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Prologue to an Experiment in Higher Education: Mentoring Psychospiritual Maturation, Breaking Humanity’s Chain of Pain
Abstract
Over the last three decades, higher education has challenged itself to cultivate campus cultures of health, social justice, and peace. Since Ernest Boyer’s seminal research, it has become evident that many students experience psychological distress, behavioral dysregulation, and lack of community, factors that undermine their well-being, academic success, and a positive campus culture. But efforts to rectify these issues have had limited success. This book offers an explanation from the perspective of humanistic psychology: higher education has not recognized student needs for person-centered learning that facilitates psychospiritual maturation during young adulthood. This book describes a curriculum that I have developed, Know Your Self. The curriculum mentors a person-centered approach to psychospiritual maturation that helps students address these problematic issues. The book also presents research demonstrating the effectiveness of this curriculum. Student Life professionals will find this curriculum relevant to co-curricular work with students. However, psychospiritual development must become a core element of academic activity, taught by engaged faculty, if we hope to transform our campuses into model cultures of health, social justice, and peace.
... According to self-determination theory, members of Afghan universities may not enjoy their job or see it as particularly meaningful, but quite as a means to attain desired outcomes controlled mainly by others-experience a sense of controlled regulation (Meyer et al., 2010;Meyer, 2014). Explorations to post-war conditions did not minimize the suffering of individuals to a degree; they created an empathic environment where academics learned to build bonds of attachment and repairing impaired resilience skills (Kass, 2017). So, many organizations operate inside just one country that we cannot ignore that country's values and culture as an influence on them (Bowles, 2014). ...
... When the results of the research are examined, it is seen that social resources and family adaptation dimensions, which strengthen the individual's ability to cope with difficulties and which are accepted as individual support resources, have a positive effect on the commitment to work. Additionally, in communal societies, reading, and discussion about traditions, members, may learn to consider others, psychological resilience, and interpersonal contact (Kass, 2017). ...
Psychological resilience has been, to a certain extent, explained by Western individualistic, and static factors. However, dynamic factors that affect the resilience through the process are proofed to be more important, i.e. culture. In some collectivist nations, like Afghanistan, the meaning of work embedded in what their own culture taught them. Afghan cultural context may provide the foundation for different ways of knowing, including resilience, by people in that nation. So, the main aim of this research is to find out the impact of psychological resilience on work engagement from the Afghan national cultural perspective. In a study of 713 staffs from 27 universities in Afghanistan show that work engagement dimensions are more related to the social and family factor of resilience than individual ones, supporting the cultural cohesion theory of individuals of Afghan people. Resiliency and energy are also one of the critical components of work engagement, vitality as a more individualistic work engagement factor lost its importance.
Since much of humanistic psychology’s agenda has been taken up by mainstream psychology and culture, the question of whether humanistic psychology is relevant today is critical. This article draws on Maslow’s description of “sickness of the soul” to argue that a psychology that stresses connection and embodied experience, meaning and ethics, creativity and dreams, resilience and self-actualization is needed now more than ever.
Despite the existence of strong viewpoints, the relation between religiousness and mental health is not yet clearly understood. The Religious Orientation Scale has provided researchers with a valuable tool for differentiating between intrinsic (
I) and extrinsic (
E) religious orientations, thereby clarifying some of the confusion in this area. In the present study we assessed correlations between these two scales and anxiety, personality traits, self-control, irrational beliefs, and depression. Results generally indicated that
I is negatively correlated with anxiety and positively correlated with self-control and "better" personality functioning, whereas the opposite is true of
E. Correlations were generally not found with irrational beliefs or depression. By dividing subjects into a fourfold typology, we discovered that 98.6% of the present sample of religious students were "intrinsics." When their personality scores were compared with those of other normal populations, trends slightly favoring this intrinsic sample were observed. Thus, these results indicated that
I is related to "normality" and that religiousness is not necessarily indicative of emotional disturbance. Some implications for counseling are suggested. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Ever since people's responses to overwhelming experiences have been systematically explored, researchers have noted that a trauma is stored in somatic memory and expressed as changes in the biological stress response. Intense emotions at the time of the trauma initiate the long-term conditional responses to reminders of the event, which are associated both with chronic alterations in the physiological stress response and with the amnesias and hypermnesias characteristic of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Continued physiological hyperarousal and altered stress hormone secretion affect the ongoing evaluation of sensory stimuli as well. Although memory is ordinarily an active and constructive process, in PTSD failure of declarative memory may lead to organization of the trauma on a somatosensory level (as visual images or physical sensations) that is relatively impervious to change. The inability of people with PTSD to integrate traumatic experiences and their tendency, instead, to continuously relieve the past are mirrored physiologically and hormonally in the misinterpretation of innocuous stimuli as potential threats. Animal research suggests that intense emotional memories are processed outside of the hippocampally mediated memory system and are difficult to extinguish. Cortical activity can inhibit the expression of these subcortically based emotional memories. The effectiveness of this inhibition depends, in part, on physiological arousal and neurohormonal activity. These formulations have implications for both the psychotherapy and the pharmacotherapy of PTSD.
