Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Spirituality In Clinical Practice: Integrating Who We Are With What We Do, Lorraine Mangione, Thomas G. Plante

Psychology

Inspired by the recent emphasis on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts in professional psychology and in society in general, we were interested in how personal religious and spirituality identities, practices, and traditions inform professionals in their work as clinicians and clinical supervisors and trainers to integrate who they are with what they do. The spiritual and religious intersectionality of professionals was explored by inviting 12 diverse professionals representing several different spiritual and religious traditions to reflect on their identities and the integration that they do to provide evidence-based professional services. Additionally, we asked them to consider best practices in …

A Clinical Trial Of The Examen And Mindfulness Within A Secular Substance Use Disorder Treatment Program, Christopher M. Buenrostro, Thomas G. Plante

Psychology

The Examen is a 500-year-old Jesuit introspective prayer and reflection. Recent research has indicated that it has utility in psychotherapy. This study implemented the Examen as a secular cognitive–behavioral tool in the first longitudinal clinical trial of the intervention with an addiction treatment population, comparing it directly to a treatment-as-usual mindfulness intervention. The study found that Examen and mindfulness are equivalent in outcomes on depression, anxiety, stress, and substance craving. Further research should continue to investigate the Examen as an alternative to mindfulness for religious and secular populations and the factors responsible for the success of these practices.

Structure, Status, And Span: Gender Differences In Co-Authorship Networks Across 16 Region-Subject Pairs (2009–2013), Kjersten Bunker Whittington, Molly M. King, Isabella Cingolani

Sociology

Global and team science approaches are on the rise, as is attention to the network underpinnings of gender disparities in scientific collaboration. Many network studies of men’s and women’s collaboration rely on bounded case studies of single disciplines and/or single countries and limited measures related to the collaborative process. We deploy network analysis on the scholarly database Scopus to gain insight into gender inequity across regions and subject areas and to better understand contextual underpinnings of stagnancy. Using a dataset of over 1.2 million authors and 144 million collaborative relationships, we capture international and unbounded co-authorship networks that include intra- …

Potential Benefits Of The Jesuit Examen For Psychological Health And Well Being: A Pilot Study, Carolina Rader, Thomas G. Plante

Psychology

The Jesuit Examen is a form of prayerful reflection on daily experiences that was introduced five centuries ago by St. Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Society of Jesus (better known as the Jesuits). The Examen may be utilized by diverse populations when adapted and secularized, which can be completed by substituting the language of God in the original Examen for more inclusive terms such as “love.” Although five centuries old, the 10–15-min daily reflective practice has not been subject to empirical research. Furthermore, research has not explored the effects of the Examen on psychological health and well-being in a …

The Effects Of Centering Prayer On Well-Being In A Sample Of Undergraduate Students: A Pilot Study, Alejandro Eros, Thomas G. Plante

Psychology

Contemplative practices have likely been used for self-awareness, concentration, creativity, and well-being since the dawn of time. While practices such as yoga and Buddhist meditation have been extensively studied in recent decades, Christian contemplative practices have received less attention in empirical research. This study aims to investigate the effects of centering prayer, a Christian contemplative practice, on mental health and well-being. The research focuses on college students enrolled in a religious studies course that incorporates centering prayer into the curriculum. It is a pilot study because it is the first to explore centering prayer in an undergraduate setting. Using a …

Name-Based Demographic Inference And The Unequal Distribution Of Misrecognition, Jeffrey W. Lockhart, Molly M. King, Christin Munsch

Sociology

Academics and companies increasingly draw on large datasets to understand the social world, and name-based demographic ascription tools are widespread for imputing information that is often missing from these large datasets. These approaches have drawn criticism on ethical, empirical and theoretical grounds. Using a survey of all authors listed on articles in sociology, economics and communication journals in Web of Science between 2015 and 2020, we compared self-identified demographics with name-based imputations of gender and race/ethnicity for 19,924 scholars across four gender ascription tools and four race/ethnicity ascription tools. We found substantial inequalities in how these tools misgender and misrecognize …

