Paul Wink

Wellesley College · Department of Psychology

This chapter, “From Olive Groves to Hell’s Kitchen,” examines Callas’s experiences during early childhood in New York City that left her with permanent psychological vulnerabilities. Having been deprived of adequate parental input during a critical developmental stage and growing up in a family beset by conflict exacerbated by a move from a provinc...

This chapter, “Nothing Left to Give,” focuses on Callas’s life after the breakup with Onassis. Never a quitter, Callas showed resolve in dealing with the abandonment but was ultimately unable to find meaning in life nor derive satisfaction from her past accomplishments. She accepted the leading role in Pasolini’s film Medea that, despite critical a...

This chapter, “Product of Her Mother’s Imagination,” probes the origins of Callas’s life-long conviction that she was celebrated not for her intrinsic worth but for her exceptional talent. Callas developed early in life an ambition to become a celebrated artist, one that she pursued with fierce dedication and commitment. Yet throughout her life she...

This chapter, “A Marriage of Mutual Convenience,” traces Callas’s marriage to Battista Meneghini, an affluent industrialist whom she met after arriving in Verona in 1947 to sing at the Arena amphitheater. During the twelve years they spent together, the couple became inseparable, with Battista fulfilling Maria’s dependency needs and Callas providin...

This chapter “Prima Donna Assoluta: Psychological Mysteries,” uses two performances of Donizetti’s Anna Bolena to illustrate how, within the space of one year (1957–1958), Callas went from being the darling of Milan’s La Scala audiences to its utmost villain. This shift in attitude resulted from a series of cancelled appearances, including the infa...

This chapter, “A Matter of the Heart,” focuses on the relationship between Maria Callas and Aristotle Onassis that began in 1959 . The liaison with Aristo offered Maria a first chance to enact her passion in real life rather than fulfilling it in operatic roles. It also provided her with an escape from a career undermined by her vocal problems. The...

This chapter, “I Gave You Everything,” analyzes Callas’s magic as a stage performer and the revolutionary nature of her short career that continues to resonate today. Her dark and penetrating voice was very different from the light voices of the coloratura sopranos who dominated bel canto roles in the first half of the twentieth century. The power...

This chapter, “An Athenian Interlude,” analyzes a major turning point in Callas’s life associated with her move, at age thirteen, from New York City to Athens. In Athens, she experienced poverty, personal humiliation, and, during the World War II years, threats to her life. But her singing benefited from the strong mentorship she received from Elvi...

Prima Donna: The Psychology of Maria Callas explores the psychological mechanisms behind the hypnotic power of Callas’s artistry and her tragic life story. Advances in developmental psychology and the concept of narcissism are used to shed light on Callas’s puzzling personal deterioration during the last nine years of her life. Although precipitate...

Chapters included in this volume highlight the vibrancy of research into diverse spiritualities. As shown by many of the book’s chapters, culturally specific measures enhance our ability to explain and understand the complexities of spiritual phenomena and help us appreciate religious traditions other than our own and humanize “the other.” The book...

Across diverse cultures, reverence is a cardinal virtue and a self-transcending positive emotion reflecting meaning and purpose in life. Yet, to date, few psychological studies have researched it. Addressing this gap, we drew two different study samples to develop and validate a self-report scale, Reverence in Religious and Secular Contexts (RRSC)....

Belief about an individual’s destiny after physical death has implications for psychosocial functioning, but there is a paucity of empirical measures that reflect diverse worldviews regarding what happens after death. Based on Smart’s theoretical model, we initiated three studies to develop a three-dimensional Connection of Soul (COS) scale designe...

This volume addresses an important problem in social scientific research on global religions and spirituality: How to evaluate the role of diverse religious and spiritual (R/S) beliefs and practices within the rapid evolution of spiritual globalization and diversification trends. The book examines this question by bringing together a panel of inter...

Meaning in life appears to confer advantages on physical and mental health, and may become even more important as people age. Yet the mechanisms through which this influence takes placeremain poorly understood. This symposium aims to illuminate some of these pathways through which meaning in life—broadly defined--may operate to improve health and w...

There has been growing interest in the role that two types of positive personality development, that is, personality maturation towards adjustment and towards growth, might play in the development of wisdom. This research, however, has been cross-sectional. In research using performance measures of wisdom there is a shortage of longitudinal data. T...

