Ian A. Gutierrez

Global and situational meanings in the context of trauma: Relations with psychological well-being

Using the meaning making model as our framework, we examined relations among global and appraised meaning and well-being in a sample of 189 college students who had experienced a highly stressful event in the past 5 years. Results suggested that elements of both global meaning (especially self-esteem beliefs) and situational meaning (especially appraisals of the event as violating ones goals) were independently related to a range of well-being outcomes, including depression, anxiety, stress, subjective happiness, and life satisfaction. However, relations varied by specific aspect of well-being. Neither control nor religious beliefs were consistently related to well-being. These results demonstrate the importance of both global and situational meanings in adjusting to life stress. Counselors should attend to both global and situational meanings in the context of helping clients deal with stressful experiences; such attention may focus on bolstering adaptive global beliefs such as self-esteem while also reappraising situational meanings, particularly of the event as violating important global beliefs and goals.

The Essential Properties of Yoga Questionnaire: Development and Methods.

Yoga interventions have considerable heterogeneity, are multi-dimensional, and may impact health in different ways. However, most research reports regarding the effects of yoga on health and wellbeing do not adequately describe the components of the yoga interventions being used. Thus, drawing comparisons across studies or understanding the relative effects of specific aspects of a yoga intervention are rarely possible. To address this problem, we created the Essential Properties of Yoga Questionnaire (EPYQ) Project, an NCCAM-funded set of studies to develop a translational tool for yoga researchers. Here we describe the methods and developmental processes used in the EPYQ Project in detail. The project consists of four main phases. Phase I was designed to gain a comprehensive understanding of the relevant aspects of yoga by conducting a comprehensive systematic literature review and conducting focus groups with stakeholders including a wide variety of yoga teachers and students. In Phase II, a pool of potential questionnaire items was developed for the prototypic questionnaire using information from Phase I. Cognitive interviews were conducted with the preliminary EPYQ items to assess the perceived clarity, meaning, and importance of each item. In Phase III, the prototypic questionnaire was administered to two large samples of yoga students and instructors. Military personnel and veterans who practiced or taught yoga (n = 329) were recruited to participate. Factor analysis and item response theory were used to identify factors and select the final questionnaire items. Phase IV is ongoing and will collect reliability and validity data on the final instrument. Results are expected to be available in 2016. The EPYQ will provide an objective tool for describing the amount of various components of yoga interventions, eventually allowing researchers to link specific yoga components to health benefits, and facilitating the design of yoga interventions for specific health conditions.

A Randomized Trial of Contingency Management for Smoking Cessation During Intensive Outpatient Alcohol Treatment

INTRODUCTION This randomized clinical trial was designed to evaluate the efficacy of contingency management (CM) for smoking cessation for smokers with alcohol abuse or dependence delivered concurrently with intensive outpatient alcohol treatment. The study also explored the indirect effects of CM smoking treatment and smoking cessation on alcohol and drug use outcomes. METHODS Alcohol abuse/dependent smokers were randomized to cognitive behavioral therapy plus nicotine replacement therapy plus contingency management (CBT+NRT+CM) or to cognitive behavior therapy plus nicotine replacement therapy (CBT+NRT) delivered concurrent with a three-week intensive outpatient alcohol treatment program. RESULTS Participants in the CBT+NRT+CM condition were significantly more likely to be cigarette abstinent at the end of treatment (χ2(1)=8.48, p=.004) with approximately double the carbon monoxide confirmed quit rate (60%) compared with the CBT+NRT condition (29%). At the one-month and six-month time-points there were nonsignificant differences in smoking abstinence outcomes by condition. Smoking treatment condition did not directly affect alcohol abstinence outcomes, but we observed an indirect effect of smoking treatment on alcohol and drug abstinence at one-month follow-up that was mediated by smoking cessation at the end of treatment. CONCLUSIONS Adding CM to an evidence-based smoking cessation treatment that included medication and behavioral counseling doubled the quit rate at the end of treatment. This finding provides strong evidence for the efficacy of CM for helping alcohol dependent smokers reach the milestone of initial smoking abstinence.

Emerging Adulthood, Evolving Worldviews How Life Events Impact College Students’ Developing Belief Systems

Worldviews—a person’s fundamental perspectives on social and metaphysical reality—relate to multiple aspects of psychological functioning and well-being. Theory on emerging adulthood contends that individuals between the ages of 18 and 29 explore and change their worldviews as they strive to develop a coherent identity. Simultaneously, emerging adults experience many significant life events. The relationship between life events and worldview development in emerging adulthood has yet to be investigated. We conducted a longitudinal analysis of changes in emerging adult college students’ (N = 168) worldviews over the course of a semester and explored how positive and negatives life events were associated with belief change. Findings revealed that 76.8% of emerging adults in our sample experienced a reliable change in at least one worldview. Additionally, the positive impact of life events was found to mitigate decreases in self-worth beliefs. We conclude by highlighting implications for theory and suggesting future lines of research.