Paying Attention To The Pandemic: Knowledge Of Covid-19 Facts By News Source And Demographics, Molly M. King

Sociology

The structured inequalities built into our sociotechnical institutions shape access to knowledge. During the COVID-19 pandemic, knowledge acquisition was shaped by news sources, class, and race. Through analysis of nationally representative data using logistic models, this study reveals how the use of different news sources differentially shapes access to accurate knowledge about COVID-19 topics for different demographics. Those who rely on informal and local news sources have the largest knowledge gaps about these topics, while those who seek information from national or international news outlets and politicians have the most accurate knowledge. Race and class influence knowledge of government operations, …

Medical Assistance In Dying (Maid): Ethical Considerations For Psychologists, Gerald P. Koocher, G. Andrew H. Benjamin, Jonathan Bolton, Thomas G. Plante

Psychology

Significant ethical challenges arise when mental health practitioners care for patients who seek to accelerate their own dying for rational medically valid reasons. Current and proposed laws provide for medical assistance in dying (MAiD) in several U.S. jurisdictions, all of Canada, and several other nations. Differing provisions of these laws complicate their utility for some patients who seek aid in dying. Some extant laws include roles that mental health professionals might play in assessing patients’ competence or capacity to consent, mental illness, or other cognitive and behavioral factors. Practitioners who choose to accept roles in the MAiD process must consider …

What Students? Which Mission?, Laura Nichols

Sociology

To understand decoupling from mission at CCUs, this chapter analyzes demographic data regarding the students whom a range of types of CCUs enroll. My aim is to examine the current state of CCUs in the United States, consider how they have evolved, and assess the extent of decoupling from mission that has occurred as indicated by the characteristics of students. The chapter's focus aligns with the directive in Pope Paul VI's 1971 apostolic letter Octogesima Adveniens that "it is up to the Christian communities to analyze with objectivity the situation which is proper to their own country, to shed on …

Algorithmic Literacy As Inclusive Pedagogy, Melanie Sellar

Staff publications, research, and presentations

The call for inclusive pedagogies has captured the wide interest of information literacy practitioners, who are now exploring what it means to teach inclusively and equitably within our discipline. This chapter argues that incorporating algorithmic literacy into our teaching praxis is an inclusive pedagogy, one which not only builds upon much of our professional priorities of the last ten years but also addresses an emerging need. By facilitating student awareness of algorithmic biases, for example, we can help to create a classroom environment that values the experiences and voices of all communities and that equips students with the willingness and …

What Is Catholic Psychotherapy And How Should It Move Forward?, Thomas G. Plante

Psychology

Catholic psychotherapy is a critically important specialization that under-scores the need for culturally competent best practices. It integrates state-of-the-art psychotherapeutic professional services with the rich religious, spiritual, and cultural contributions and traditions of the Roman Catholic Church. Since the Church is the single largest religious denomination in the world and represents about a quarter of the United States population, there is ample need for Catholic-informed and engaged psychotherapists with expertise in working thoughtfully and sensitively with Catholic clients, including laypersons and clerics, and with Church institutions such as schools, hospitals, and charitable groups. While the Catholic Psychotherapy Association has been …

Human Interaction With The Divine, The Sacred, And The Deceased: Topics That Warrant Increased Attention By Psychologists, Thomas G. Plante, Gary E. Schwartz, Julie J. Exline, Crystal L. Park, Raymond F. Paloutzian, Rüdiger J. Seitz, Hans-Ferdinand Angel

Psychology

Humans have likely been attempting to communicate with entities believed to exist, such as the divine, sacred beings, and deceased people, since the dawn of time. Across cultures and countries, many believe that interaction with the immaterial world is not only possible but a frequent experience. Most religious traditions across the globe focus many rituals and activities around prayer to an entity deemed divine or sacred. Additionally, many people–religious, agnostic, and atheists alike–report communication with their departed loved ones. During highly stressful times associated with natural disasters, war, pandemics, and other threats to human life, the frequency and intensity of …