The understanding of the personality correlates of spirituality is complicated by the ambiguity associated with the term. Although most Americans use spirituality to denote a personal relationship with one's god that is embedded within traditional, institutionalized religious beliefs and practices, a growing number of individuals self-identify as s...

Deeply rooted in Western and Eastern civilization, reverence is a cardinal virtue that embraces meaning and purpose in life. It is also a self-transcending positive emotion, associated with specific worldviews that may determine the context in which an individual senses it. To date, few psychological studies have addressed this concept. To address...

The idea that the self-overvaluation characteristic of narcissism can be directed either overtly toward the public self (ego) or covertly toward the privately idealized self-image (ego ideal) was first discussed in the 1920s (e.g., Ellis, 1927). The more recent designation of these two faces of narcissism as Grandiosity-Exhibitionism (overt) and Vu...

Objective We investigated the connection between wisdom-related performance, personality, and generativity to further the understanding of how they are interrelated.Method Our sample consisted of 163 men and women participants between 68-77 years of age, mostly white, and predominantly middle class. Wisdom was assessed with the performance-based Be...

Despite the evidence that belief in afterlife has positive implications for psychosocial functioning, there is a paucity of empirical research and measures reflecting diverse worldviews regarding literal immortality. We reported findings on a newly developed Connection of Soul (COS) scale reflecting 3 dominant worldviews conceptualizing a soul's li...

In Capriccio, his 15th and last opera, Richard Strauss has a poet and musician vying for the favors of Countess Magdalena in a contest that ends in an inevitable draw. In his swan song, Strauss chose to address the fundamental issue facing any opera composer concerning the creative tension between words and music or reason and emotion. In psycholog...

The psychological concept of wisdom has its roots in philosophy and religion, a connection exemplified by references to wisdom in the Bible, the writings of Confucius, and in Buddhist teachings. In the Western tradition, wisdom was of prime concern to Greek philosophers including Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle whose ideas subsequently influenced th...

The present scale development results indicate initial success in constructing a reliable new self-report measure of adaptive overt narcissism that is distinct from measures of covert and maladaptive overt narcissism. The Adaptive Overt Narcissism Scale (AONS) also is substantially more correlated with self-esteem than existing subscales of the NPI...

The purpose of the present research was to improve the reliability and item content of the recently popular Hypersensitive Narcissism Scale (HSNS; Hendin & Cheek, 1997) by expanding it into a more complete measure of maladaptive covert narcissism. In an Amazon Mechanical Turk survey of 420 adults, the 23-item expanded version of the Maladaptive Cov...

The Oxford Handbook of Retirement offers comprehensive, up-to-date, and forward-thinking summaries of contemporary knowledge on retirement, especially the important progress that has been made in the field over the past two decades. The approach taken spans human resource management, organizational psychology, development psychology, gerontology, s...

Objectives. Fatigue symptoms are common among individuals suffering from cardiac diseases, but few studies have explored longitudinally protective factors in this population. This study examined the effect of preoperative factors, especially the use of prayer for coping, on long-term postoperative fatigue symptoms as one aspect of lack of vitality...

A multidisciplinary team of scholars shows how spiritual and religious practices actually do power psychological, physical, and social benefits, producing stronger individuals and healthier societies. In recent years, scholars from an array of disciplines applied cutting-edge research techniques to determining the effects of faith. Religion, Spirit...

This study explored the role of both traditional religiousness and of experiencing reverence in religious and secular (e.g., naturalistic, moralistic) contexts in postoperative hospital length of stay among middle-aged and older patients undergoing open-heart surgery. Reverence was broadly defined as "feeling or attitude of deep respect, love, and...

The relationship between individualism and collectivism (I/C), ethnicity, and four other social variables was examined using data from 453 American college students of Chinese, Korean, and European descent. Measures of Chinese and Korean ethnicity were better predictors of collectivism than individualism. The strength of the relationship between et...

This prospective study explores prayer, reverence, and other aspects of faith in postoperative complications and hospital length of stay of patients undergoing coronary artery bypass graft surgery. Alongside traditional religiousness measures, we examined sense of reverence in religious and secular contexts. Face-to-face interviews were conducted w...

