping with a spider, the accounts of phobics were found to be briefer and to include fewer stages. In a study of stimulus im...

A version of the Stroop test was developed which requires colour naming of spider words. Spider phobics were severely retarded on this task, but not on the conflicting colour-word Stroop or a Stroop with more general threat words. Desensitization of phobics significantly reduced interference on the Spider Stroop. A third experiment examined the ret...

An argument is developed for basing study counselling more closely on relevant principles of the cognitive psychology of studying. This can and should take into account the inter-relationships between study processes and the student's emotional state, and offer help with both in an integrated way. Finally, the advantages of an individual-centred ap...

An index of tight construing was derived from a Kelly grid in which the elements were spiders. This index, the coefficient of concordance, corresponds to the average correlation between constructs. Concordance was significantly higher in spider phobics than controls, in line with the hypothesis that emotional disorders are associated with higher co...

Synopsis Depressed patients commonly complain of concentration problems, yet these have seldom been the focus of systematic investigation. A structured interview about concentration problems was administered to a group of relatively severely depressed patients. Problems in reading and watching television were the most common, and were highly correl...

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It has been claimed that fear shortens time-estimates. Contrary to this view, 35 spider-phobic subjects give longer estimates of a short interval spent observing a spider than 18 non-phobic controls. The phobics' estimates are also more variable.

The construction is described of a questionnaire designed to measure separate dimensions of cognitive-behavioural responsiveness to spiders in spider phobics. Dimensions of vigilance, preoccupation and coping-avoidance are established. Data are presented on differences between phobics and normals on the questionnaire, on correlations between the qu...

Discusses the implications for public policy of findings suggesting that most clinical psychologists in the British National Health Service (NHS) do not perform any research. A distinction between applied and applicable research is made, and implications for training and organization in the NHS are noted. (5 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012...

Some of the problems that confront the clinician in seeking to comprehend patients' accounts of their problems are discussed. It must be anticipated that these will be systematically deficient, both because of limitations in patients' awareness and because of the effects of the communication situations. Several strategies of listening that are avai...

The literature indicates that clinical judgement may sometimes be adversely affected by clinical training. It is suggested that this reflects qualitative changes in the modes of clinical listening, modes of inference, and relative weights given to stereotypic and individual information. A theoretical discussion of this issue focuses mainly on the h...

Reexamined the correlational structure of the General Aptitude Test Battery to determine whether it permits the measurement of nine separate aptitudes, as is claimed. The pattern of correlations between subtests suggests that several of the aptitudes are of doubtful validity. Three matrices of correlations between tests were factor analyzed using t...

A review is presented of factors relevant to the level of the knowledge, self-care and metabolic control of diabetic patients. Methods of assessing each of these are described, and ways of improving them reviewed. Recommendations are made for further work in this field.It is suggested that traditional education programmes have little clinical value...

Discusses the relevance of habituation as a model for response decrement in desensitization. A discussion of the relationship between habituation and extinction leads to the view that there are no sound reasons for explaining desensitization as an extinction rather than as a habituation phenomenon. The maximal habituation theory of desensitization...

A search was made of records available for 65 non-psychotic patients referred to a psychiatric day hospital. Assessments were made of whether they had shown various specified types of deviant social conduct, such detailed objective surveys of social conduct being regarded as superior to the use of concepts such as ‘psychopathic personality’. The co...

A rating scale developed by Griffiths (1973) was used to assess four separate areas of the work behaviour of patients in a psychiatric rehabilitation unit. Assessments were made at an early and a late stage of rehabilitation. The ability of ratings on this scale to predict resettlement at work was confirmed in a prospective study. The scale was als...

Synopsis Several indices of occupational stability are discussed and the importance of controlling for age in assessing occupational stability emphasized. The ability of 6 indices to predict the stable resettlement of psychiatric patients at work after a course of rehabilitation was examined. Though mean job length was a significant predictor, indi...