Shifting Students Toward Testing: Impact Of Instruction And Context On Self-Regulated Learning, Patricia M. Simone, Lisa C. Whitfield, Matthew C. Bell, Pooja Kher, Taylor Tamashiro

Psychology

Much of the learning that college students engage in today occurs in unsupervised settings, making effective self-regulated learning techniques of particular importance. We examined the impact of task difficulty and supervision on whether participants would follow written instructions to use repeated testing over restudying. In Study 1, we found that when supervised, instructions to test resulted in changes in the self-regulated learning behaviors such that participants tested more often than they studied, relative to participants who were unsupervised during learning. This was true regardless of the task difficulty. In Study 2, we showed that failure to shift study strategies in …

Principles For Managing Burnout Among Catholic Church Professionals, Thomas G. Plante

Psychology

While a large body of research literature has explored the assessment, treatment, and prevention of worker burnout, much less research has focused on the unique issues associated with burnout in religious organizations, especially within the Roman Catholic Church. Catholic Church employees, whether clerics or laypersons, are embedded within a 2,000-year-old global hierarchical structure and organization that is unique in that it includes clerics with vows of chastity, obedience, and often poverty as well as ongoing crises related to clerical sexual abuse scandals, significant financial stressors, and a faith tradition that often overvalues sacrifice and suffering. The purpose of this brief …

Santa Clara Magazine, Volume 63 Number 2, Fall 2022 [Print Issue 62:2], Santa Clara University

Santa Clara Magazine

14 - AFTER THE CANNONBALL What does it mean to wrestle with your own human limitations and vulnerability as you follow the footsteps of a saint? Hung Pham, S.J.

18 - GROWING When I was little, there seemed to be this nondescript era of life, a foggy “someday,” when becoming an adult just happened. Nikhita Panjnani ’24.

20 - HOW IT STARTED, HOW IT'S GOING For decades, the internet has shaped the way we communicate, but two years of being extremely online hit fast forward on its real-world impact. Matt Morgan.

26 - NURTURING NATURE A story in two stories: …

Redi For Binned Data: A Random Empirical Distribution Imputation Method For Estimating Continuous Incomes, Molly M. King

Sociology

Researchers often need to work with categorical income data. The typical nonparametric (including midpoint) and parametric estimation methods used to estimate summary statistics both have advantages, but they carry assumptions that cause them to deviate in important ways from real-world income distributions. The method introduced here, random empirical distribution imputation (REDI), imputes discrete observations using binned income data, while also calculating summary statistics. REDI achieves this through random cold-deck imputation from a real-world reference data set (demonstrated here using the Current Population Survey Annual Social and Economic Supplement). This method can be used to reconcile bins between data sets or …

Santa Clara Magazine, Volume 63 Number 1, Summer 2022, Santa Clara University

Santa Clara Magazine

16 - SHARED DREAMS Meet incoming University President Julie Sullivan, the first layperson and woman selected to lead SCU. Leslie Griffy

20 - BD KNOWS BEST Discovering who you really are, being grateful, and dinosaurs with BD Wong. Lauren Loftus.

22 - SWEPT AWAY Being homeless in Silicon Valley is particularly deadly. One professor explores why so many die in a land of such excess. Leslie Griffy .

28 - ON THE OUTSIDE A first-person account of being wrongly convicted, as told by Arturo Jimenez.