Neuroelectric and imaging studies of meditation are reviewed. Electroencephalographic measures indicate an overall slowing subsequent to meditation, with theta and alpha activation related to proficiency of practice. Sensory evoked potential assessment of concentrative meditation yields amplitude and latency changes for some components and practices. Cognitive event-related potential evaluation of meditation implies that practice changes attentional allocation. Neuroimaging studies indicate increased regional cerebral blood flow measures during meditation. Taken together, meditation appears to reflect changes in anterior cingulate cortex and dorsolateral prefrontal areas. Neurophysiological meditative state and trait effects are variable but are beginning to demonstrate consistent outcomes for research and clinical applications. Psychological and clinical effects of meditation are summarized, integrated, and discussed with respect to neuroimaging data.
Over the last ten years the basic knowledge of brain structure and function has vastly expanded, and its incorporation into the developmental sciences is now allowing for more complex and heuristic models of human infancy. In a continuation of this effort, in this two-part work I integrate current interdisciplinary data from attachment studies on dyadic affective communications, neuroscience on the early developing right brain, psychophysiology on stress systems, and psychiatry on psychopathogenesis to provide a deeper understanding of the psychoneurobiological mechanisms that underlie infant mental health. In this article I detail the neurobiology of a secure attachment, an exemplar of adaptive infant mental health, and focus upon the primary caregiver's psychobiological regulation of the infant's maturing limbic system, the brain areas specialized for adapting to a rapidly changing environment. The infant's early developing right hemisphere has deep connections into the limbic and autonomic nervous systems and is dominant for the human stress response, and in this manner the attachment relationship facilitates the expansion of the child's coping capcities. This model suggests that adaptive infant mental health can be fundamentally defined as the earliest expression of flexible strategies for coping with the novelty and stress that is inherent in human interactions. This efficient right brain function is a resilience factor for optimal development over the later stages of the life cycle. ©2001 Michigan Association for Infant Mental Health.
Social-psychological concepts and findings have entered the mainstream of theory and research in international relations. Explorations of the social-psychological dimensions of international politics go back at least to the early 1930s.
In Overcoming Religious Illiteracy, Harvard professor and Phillips Academy teacher Diane L. Moore argues that though the United States is one of the most religiously diverse nations in the world, the vast majority of citizens are woefully ignorant about religion itself and the basic tenets of the world's major religious traditions. The consequences of this religious illiteracy are profound and include fueling the culture wars, curtailing historical understanding and promoting religious and racial bigotry. In this volume, Moore combines theory with practice to articulate how to incorporate the study of religion into the schools in ways that will invigorate classrooms and enhance democratic discourse in the public sphere.
