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The authors examined the associations of 3 types of psychological coping (task-based, emotion-based, avoidance), 2 types of religious coping (positive, negative), and their interactions with grief of 57 mothers bereaved by the sudden death of a child. Results indicated that mothers who use emotion-based coping report significantly higher levels of grief, whereas mothers who use avoidance coping report lower levels of grief The interaction of task coping and positive religious coping was also associated with lower self-reported grief The findings support the differential utility of various coping styles on mothers' grief reactions to the sudden death of a child.

This study investigated mental health professionals' assessment of the pathognomonic significance of religious beliefs. A total of 110 participants reviewed 3 vignettes depicting individuals possessing the religious beliefs associated with Catholicism, Mormonism, and Nation of Islam. The religious beliefs of the individuals in the vignettes were identified as either being integral to a religious tradition or not and also as either resulting in a threat to harm another or not. Identifying beliefs as religious resulted in lower ratings of pathology for 2 of the religions, and beliefs that did not involve a threat to harm also were rated lower for the same 2 religions. The results reveal a disjuncture between recommendations of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (4th ed.; American Psychiatric Association, 1994) and clinicians' judgments. Keywords: religion, culture, delusion, diagnosis, psychopathology

This study examined associations among parental divorce, family conflict, sex, and young men's and women's achievement of intimacy. Analyses indicated that family conflict and sex, but not divorce, were significantly related to intimacy. Examination of those within the divorced group suggest that time of divorce, along with family conflict, were related to intimacy.

This study investigated factors influencing the adjustment of families of 49 autistic children (38 boys, 11 girls) to the stress of raising an autistic child. Analysis indicated that the severity of the child's disorder (stress), mother's social support (resources), and mother's perceived locus of control (perception) were significant factors in family adjustment. In addition, evidence suggested that agency affiliation also was an unexpected, yet important factor.

The Stress-Arousal Checklist was developed as a self-report measure both of arousal and of the favorable or unfavorable appraisal of that arousal. Previous studies with the checklist showed differential sensitivity of the two subscales to experimental manipulations. In the present study, the convergent and discriminant validity were further explored by comparing scores with those on the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory-State. The results supported the validity of the two-factor structure.

The developmental features of the fears of 112 nonretarded and 42 retarded children were examined. With development, the fears of nonretarded children became more closely aligned with real sources of threat that involve human agency and less fearful of imaginary things. The retarded children displayed patterns of fears similar to their mental-age peers rather than chronological peers and were more likely to deny being fearful than their nonretarded peers.

This study examined how mental health professionals make judgments about the religious authenticity and mental health of behaviors motivated by religious ideation. Participants were presented with written vignettes of religiously motivated behavior. The context of religious behavior varied on 6 dimensions and also on 3 levels of conventionality. The results indicated that the determining factor in the ratings was not dimensions of religious experience, but the degree that the experience deviated from conventional religious beliefs and practices. The more unconventional the behavior, the less religiously authentic and mentally healthy it was deemed to be.

Research on infancy and the philosophy of Levinas are integrated, suggesting that human development is forged within an ethical, relational context, with particular individuals, embodied in ordinary, daily, concrete acts of giving, care and exchange. Ethics is immanent in human conduct and moral principles are derived from the acts of relatedness and care essential to human life, present from the earliest, first moments of life. Ethics as first philosophy suggests that the primordial relational context of development necessarily entails ethical responsibility, revealed most visibly in love and death. Key Words Epistemology - Ethics - Infancy - Morality -