30 - BOOKED AND BUSY The secret behind the Hollywood success of so many Bronco …

Teaching & Learning Guide For Disability And Climate Justice, Molly M. King, Maria A. Gregg, Ana V. Martinez, Emily Y. Pachoud

Sociology

Disability is widespread: nearly one in four Americans has a disability (Taylor, 2018) and disability cuts across demographic categories. Among individuals aged 15 and over, 12.6% had some type of mobility disability; above age 65, it is nearly 40% (Brault, 2012). Mobility disabilities heighten vulnerability to climate change and climate-related disasters (UNHCHR, 2020). Reduced information resources and mobility, increased health risks, and a lack of visibility in climate change discourse put people with disabilities in a more vulnerable position in the climate crisis. However, this vulnerability can be mitigated through relevant and sufficient access to information, risk mitigation …

Religion Has A Public Relations Problem: Integrating Evidence-Based Thinking Into Clinical Practice, Thomas G. Plante

Psychology

Religion and religious institutions receive a great deal of negative, rather than positive, attention and press. This creates an impression, for the casual observer, that religion and associated institutions are a plight on the planet. It is critically important for evidence-based research and best practices in clinical services to be well known and utilized within professional psychotherapy practice. Clinicians must be mindful of the many advantages of religious engagement for physical, mental, and community health and wellness. Psychologists, and other mental health professionals, tend to be secular and nonreligious and receive little, if any, training on religious diversity that may …

Five Spiritually Based Tools For Clinical Practice During Challenging, Stressful, And Apocalyptic Times, Thomas G. Plante

Psychology

Stress in America and across the globe is high with so many ongoing societal problems. The COVID-19 global pandemic along with accelerating climate change, increasing economic instability and inequality, divisive politics and an increase in authoritarianism, racism, and discrimination against those who are oppressed and marginalized are just a few current examples. Evidence suggests that mental health problems and demand for services have exploded as well. Psychotherapists who are well versed in spiritual and religious integration in their clinical work can help. While therapists cannot solve the country’s and world’s numerous problems, they can help their clientele better cope and …

Disability And Climate Change: A Critical Realist Model Of Climate Justice, Molly M. King, Maria A. Gregg

Sociology

Existing literature on climate change as an issue of environmental justice documents the heightened vulnerability of people with disabilities to the effects of climate change. Additionally, there are numerous studies showing that access to information is a prerequisite for perceiving risk and taking action. Building on this work, our review seeks to understand how physical disability relates to perceptions of climate-related risk and adaptations to climate-related events. We introduce a critical realist model of climate justice to understand the relationships between the environmental features that disable, risk perception and information seeking, and adaptive capacity and resilience to climate change. In …

From The Vault - November 2021 Newsletter, Archives & Special Collections

From the Vault: Archives & Special Collections Newsletter

In this issue of the newsletter, staff share information about first generation college students, details for the Fall 2021 exhibit, the Samurai & the Cross, news of additions to the Artifact Collection in the SCU Digital Collections, and two blog posts featured on Arthur’s Attic this month, one about the Catalá Crucifix in the Mission Church and the other about marbled papers used in book arts and book binding.

Santa Clara Magazine, Volume 62 Number 2, Fall 2021, Santa Clara University

Santa Clara Magazine

18 - WE ARE THE CHAMPIONS The pandemic stole an entire year of games from them. But this team still won it all. Written by Harold Gutmann. Illustrated by Liam Eisenberg.

26 - INFORMED BY STRUGGLE. How hardship forged a sense of gratitude in SCU finance professor Meir Statman and his wife, Navah. Written by Deborah Lohse.

30 - TWEETING GOOD There’s a Bronco who finds hope, God, and cat pictures online. We talk with @padreSJ. Interviewed by Leslie Griffy. Illustrated by Kyle Hilton.

34 - SIGNALS FROM A CHANGING PLANET. The imprints of humans on the environment spell a …

Construal Level Moderates A Local Dominance Effect Of Appearance Comparisons In Undergraduate Women, Kathryn Bruchmann, Maggie L. Osa, Kahana Wong, Lindsay Baerg

Psychology

Body image concerns are pervasive within university environments. In this study, we suggest that high rates of body image concerns among undergraduate women may be due, in part, to a local dominance effect of appearance comparisons. That is, undergraduate women may increasingly make upward social comparisons with a predominantly thin and fit student population, rather than downward or lateral social comparisons with the size-diverse global population. The present research tested for and found evidence of this local dominance effect in Study 1 (N = 50), and tested a construal level manipulation as a moderating factor in Study 2 ( …