The person-centred approach is one of the most popular, enduring and respected approaches to psychotherapy and counselling. Person-Centred Therapy returns to its original formulations to define it as radically different from other self-oriented therapies. Keith Tudor and Mike Worrall draw on a wealth of experience as practitioners, a deep knowledge of the approach and its history, and a broad and inclusive awareness of other approaches. This significant contribution to the advancement of person-centred therapy: Examines the roots of person-centred thinking in existential, phenomenological and organismic philosophy. Locates the approach in the context of other approaches to psychotherapy and counselling. Shows how recent research in areas such as neuroscience support the philosophical premises of person-centred therapy. Challenges person-centred therapists to examine their practice in the light of the history and philosophical principles of the approach. Person-Centred Therapy offers new and exciting perspectives on the process and practice of therapy, and will encourage person-centred practitioners to think about their work in deeper and more sophisticated ways.
Part I. From There to Here - Theoretical Background: 1. From visiousness to viciousness: theories of intergroup relations 2. Social dominance theory as a new synthesis Part II. Oppression and its Psycho-Ideological Elements: 3. The psychology of group dominance: social dominance orientation 4. Let's both agree that you're really stupid: the power of consensual ideology Part III. The Circle of Oppression - The Myriad Expressions of Institutional Discrimination: 5. You stay in your part of town and I'll stay in mine: discrimination in the housing and retail markets 6. They're just too lazy to work: discrimination in the labor market 7. They're just mentally and physically unfit: discrimination in education and health care 8. The more of 'them' in prison, the better: institutional terror, social control and the dynamics of the criminal justice system Part IV. Oppression as a Cooperative Game: 9. Social hierarchy and asymmetrical group behavior: social hierarchy and group difference in behavior 10. Sex and power: the intersecting political psychologies of patriarchy and empty-set hierarchy 11. Epilogue.
This chapter explores the neuropsychology of religious and spiritual experience. An analysis of the neuropsychological basis of these experiences serves several important purposes: (a) to illuminate the biological roots of these experiences and provide new information regarding the function of the human brain, (b) to provide a new understanding of how and why these experiences have played such a significant role in human thought and history, and (c) to lead to an understanding of the relationship between these experiences and human health and psychological well-being. In further considering a neuropsychological and neuroevolutionary approach to the study of religious and spiritual experiences, it is important to consider two major avenues toward attaining such experiences: group ritual and individual contemplation or meditation. A phenomenological analysis reveals that the two practices are similar in kind, if not in intensity, along two dimensions: (a) intermittent emotional discharges involving the subjective sensation of awe, peace, tranquillity, or ecstasy; and (b) varying degrees of unitary experience correlating with the emotional discharges. It is important for clinicians to be sensitive and knowledgeable regarding spiritual and philosophical beliefs. The chapter describes that professionals need to be capable of distinguishing normal, healthy spiritual growth from psychopathology. The fact that spiritual experiences have an effect on autonomic function as well as other cortically mediated cognitive and emotional processes suggests that such experiences not only affect the human psyche but also may be utilized to assist in the therapy of various disorders.
Person-centered spiritual maturation is a developmental process with prosocial potential for individuals and communities with diverse belief systems (including secular humanism). Investigation of this process has historical roots in Kass’s work with Dr. Carl Rogers on the Person-Centered Approach Project. Previous work identifies this construct’s conceptual properties. This article reports the effectiveness of a curriculum to mentor this learning process in higher education. We conducted a quasi-experimental, mixed methods study (triangulated qualitative and quantitative data) with experimental and control groups. Qualitative analysis (written student narratives, experimental group) documented five dimensions of growth (behavioral, cognitive, social–emotional, contemplative, and integrative) that culminated in a resilient worldview and prosocial behavior. Statistical analysis (experimental and control groups, pre–post intervention) confirmed these findings, demonstrating significant improvement in quantifiable elements of person-centered spiritual maturation. Effect sizes were meaningful, indicating 15% to 21% greater improvement in the experimental group. These results suggest that person-centered spiritual maturation can serve as a prevention-oriented, community-building intervention for higher education. It offers an integrative model of learning through which faculty in the social sciences and other disciplines can mentor social–emotional growth and contemplative self-inquiry, helping university communities build sustainable cultures of health, social justice, and peace. Further research is necessary and justified.