This study used longitudinal data to examine the relations among religiousness, spirituality, and 3 key domains of psychosocial functioning in late adulthood: (a) sources of well-being, (b) involvement in tasks of everyday life, and (c) generativity and wisdom. Religiousness and spirituality were operationalized as distinct but overlapping dimensio...

The hypothesis that personality characteristics in adolescence can be used to predict religiousness and spiritual seeking in late adulthood was tested using a structural equation modeling framework to estimate cross-lagged and autoregressive effects in a two-wave panel design. The sample consisted of 209 men and women participants in the Berkeley G...

We use long-term longitudinal data from a sample (N = 155) of older age mainline Protestants, Catholics, and a small number of conservative Protestants to investigate the relations among church-centered religiousness, spiritual seeking, and authoritarianism. In late adulthood, religiousness was related positively, and spiritual seeking was related...

Objectives. Sense of personal control is a key marker of successful aging, yet little is known about its relation to religiousness and personal adversity among older adults. This study investigated the relation between two different religious orientations, a church-centered religiousness and a non-church-based spiritual seeking, sense of control, p...

This chapter focuses on four questions critical to understanding the long-term connection between generativity and health. First, it examines whether adolescents who manifest generative behaviour in high school grow up to be physically and psychologically healthy older adults. Second, it disentangles the different dimensions of concern for others....

In the Course of a Lifetime provides an unprecedented portrait of the dynamic role religion plays in the everyday experiences of Americans over the course of their lives. The book draws from a unique sixty-year-long study of close to two hundred mostly Protestant and Catholic men and women who were born in the 1920s and interviewed in adolescence,...

This chapter discusses the concept of the spiritual seeking of Americans. In America, the first spiritual awakening dates back to the 1830s and 1840s, and that is associated with the emergence of the transcendentalist movement and renowned figures such as Emerson and Thoreau. What is new about American spiritual seeking in the post-1960s era is its...

This chapter presents several studies of individuals to highlight the vibrant role religion played in America. The emphasis is given on two individuals: Jane Bell, and Barbara—whose life illuminates the strong social presence of religion in America and its vibrancy in anchoring individuals and families over time as they encounter their life course...

The view that late adulthood is a time of crisis promoted the idea that religion plays a central role in the process of successful aging. If indeed late adulthood is a time of increased social isolation and existential threat, then it may well be that religious engagement would provide an important source of personal meaning and social support for...

This chapter discusses the broad religious life of America. The findings of the study being analyzed in it indicate that many ordinary Americans in the decades preceding the 1960s readily invoked a language of individual autonomy in talking about church and their own religious habits. This autonomy enabled them to arbitrate selectively among church...

This chapter provides a complete idea of American adolescent religion in the 1930s and 1940s through a study conducted on adolescents of that period. The study indicates that along with school and friends, church was also a vibrant part of adolescent life in the 1930s and 1940s. Religious services, Sunday school, participation in church-based youth...

This chapter explores religious freedom in America in the 1950s. It presents some studies to highlight the religious freedom people had experienced in that period. The freedom of individuals to define their religious identity and to exercise their own authority in regard to religion became especially pronounced in the 1960s. The data presented in t...

This chapter discusses the flow of religiousness across the life of a person. In a person's life, the three phases of adulthood (early, middle, and late adulthood) are examined to study how religiousness changes during the transition from middle to late adulthood, and this requires special attention. Americans turn to religion increasingly as they...

This chapter assesses change in individual levels of religiousness—discovering who increased or decreased in religiousness during their adult years. A sample study of some individuals that is highly stable as a group can show a lot of individual variability as long as increases in religiousness among some of the members are offset by declines in re...

This chapter discusses the activities, personality, and social attitudes of Americans related to religious and spiritual aspects of their late adulthood. According to a traditional assumption, late adulthood is a time in the life course when individuals experience a decline in personal meaning and purpose as a result of their diminished social role...

This chapter discusses the concepts of spiritual seeking, Therapeutic culture, and concern for others among the participants of the study presented here. It analyses the links between different types of narcissism or self-investment and spiritual seeking among the participants of the study, using ratings of narcissism from early adulthood, psychoth...