Social Comparison Information Influences Intentions To Reduce Single-Use Plastic Water Bottle Consumption, Kathryn Bruchmann, Sarah M. Chue, Keelin Dillon, Jaime K. Lucas, Kayla Neumann, Charlotte Parque

Psychology

Single-use plastic consumption is at an all-time high and threatens environmental and human health. College campuses in particular serve as a hub for single-use plastics due to their convenience for students on the go. The present research tests whether social comparison information can influence self-perceptions of single-use plastic consumption and motivate behavior change within the college campus environment. In a controlled experiment, we measured college students' existing plastic water bottle usage and gave them false feedback about their behaviors and relative standing to their classmates: participants in comparison conditions learned they were either above or below average in their plastic …

From The Vault - August 2021 Newsletter, Archives & Special Collections

From the Vault: Archives & Special Collections Newsletter

In the August 2021 issue of From the Vault, we reiterate that Archives & Special Collections is open by appointment and announce an early preview of the Samurai and the Cross exhibit and the new collection of mini books we acquired during the pandemic. Additionally, we announce the addition of Ethnic Studies Department newsletters to the Digital Collections and share links of our most recent blog posts.

Towards Smallholder Food And Water Security: Climate Variability In The Context Of Multiple Livelihood Hazards In Nicaragua, Christopher M. Bacon, William A. Sundstrom, Iris Stewart-Frey, Edwin P. Maurer, Lisa C. Kelley

Environmental Studies and Sciences

Climate variability and change affect both food and water security, as do other hazards, such as shifting food prices, plant pathogens, and political economic changes. Although household food and water insecurity affect billions, most studies analyze them separately. This article develops a relational approach to explaining household access to food and water in a multi-hazard context. We identify pathways linking hazards to livelihood vulnerability and assess the relative importance of climate-related hazards. Analyzing longitudinal data collected from two surveys of the same 311 smallholder households in northern Nicaragua, conducted in 2014 and again in 2017, we find that peak seasons …

Filipinx/A/O-American College Students And Mental Health, Gabi Sicat

Sociology - Independent Research

Filipinx/a/o-Americans are the second largest Asian American population yet are often underrepresented in research studies and media, while predominantly East Asians remain the center focus. Issues and experiences of subpopulations within minority groups are often overshadowed by the dominant group and essentially erased. Therefore, disaggregating data persists as an important way to understand the differences between subgroups and to ultimately create effective strategies to remediate these inequities. This current study looks to further examine the research question: What experiences shape Filipinx/a/o-American college students’ mental health? Specifically how does family, religion, immigration, racial stereotypes (e.g., model minority myth), and acculturation at …

Using The Examen, A Jesuit Prayer, In Spiritually Integrated And Secular Psychotherapy, Thomas G. Plante

Psychology

The Examen is a 500-year-old end of day prayer developed by St. Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Society of Jesus (better known as the Jesuits). Like many other religious or spiritual practices, such as mindfulness and yoga, the Examen is suitable as either a spiritually focused or secular intervention strategy to assist people within clinical psychotherapy practice and elsewhere. Adapting the Examen as a cognitive behavioral psychotherapy intervention is easy to do and may add another important tool to the toolbox of practicing clinicians interested in thoughtfully integrating spiritually based approaches in their clinical work with religiously as well …

From The Vault - June 2021 Newsletter, Archives & Special Collections

From the Vault: Archives & Special Collections Newsletter

In this issue of the Archives & Special Collections newsletter From the Vault, we announce our post-COVID re-opening plans (July 12, 2021 for SCU affiliates), give a shout out to the amazing class of '21, and share some updates on what we've been up to recently, including the entries for SCU in Quarantine, A&SC instruction statistics for the academic year, scholarly output related to our collections, and our recent blog posts.