Person-centered spiritual maturation has conceptual and historical roots in my work with Carl Rogers, as a staff member of the Person-Centered Approach Project. It is a person-specific process of psychospiritual development that can be mentored in communities where belief systems and cultural identities are diverse. It enables individuals to deepen engagement with contemplative practices from spiritual traditions that hold personal salience, while building inclusive, respectful communities. This multidimensional model emerges from three decades mentoring person-centered spiritual maturation with university students in the service of their growth as professionals and socially responsible citizens. Growth includes (a) behavioral self-regulation through mindfulness; (b) cognitive understanding of humanity’s chain of pain that supports social justice; (c) social–emotional development that repairs broken attachment templates and promotes compassionate attunement to self and others; (d) contemplative practice that strengthens secure existential attachment and taps the human capacity for unconditional altruistic love; and (e) formation of a resilient worldview, confidence in life and self, that helps people confront life’s existential, interpersonal, and intergroup tensions with sufficient internal composure to derive maturational growth. This model provides a cohesive multidimensional explanation of person-centered spiritual maturation that highlights its prosocial value, integrates relevant neuroscience, and offers researchers a conceptual framework for future investigations.
Clinical observations suggesting a relationship between spiritual experiences, life purpose and satisfaction, and improvements in physical health led to the development of an Index of Core Spiritual Experience (INSPIRIT). Data from 83 medical outpatients showed the INSPIRIT to have a strong degree of internal reliability and concurrent validity. Multiple regression analyses showed the INSPIRIT to be associated with: (1) increased life purpose and satisfaction, a health-promoting attitude; and (2) decreased frequency of medical symptoms.
Religious experiences may be a resource in primary preventive care. Using Tillich's model, in which ontological anxiety contributes to psychological and physical illness, this paper proposes that religious experience can contribute to well-being. Data supporting these relationships, drawn from studies of psychotherapeutic workshop participants, medical outpatients and divinity school students, are reviewed. Further evidence is reviewed which suggests that the development of an internally-focussed perceptual orientation may facilitate the occurrence of religious experience.
There is a true yearning to respond to The singing River and the wise Rock. So say the Asian, the Hispanic, the Jew, The African, the Native American, the Sioux, The Catholic, the Muslim, the French, the Greek, The Irish, the Rabbi, the Priest, the Sheik, The Gay, the Straight, the Preacher, The privileged, the homeless, the Teacher. In his novel Ulysses, James Joyce described history as a nightmare from which we are trying to awake (Joyce, 1914, 1961). Each of us knows what he meant. Human culture is ensnared in a vast, traumatic, trans-generational chain of pain (Kass, 2008). This nightmare is so pervasive, and so profound, that we often doubt the goodness and sanctity of human nature. How can it be—during every historical period, in every major culture—that corrupt elites, patriarchy, racism, greed, and the will to dominate through violence, have played such a chilling role in human civilization…unless humanity—and perhaps life, itself—are marred by vast imperfections that call into question the existence of a transcendent God? What justification do we have, during such troubled times, to speak about a subject as seemingly naïve and abstract as spirituality? 1 Portions of this paper were presented as the keynote address at the conference: Body, Mind, and Spirit: Innovations in Research, Practice, and Pedagogy. Lesley University, March, 30, 2007.
An Introduction to the Psychology of Religion and Coping. Part I: A Perspective on Religion. The Sacred and the Search for Significance. Religious Pathways and Religious Destinations. Part II: A Perspective on Coping. An Introduction to the Concept of Coping. The Flow of Coping. Part III: The Religion and Coping Connection. When People Turn to Religion. When They Turn Away. The Many Faces of Religion in Coping. Religion and the Mechanisms of Coping - The Transformation of Significance. Part IV: Evaluative and Practical Implications. Does it Work? Religion and the Outcomes of Coping. When Religion Fails - Problems of Integration in the Process of Coping. Putting Religion into Practice.
Conducted for the Bringing Theory to Practice project, this literature review examines the theoretical and research bases for linking engaged learning, student mental health and well-being, and civic development. The findings of this review are discussed briefly in this article. Current prevention literature recommends a shift from targeted interventions toward community-level approaches in addressing students' mental health concerns. In this article, the author presents a definition of engagement learning and that the concept of engaged learning emerges from multiple theoretical frameworks and educational practices. She examines the two concepts of which it is comprised--"learning" and "engagement" in college.