This chapter presents some of the studies that were carried out on parents to understand the family context shaping religious socialization in the 1930s and 1940s. The interviews with the parents of the study participants provide a rare window into the family religious atmosphere of ordinary Americans in the 1930s and 1940s. Those valuable data ill...

Scales from the California Psychological Inventory's (CPI; Gough, 1987) Externality and Control clusters, in conjunction with a case study, were used to investigate personality change in a sample of women physicians who entered a Pacific Northwest medical school in 1964–1967. A core of 40 women was retested in their early 30s and mid-40s. From mid-...

Data from a sample of predominantly white, Christian men and women born in Northern California in the 1920s (N = 155) were used to test the hypothesis that traditional, church-centered religiousness and de-institutionalized spiritual seeking exemplify distinct, but equally adaptive, ways of approaching fear of death in old age. Although both religi...

ABSTRACT Separate factor analyses of items anchoring the opposite ends of a narcissism prototype derived from the California Q-set resulted in three narcissism or self-directed factors: Hypersensitivity, Willfulness, and Autonomy; and two factors hypothesized to represent the object-directed line of development: Straightforwardness and Givingness....

We used longitudinal data (N = 155) to investigate the relation between religiousness and fear of death and dying in late adulthood. We found no linear relations between religiousness and fear of death and dying. Individuals who were moderately religious feared death more than individuals who scored high or low on religiousness. Fear of death also...

This study used data from a long-term longitudinal study of men and women to examine the relations among spirituality, narcissism, and psychotherapy. The findings indicated that in late adulthood (age late 60s/mid 70s) spirituality was related to autonomous or healthy narcissism but was unrelated to willful (overt) or hypersensitive (covert) narcis...

This study used a representative community-based sample of men and women born in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1920s to investigate the long-term relations between religiousness, spirituality, depression, and physical health. In late adulthood (age late 60s/mid-70s), religiousness buffered against depression associated with poor physical health...

The Catholic Revolution began on October 13, 1962. After the free vote for the Members of the Commissions, the Council Fathers began to realize that they could overcome the entrenched power of the Roman Curia and that they could change the Church in certain important areas like liturgy, ecumenism, the interpretation of scripture, attitudes towards...

This chapter is about the revolutionary impact of Vatican Council II on the Catholic Church in the United States. The so-called sexual revolution was not infact a revolution but an increase in pre marital sex along with a decline in the age of first sexual activity. The theory and supporting data concludes that there was indeed a revolution within...

This chapter distinguishes between Catholic rules and the Catholic sense of sacramentality and community. Up to 1965, no one in the Church would have considered that distinction important. The rules were the Church. The Church became concerned that Catholics were sleeping together before marriage, practicing birth control, getting divorced, not and...

Between the Catholic school studies of 1963 and 1974, NORC studied the priesthood for the Catholic hierarchy. After a papal commission recommended a change in birth control teaching, Pope Paul VI issued the encyclical Humane vitae, which rejected the recommendations of the commission and dismissed its arguments for change. Many priests in the Unite...

This chapter studies what happened at the Council, and the consequent sweeping away of the old structure. Melissa Jo Wilde invokes a theory of collective behavior to explain the astonishing events. The tradition of collective behavior theory and research is impressed by the frequently observed phenomenon of individuals merging into a group experien...

The beauty of Catholic heritage inspires immense religious awe in the mass psyche and enables adherence to faith. Beauty, by way of brief introductory description, is a dimension of an object, event, or person. Religion does not speak in abstract concepts, religion speaks in stories, in the language of images. Human knowledge is primarily the knowl...

Revolutionary events and the collapse of institutional structures always leave chaos, confusion, and conflict in their wake. In the revolutionary years after the council, more changed than just the rules about sex. A large majority of laity and lower clergy participated and celebrated these changes. Neither historical nor theological nor personal d...

This chapter studies what happened between the end of the council and the 1974 study. A youth culture had spawned drug abuse, rock and roll music, sexual promiscuity, and disrespect for the authority. This culture had infiltrated the Church and was responsible for the catastrophic change in Catholic belief and practice. Even those in their sixties...

