The Goshen Psychology Newsletter

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PSYCHLONE

Volume 35, Number 1

WELCOME

Well, a new school year has begun and it is past time for the first edition of the Psychology Department newsletter to be sent. For first-time readers, the Psychlone is a four-times-a-year electronically distributed source of information about the department, its people, its ideas, and its activities. Included are announcements of upcoming events and news of graduates. There is also a section reflecting what the newsletter editor has been reading!



So a hearty welcome to those who are faculty or majors or minors in psychology. It looks very promising for a good year in the department. Indeed, our first event, the annual meeting about careers has already been held, with good attendance and discussion. We hope you will be actively involved at GC and that includes involvement with the activities of the department. We welcome you to all our events and we also welcome you to just stop in and chat as you have interest.

WEB

At long last, the Department web page has been upgraded. Thanks to Garrett Gingerich who was largely responsible for fixing it up. We will try to do a better job of keeping it up-to-date.

HONORS

Among the links and materials you will find on the new web page are the parameters for receiving an honors degree in psychology. If you have strong credentials you may wish to check this out and talk to one of the department faculty about receiving honors designation.

GC and BC and MC

The fifth annual Goshen College/Bluffton College/Manchester College psychology-focused conference will be held at Bluffton College April 7, 2005. This conference is an annual opportunity for psychology students and faculty to get together for interaction and paper presentations. It is not too soon to be thinking about what paper you want to read. GC generally has more papers than any other school (though Manchester is catching up!!). Let’s do it again. Presentations such as this look very good on a resume, especially for graduate school.

CAPS

Recently CAPS (the Christian Association for Psychological Studies) has made efforts to become more “friendly” to psychologists who are not clinicians. A group of us are hoping to continue and strengthen this academic track. So whether clinician or developmental or social psychologist, and if you are intrigued by dialogue between Christian faith and psychology, think about joining CAPS. The conference next year is March 9 to 11 in Cincinnati. (There will even be a special academic track on neuropsychology).

NEWS OF GRADS

LEAH GOOD is an Access Center counselor and emergency services team leader at Oaklawn in Goshen .



LUCAS MILLER works for a law firm in Pittsburg after completing his law degree at the University of Pittsburg School of Law.



LEAH RAYL-MILLER is director of Employment Opportunities Unlimited at Oaklawn in Goshen . This program assists those with disabilities in job placement.



AMANDA HEGGEN has begun graduate school at the University of New Mexico . She writes that she also is a recipient of “an amazing internship that pays for my schooling plus a decent stipend.”



JONAH WETHERILL completed his degree in occupational therapy at Washington University in St. Louis . He is now employed by Chicago Metro Hand Therapy in Arlington Heights , IL .



AMIE KOONTZ lives in Montgomery Center , VT and runs a technical education program for adults.



MARCEL YODER was promoted to Associate Professor and received tenure at the University of Illinois, Springfield .



LISA KOOP has completed a law degree and is working at the Notre Dame Legal Aid Clinic. She was recently selected as a recipient of an Indiana Governor’s Award for Tomorrow’s Leaders.



LISA MILLER is a nurse at the Circle of Caring Birthplace at Goshen General Hospital . She is also a Ten Thousand Villages volunteer.

IN THE LITERATURE

“Because of the proclivity to seize and freeze on early notions, persons under a heightened need for closure may process information less extensively and carefully and generate fewer competing hypotheses to account for the data they have available. Despite this curtailment in information processing , or perhaps because of it, persons under a heightened need for closure may feel particularly assured of their judgments, even though objectively these may have been based on a rather superficial exploration. Such a paradoxical sense of confidence may stem from the tendency of high-need-for-closure individuals to refrain from generating competing alternative interpretations of known facts, and to regard their own perspective as the sole valid one under the circumstances” (pp. 21-22).



Kruglanski, A. (2004). The psychology of closed mindedness. New York: Psychology Press.



“Consistent with our hypotheses, the results of these experiments suggest that religious symbols can have a substantial and nonconscious influence on coping processes. During a motivated performance situation, religious stimuli that people did not consciously perceive influenced motivational and related physiological states. However, important boundary conditions apparently exist. The results of Experiment 1 provide evidence indicating that unreportable religious symbols were influential only when the subsequent task was relevant to existential issues. Thus a fleeting image of Jesus might positively influence an individual’s experience as he or she delivers a eulogy, the same image probably would not influence his or her experience playing a word game” (p. 1212).



Weisbuch-Remington, M., Mendes, W., Seery, M., & Blascovich, J. (2005). The nonconscious influence of relisious symbols in motivated performance situations. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 31, 1203-1216.



“I likened the process of overcoming prejudice to the breaking of a bad habit in that people must make a decision to eliminate the habit and then learn to inhibit the habitual response. Thus, the change from being prejudiced to nonprejudiced is not an all-or-none event, but unfolds a process during which those who have renounced prejudice remain vulnerable to the conflict engendered between automatic responses and consciously endorsed nonprejudiced beliefs” (p. 333).



That is good regulators were more sensitive to the fact that their automatically activated stereotypes were at odds with their intended nonstereotypic responses and they were more efficient in recruiting controlled processes online as the response unfolded” (p. 336).



Devine, P. (2005). .Breaking the prejudice habit: Allport’s “inner conflict” revisited. In J. Dovidio, P. Glick, & L. Rudman, On the Nature of Prejudice: Fifty Years After Allport (pp. 327-342). Malden, MA: Blackwell.