The brain and the nervous system are our most cultural organs. Our nervous system is especially immature at birth, our brain disproportionately small in relation to its adult size and open to cultural sculpting at multiple levels. Recognizing this, the new field of n€anthropology places the brain at the center of discussions about human nature and culture. Anthropology offers brain science more robust accounts of enculturation to explain observable difference in brain function; n€science offers anthropology evidence of n€plasticity’s role in social and cultural dynamics. This book provides a foundational text for n€anthropology, offering basic concepts and case studies at the intersection of brain and culture.
After an overview of the field and background information on recent research in biology, a series of case studies demonstrate n€anthropology in practice. Contributors first focus on capabilities and skills--including memory in medical practice, skill acquisition in martial arts, and the role of humor in coping with breast cancer treatment and recovery--then report on problems and pathologies that range from post-traumatic stress disorder among veterans to smoking as a part of college social life.
http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/encultured-brain-0
Notes that feminism, along with other critical theories, is critiquing the 19th- and 20th-century privileges of logical positivist, empirical, and rational forms of intellectual inquiry and their intersections with domination (of knowledge, resources, and institutional control). Many important questions are raised about the ways Western intellectual history has come to its underlying assumptions. For example, some of these assumptions are that universal laws underlie reality, that science can come to comprehend and control them, and that rationality is composed of a sort of dichotomous ordering of predefined constructs with a linear and causal relationship. The attempt of this chapter is to move toward a description of human nature and experience that is not mired in the limitations of these traditional forms of inquiry, but rather based more fully in the reality of people's lived experiences. The feminist ecological theory described here draws from the principles of ecological theory, feminist therapy theory, multicultural psychology, liberation psychology, and critical psychology. The authors present the feminist ecological model, which is designed to represent the multiple spheres of influence in people's lives. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Offers teachers, students, practitioners and researchers a compendium of research and practice techniques in the field of humanistic psychotherapies. In addition to the editors' overview of the history, defining characteristics, and evolution of humanistic psychotherapies, contributors illustrate significant research results and document the effectiveness of major humanistic therapeutic approaches, including client-centered, Gestalt, existential and experiential. It is argued that these approaches are equivalent, and in many cases, superior to others in treating a wide range of psychopathology. Contributors offer guidelines for practice and introduce methods for working with an increasingly difficult, diverse, and complex range of individuals, couples, families, and groups. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Traces the development of the cognitive approach to psychopathology and psy hotherapy from common-sense observations and folk wisdom, to a more sophisticated understanding of the emotional disorders, and finally to the application of rational techniques to correct the misconceptions and conceptual distortions that form the matrix of the neuroses. The importance of engaging the patient in exploration of his inner world and of obtaining a sharp delineation of specific thoughts and underlying assumptions is emphasized. (91/4 p ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Currently, the field of human development lacks a comprehensive conceptual and methodological model of spiritual development. Aspects of this process have been studied through specific lenses, resulting in a pastiche of constructs rather than an integrated model. The purpose of this chapter is to take a tentative step toward articulating a more comprehensive framework through which spiritual development can be understood and studied. In the first section, the authors review current psychological models of spiritual development. In the second section, a more comprehensive religious model is examined, drawing on Maimonides'
Guide of the Perplexed. In the third section, the chapter presents a case study that describes a young adult engaged in a process of spiritual development. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Like its predecessor—which awakened the therapeutic community to the varying assumptions, needs, and biases of culturally different clients—this updated and revised "Second Edition" opens new doors and lays the groundwork for exciting new directions.
While the overall approach has remained the same, there is heightened emphasis on the damaging effects of political and racial biases inherent in the mental health field and on the need for developing culture-specific communication/helping styles for culturally different clients. Also highlighted are the key issues of ethnic and racial identity formation and culturally specific concepts of the family and their relationship to counseling.