This chapter studies the model of Catholic revolution. Pre-1965, the model was very clear and precise—being Catholic entailed uniform acceptance of ecclesiastical dictate. This model was so hallowed and so unquestioned that its violation still affronts right-wing Catholics. The model has changed but comprehending the religious dynamics of the chang...

This chapter explains that if one tries to recover some of the potentially useful and valuable symbols of heritage, one must explore the images and stories and metaphors, the art and beauty of the Catholic past. In the post revolutionary decades the false prophecy of the second Vatican Council has infected only some elements of the Church's elite—P...

This chapter proposes that the problem of authority experienced in the Church is not in relation to the authority wielded by the Vatican but that wielded by the local parish. The local parish being the only remaining ground for the Church objectively to wield influence over the lives of people, via practices of the local Church, specifically, bapti...

The revolution was uniquely American and was a result of the materialism, consumerism, secularism, and “pan-sexualism” of American society. The curalists are European influenced intellectuals who are unbending haters of the United States. At the time of the worst period of child sex abuse scandals, the curalists took the opinion that this is what w...

Can someone intelligent and well educated still continue to be a Roman Catholic in these times? This chapter clarifies what religion is and what is it about the Catholic religion that explains its enormous appeal even to men and women who think that the Pope is out of touch and that the bishops and the priests are fools. Thirty-four percent of Amer...

Priests were the officers in the Catholic Revolution. Their changes in attitude towards birth control, masturbation, and divorce occurred at the same time as the revolutionary effervescence which spread among the laity. Priesthood has paid a high price for its revolutionary leadership. Priests are also responsible for the emergence of beige Catholi...

Liturgists find their intolerance a virtue, their unveiling of other liturgical ignorance as educational, their politics as righteous, their disdain as caring, and their failures as successes. It is indicative of the problems of liturgy and liturgists that there has never been a national survey of the impact on the laity and the reaction of the lai...

Older adults provided oral life histories in a semi-structured interview format. The transcribed narratives were coded for the presence of specific, one-moment-in-time episodes. Participants differed systematically in the degree to which their narratives were marked by descriptions of specific events. Women's memory styles were markedly more specif...

This study used longitudinal data to examine the relations among religiousness, spirituality, and 3 key domains of psychosocial functioning in late adulthood: (a) sources of well-being, (b) involvement in tasks of everyday life, and (c) generativity and wisdom. Religiousness and spirituality were operationalized as distinct but overlapping dimensio...

This Handbook showcases research and thinking in the sociology of religion. The contributors, all active writers and researchers in the area, provide original chapters focusing on select aspects of their own engagement with the field. Aimed at students and scholars who want to know more about the sociology of religion, this handbook also provides a...

This article examines the relations between religiousness, spirituality, and generativity (concern for the welfare of future generations) in late adulthood using longitudinal life-course data. Religiousness and spirituality were operationalized as distinct but overlapping dimensions of individual difference measuring involvement in traditional and...

This article summarizes quantitative findings and presents two illustrative case studies showing how religious dwelling and spiritual seeking evolve over the adult life course and relate to psychosocial functioning in late adulthood. The data come from the Institute of Human Development (IHD) longitudinal study of men and women. Religious dwellers...

Longitudinal data spanning early (30s) and older (late 60s/mid-70s) adulthood were used to study spiritual development across the adult life course in a sample of men and women belonging to a younger (born 1928/29) and an older (born 1920/21) age cohort. All participants, irrespective of gender and cohort, increased significantly in spirituality be...

Concurrent and longitudinal associations between cognitive and affective personality variables--intellectual efficiency (IE), anxiety, and hostility--and observer ratings of physical health were examined in 3 longitudinal samples of women: Mills Longitudinal Study (n = 101); Radcliffe Study (RS, n = 118); and University of California, San Francisco...

This study compared social values and relationships with parents among American college women of Chinese and European descent. Chinese-American women scored higher on a measure of practicality and pragmatism (mastery), hierarchy, and traditionality. The Euro-American women showed a greater interest in voluntary prosocial behaviour and philanthropy....

This study investigated the relation between two types of narcissism and boredom in a group of 106 women undergraduates. As expected, MMPI-based measures of overt and covert narcissism both correlated positively with the Boredom Proneness Scale (BPS) (Farmer & Sundberg, 1986) and its subscale measuring a need for challenge and excitement. Only Over...