Factors Predicting Volunteer Engagement Among Urban-Residing African American Women

Research has shown that urban-residing African American women engage in volunteer work at impressive rates. However, few studies have empirically assessed the factors that account for volunteerism within this population. This study explores the relationship between demographic variables, early religious involvement, current religious involvement, empathy, perspective taking, and volunteer engagement among African American women residing in a large urban center (N = 211). Findings from multivariate analyses revealed that current religious involvement positively predicted women’s volunteer engagement. Age was found to negatively predict volunteer engagement but positively predict the number of hours women spend volunteering per year. The implications of these findings are discussed and future lines of research considered.

Assessing Disruptions in Meaning: Development of the Global Meaning Violation Scale

Models of meaning making following stressful events are based on the notion that individuals’ appraisals of events (i.e., their situational meaning) can violate their goals and beliefs (i.e., global meaning), and that resulting discrepancies between situational meaning and global meaning negatively affect their psychological adjustment. To date, research has relied primarily on indirect measures of meaning violation. We describe the development of a new instrument, the Global Meaning Violation Scale (GMVS), for directly assessing belief and goal violations. We establish the psychometric integrity of the GMVS across three studies. In Study 1, we identify and replicate a factor structure consisting of three subscales: belief violation, intrinsic goal violation, and extrinsic goal violation. In Study 2, we provide evidence for the reliability and validity of the GMVS. In Study 3, we test the predictive validity of the GMVS in a sample of undergraduates reporting on the most stressful experiences of their lives. Our findings indicate that the GMVS is a reliable and valid tool for directly examining global meaning violation. We anticipate that the GMVS will advance research on stress, trauma, and coping by giving researchers a tool to directly explore the role of violations in meaning making processes.

The Essential Properties of Yoga Questionnaire (EPYQ): Psychometric Properties

Yoga interventions are heterogeneous and vary along multiple dimensions. These dimensions may affect mental and physical health outcomes in different ways or through different mechanisms. However, most studies of the effects of yoga on health do not adequately describe or quantify the components of the interventions being implemented. This lack of detail prevents researchers from making comparisons across studies and limits our understanding of the relative effects of different aspects of yoga interventions. To address this problem, we developed the Essential Properties of Yoga Questionnaire (EPYQ), which allows researchers to objectively characterize their interventions. We present here the reliability and validity data from the final phases of this measure-development project. Analyses identified fourteen key dimensions of yoga interventions measured by the EPYQ: acceptance/compassion, bandhas, body awareness, breathwork, instructor mention of health benefits, individual attention, meditation and mindfulness, mental and emotional awareness, physicality, active postures, restorative postures, social aspects, spirituality, and yoga philosophy. The EPYQ demonstrated good reliability, as assessed by internal consistency and test-retest reliability analysis, and evidence suggests that the EPYQ is a valid measure of multiple dimensions of yoga. The measure is ready for use by clinicians and researchers. Results indicate that, currently, trained objective raters should score interventions to avoid reference frame errors and potential rating bias, but alternative approaches may be developed. The EPYQ will allow researchers to link specific yoga dimensions to identifiable health outcomes and optimize the design of yoga interventions for specific conditions.

Life-Changing Religious and Spiritual Experiences: A Cross-Faith Comparison in the United States.

Life-changing religious and spiritual experiences shape people’s lives and form a central part of the autobiographical narratives of many Americans. As such, they have been key phenomena of interest among social scientists. However, the likelihood of individuals experiencing life-changing religious or spiritual experience across diverse faith traditions has yet to be studied. The current study explores the incidence of reporting life-changing religious or spiritual experiences among adherents of 6 world religious traditions as well as atheists and agnostics living in the United States (N = 970). We account for subjective religiousness, subjective spirituality, and impression management in our analysis of interfaith differences in rates of life-changing religious and spiritual experience. Findings revealed interreligious differences in the incidence of religious experience, with Protestants and Muslims more likely to report having had a life-changing religious and spiritual experience, and Jews, Catholics, and atheists/agnostics reporting comparatively fewer of these experiences. While religiousness and spirituality were associated with the likelihood of having had a life-changing religious or spiritual experience across religions, impression management was only minimally associated with religious experience. Our results suggest that an individual’s religious culture is strongly related to that person’s likelihood of having a life-changing religious or spiritual experience.

When the divine defaults: Religious struggle mediates the impact of financial stressors on psychological distress.

It is generally assumed that religion provides support, strength, and solace to those grappling with financial difficulties. Recently, however, scholars have found evidence of harmful effects of religion by way of negative religious coping and religious or spiritual struggle. To date, these potentially negative phenomena have not been studied in the context of coping with financial stressors. Using intensive longitudinal data collected twice daily for 14 days from 439 participants, we explored whether and how religious struggle with the divine factors into the relationship between financial hardship and distress. Chronic financial stress, as measured by inability to pay bills on a routine basis, had a direct effect on depression, whereas acute financial stress did not. Religious struggle with the divine mediated the effect of acute financial stressors on depression but not the effect of chronic financial stress on depression. These findings suggest that financial hardship impacts well-being by way of religious struggle in the short-term, but that spiritual struggle has less impact on the relationship between financial hardship and well-being in the long term. The implications of these findings are discussed.