"Counseling the Culturally Different" moves from the theoretical to the practical in three sections covering: Issues and Concepts—provides a conceptual framework with which to view the complex interplay of values, expectations, and social and political forces in the counselor-client relationship and the practice of cross-cultural counseling in public schools, mental health agencies, industries, and correctional institutions. Counseling Specific Populations—guidelines and detailed methods for counseling specific minority groups (including African Americans, Hispanics, American Indians and Asian Americans). Critical Incidents—a series of case vignettes portraying typical issues and dilemmas.
Combining a sound conceptual framework for multicultural counseling with proven therapeutic methods for specific groups, "Counseling the Culturally Different, Second Edition" prepares students, like no other text in the field, for the rigors of counseling in the "real world." At the same time, as a source of enlightenment and guidance for professionals, it has been proven to make a difference in clients' lives. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
If the proper study of mankind is man, it is a paradox worth pondering that consciousness, the receptacle of all that is truly human, has not yet found a place in the life sciences. This is not to imply that neuroscientists are uninterested in physiological correlates and mechanisms of sleep and wakefulness, or that psychopharmacologists are not intensively investigating psychoactive drugs, and so forth. Rather, the experimentalist feels compelled to limit himself to considering physical or behavioral variables in order to comply with the dominant physicalistreductionist paradigm of modern science. As far as scientific practice is concerned, consciousness is still regarded, at best, as an epiphenomenon. Similarly, if we had a science of consciousness, biochemical, physiological, and behavioral data might appear to it to be epiphenomena, for we have not even an inkling of how physical phenomena are linked to the "subjectively" manifested activity of consciousness. There is no denying the very real philosophical and practical difficulties impeding the scientific investigation of psycho-physical interactions. But despite these difficulties and the past neglect of the subject, the current unprecedented public interest in the varieties of conscious experience is reflected in a number of research papers and theoretical analyses attempting to deal with physiological correlates of altered states of consciousness (ASCs). This survey is primarily concerned with one subset of this group: studies directed at physiological events during meditation. The specific questions on which I hope to shed some light are: (1) What conclusions can be drawn from existing physiological studies on meditating subjects? (2) How do these findings and other current concepts relate to mystical experience? (3) What, if
This article describes the validation of an Inventory of Positive Psychological Attitudes that has potential relevance to health outcomes and its preliminary testing with chronic pain patients. The inventory taps two attitudinal domains: (1) life purpose and satisfaction and (2) self-confidence during potentially stressful situations. It also provides a total score. The inventory scales, developed using factor analysis, were found to have a strong degree of internal reliability and concurrent validity. Preliminary testing suggested that positive change on these scales correlates with positive changes in the health status of chronic pain patients. Multiple regression analyses suggested that the interactions of these positive psychological attitudes with health status are not fully accounted for by the interactions of negative psychological attitudes with health status.
Practitioners understand "meditation," or mental training, to be a process of familiarization with one's own mental life leading to long-lasting changes in cognition and emotion. Little is known about this process and its impact on the brain. Here we find that long-term Buddhist practitioners self-induce sustained electroencephalographic high-amplitude gamma-band oscillations and phase-synchrony during meditation. These electroencephalogram patterns differ from those of controls, in particular over lateral frontoparietal electrodes. In addition, the ratio of gamma-band activity (25-42 Hz) to slow oscillatory activity (4-13 Hz) is initially higher in the resting baseline before meditation for the practitioners than the controls over medial frontoparietal electrodes. This difference increases sharply during meditation over most of the scalp electrodes and remains higher than the initial baseline in the postmeditation baseline. These data suggest that mental training involves temporal integrative mechanisms and may induce short-term and long-term neural changes.
Emerging adulthood: A theory of development from the late teens through the twenties
- J J Arnett
- JJ Arnett
Campus life: In search of community: The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching
- E L Boyer
- EL Boyer
A new religious America: How a “Christian country” has become the most religiously diverse nation
- D L Eck
- DL Eck
Selected writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson
- R W Emerson
- RW Emerson
Attachments across the life span
- M D Ainsworth
- MD Ainsworth
Autonomic neuro-effector systems
- W B Cannon
- A Rosenblueth
- WB Cannon