A self-report Adjective Check List (ACL) Practical Wisdom Scale (PWS) and external ratings of Transcendent Wisdom (TWR), based on subjects' examples of personally important wisdom, were used to study the personality correlates and life implications of two types of wisdom among participants in their 50s in a longitudinal study of women. High scorers...

How does personality type moderate personality change in middle age? Answers to this question were sought with three observer-based measures of self-directedness (autonomy, hypersensitivity, and willfulness) scored from the California Q-set when the participants in the Mills longitudinal study were age 43. From their early 40s to early 50s, high sc...

ABSTRACT How does personality type moderate personality change in middle age? Answers to this question were sought with three observer-based measures of self-directedness (autonomy, hypersensitivity, and willfulness) scored from the California Q-set when the participants in the Mills longitudinal study were age 43. From their early 40s to early 50s...

The construct validity of the Psychopathy Q-sort (PQS; Reise & Oliver, 1994) was investigated by correlating it with an array of observer-based and self-report personality measures in a sample of 350 men and women assessed at the Institute of Personality Assessment and Research (IPAR). High discriminant validity of the PQS was indicated by a patter...

Data from a longitudinal study of women physicians is used to study psychosocial and current implications of good health in midlife. The women comprise the classes 1964 to 1967 of the University of California School of Medicine at San Francisco. The subjects were interviewed and tested using the California Psychological Inventory while they were st...

Positive and negative implications of two types of college-age narcissism on psychosocial functioning at midlife were studied in a longitudinal sample of women. Both types were scored with self-report measures when the women were, on the average, age 21. Throughout the first half of their adult life, high scorers on covert narcissism presented them...

Reviews the book, The relational self: Theoretical convergences in psychoanalysis and social psychology edited by Rebecca C. Curtis (see record 1991-97680-000). The relational self, a collection of papers from a conference held at Adelphi University in 1990, represents the latest attempt at rapprochement between psychoanalysis and social/personalit...

Reviews the book, In Search of Jung: Historical and Philosophical Enquiries by J. J. Clarke (1992). Although scholarly, rich in insight, and well argued, Clarke's account of the intellectual and historical roots of Jungian psychology is likely, in my opinion, to confirm and reinforce rather than lessen the existing misgivings concerning Jung's theo...

Adjective Check List (ACL) data from 82 female participants in a longitudinal study and their male partners were used to investigate personality change between the early parental and postparental periods. In the early parental period, men were more competent, whereas women were more emotionally dependent and more facilitative in their interpersonal...

Adjective Check List (ACL) data from 82 female participants in a longitudinal study and their male partners were used to investigate personality change between the early parental and postparental periods. In the early parental period, men were more competent, whereas women were more emotionally dependent and more facilitative in their interpersonal...

Between their early 40s and early 50s, 101 alumnae in the Mills longitudinal study decreased in dependence and self-criticism and increased in confidence and decisiveness. They also increased in comfort and stability attained through adherence to personal and social standards, and they scored higher on measures of coping through intellectuality, lo...

Three observer-based narcissism scales were developed from factor scores based on a California Q-set (CAQ) narcissism prototype. Each of the three scales--Willfulness, Hypersensitivity, and Autonomy--correlated with observer and self-report narcissism measures in the derivation sample of 105 women and a cross-validation sample of 175 men and 175 wo...

ABSTRACT This article examines personality change in three types of narcissists (hypersensitive, willful, and autonomous), who were members of a longitudinal sample of women. Measures of narcissism were derived from the age-43 California Q-set ratings. Women who had high scores on hypersensitivity at age 43 were characterized by decline in personal...

Separate factor analyses of items anchoring the opposite ends of a narcissism prototype derived from the California Q-set resulted in three narcissism or self-directed factors: Hypersensitivity, Willfulness, and Autonomy; and two factors hypothesized to represent the object-directed line of development: Straightforwardness and Givingness. These fiv...

The present study examines the lack of strong correlations among existing self-report measures of narcissism. A principal-components analysis of 6 MMPI narcissism scales resulted in 2 orthogonal factors, 1 implying Vulnerability-Sensitivity and the other Grandiosity-Exhibitionism. Although unrelated to each other, these 2 factors were associated wi...