John Poston

Biola University | BU · Rosemead School of Psychology

The biblical practice of lament has been largely neglected in many modern evangelical Christian contexts in the United States, despite increasing calls to reclaim this spiritual practice. This loss of lament is not without cost, and various negative impacts on individuals and communities have been suggested in the literature. The present article ar...

God image has been defined as one’s emotional, automatic, and implicit representation of God, and God concept has been defined as one’s analytic, conscious, and explicit beliefs about God. Congruence between these two forms of God representation has been theorized to be a key facet of theistic relational spirituality. As such, the present study sou...

Seminary students remain unstudied in the research literature despite their eminent role in caring for the wellbeing of congregants. This study aimed to conduct baseline analysis of their family of origin health, psychological health, and physiological heath by utilizing the Biobehavioral Family Model (BBFM) as a conceptual framework for understand...

Financial stress is a growing concern for Americans. One population that is particularly susceptible to financial stress and its negative consequences are students enrolled in seminaries many of whom will graduate with large amounts of debt while entering a profession with unique financial challenges that can make repaying student loan debt a daunt...

Attachment theory has been extended beyond human relationships to also help explain humanity’s relationship to the divine through the construct of attachment to god (Kirkpatrick & Shaver, 1990). While research has established childhood attachment to caregivers as a significant predictor of adult attachment to god (Kirkpatrick, 2005), the predictive...

Attachment theory has since been extrapolated to better explain humanity’s relationship to the divine through the construct of attachment to god (Kirkpatrick & Shaver, 1990). While research has firmly established childhood attachment as a significant predictor of adult attachment to god (Kirkpatrick, 2005), additional theoretically-probable predict...

Although the field of professional psychology has moved to an increased emphasis on assessing trainees' clinical competencies (Roberts, Borden, Christiansen, & Lopez, 2005), the field of psychoanalysis has lagged behind. A few psychoanalytic competency models have begun to emerge (e.g., Barsness, 2017; Cabaniss, 2008; Lemma, Roth, & Pilling, 2008;...

Individuals diagnosed with borderline personality disorder (BPD) and schizophrenia spectrum disorders (SSD) are known to display deficits in social cognition (SC). Our sample comprised 81 patients enrolled in residential treatment for complex psychopathology. We used performance-based assessments to test the hypothesis that individuals with SSD wou...

The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) has recently begun to fund programs that train medical residents on how to utilize an evidence-based validated system known as Screening, Brief Intervention, and Referral to Treatment (SBIRT) for providing early detection and brief treatment of unhealthy substance use. This pape...

Screening, Brief Intervention, and Referral to Treatment (SBIRT), an evidence-based validated system for providing early detection and brief treatment of substance use disorders, has been widely used in the training of medical residents across specialties at a number of sites. This paper investigates the effectiveness of SBIRT training during short...

Research in psychoanalysis is in many ways dependent on some level of engagement with patients in ongoing treatments. The use of patients as study participants may complicate the process of research as well as affect treatment outcomes, and, thus, requires that researchers and clinicians give careful thought to the ways in which they involve patien...

The relationship between episodic and dispositional forgiveness and the resolution of Erikson's (1963) psychosocial crises were explored in this study. Participants (N = 66) completed the Enright Forgiveness Inventory (Enright & Rique, 2004), Tendency to Forgive Scale (Brown, 2003), and Measures of Psychosocial Development (Hawley, 1988). Results a...

Lilienfeld, Garb, and Wood (2011) commented on our recently published meta-analysis (Poston & Hanson, 2010). In their thorough, fine-grained critique, they questioned the study's inclusion criteria, sampling, and results, suggesting the latter are "overstated" (p. 1048). Additionally, they discussed the Barnum effect, suggesting that it accounts, a...

This study entails the use of meta-analytic techniques to calculate and analyze 18 independent and 52 nonindependent effect sizes across 17 published studies of psychological assessment as a therapeutic intervention. In this sample of studies, which involves 1,496 participants, a significant overall Cohen's d effect size of 0.423 (95% CI [0.321, 0....

Research on breaking bad news has involved undergraduates, medical students, and physicians. However, to date, no studies have examined how, or whether, psychologists are trained to break bad news, as well as their current practice of breaking bad news. This mixed methods study explored the training and practice of 329 licensed psychologists/APA me...