Papers by Kevin J Flannelly
Routledge eBooks, May 21, 2020
The article defines, describes, and discusses the seven threats to the internal validity of exper... more The article defines, describes, and discusses the seven threats to the internal validity of experiments discussed by Donald T. Campbell in his classic 1957 article: history, maturation, testing, instrument decay, statistical regression, selection, and mortality. These concepts are said to be threats to the internal validity of experiments because they pose alternate explanations for the apparent causal relationship between the independent variable and dependent variable of an experiment if they are not adequately controlled. A series of simple diagrams illustrate three pre-experimental designs and three true experimental designs discussed by Campbell in 1957 and several quasi-experimental designs described in his book written with Julian C. Stanley in 1966. The current article explains why each design controls for or fails to control for these seven threats to internal validity.
Routledge eBooks, May 21, 2020
The t-test developed by William S. Gosset (also known as Student's t-test and the two-sample t-te... more The t-test developed by William S. Gosset (also known as Student's t-test and the two-sample t-test) is commonly used to compare one sample mean on a measure with another sample mean on the same measure. The outcome of the t-test is used to draw inferences about how different the samples are from each other. It is probably one of the most frequently relied upon statistics in inferential research. It is easy to use: a researcher can calculate the statistic with three simple tools: paper, pen, and a calculator. A computer program can quickly calculate the t-test for large samples. The ease of use can result in the misuse of the t-test. This article discusses the development of the original t-test, basic principles of the t-test, two additional types of t-tests (the onesample t-test and the paired t-test), and recommendations about what to consider when using the t-test to draw inferences in research.
Religion, spirituality and health: a social scientific approach, 2017
This chapter proposes future research related to ETAS Theory’s four levels of analysis. Research ... more This chapter proposes future research related to ETAS Theory’s four levels of analysis. Research at the behavioral level (Level I), particularly, psychological and sociological research, is proposed to test behavioral predictions from ETAS Theory about the association between mental health and beliefs, threats, and safety. Future Level I research should examine more beliefs and more classes of psychiatric symptoms, as well as their lifetime prevalence. The chapter notes that much more cognitive-affective neuroscience research (Level II) is needed to determine the association of many classes of psychiatric symptoms with brain structure and function, and the relationship between beliefs, brain function, and psychiatric symptoms, to test ETAS Theory predictions at this level of analysis. One section of the chapter describes the design of three experiments to test the effects of different religious beliefs on psychiatric symptoms and the activity of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, the amygdala, and other brain structures implicated by ETAS Theory to be involved in processing beliefs and the threat assessments that underlie psychiatric symptoms. The studies contrast the effects of beliefs that should enhance or reduce the perceptions of threat. Level III involves detailed neuro-anatomical and neuro-physiological analyses to define the specific neural circuits or networks that comprise different ETAS and determine how they operate. Level IV is an evolutionary level of analysis that uses the methodology of comparative anatomy and comparative behavior to understand the evolutionary origins of psychiatric disorders as well as beliefs.
Journal of the Association of Nurses in AIDS Care, Mar 1, 2001
This study tested the effects of a 7-week individual self-management and coping skills training p... more This study tested the effects of a 7-week individual self-management and coping skills training program on various measures of health and well-being of persons with HIV/AIDS. Forty men and women were randomly assigned the treatment or wait-list control group. Treated participants showed significant posttreatment changes on all four major measures of mood, coping, and health attitudes. Treatment significantly improved coping strategies as measured by the use and effective measures of the Jalowiec Coping Scale and several of its subscales, including decreases in use of emotive, fatalistic, and palliative coping styles. Psychological mood was improved, as measured by the Profile of Moods Total Mood Disturbance (POMS TMD) score and specific subscales of the POMS, which were targeted in the intervention (e.g., Anger). Treated participants also showed significant increases on the Internal subscale of the Health Attribution Test.
The journal of pastoral care & counseling, Sep 1, 2017
This study replicates, expands and analyzes a 2004 survey examining six hospital characteristics ... more This study replicates, expands and analyzes a 2004 survey examining six hospital characteristics influencing three measures of chaplain employment in large, small, for-profit and nonprofit hospitals. The relationship between hospital characteristics and hiring Board Certified Chaplains was minor and inconsistent across time. The results indicate that religiously affiliated hospitals employed more full-time chaplains and that chaplain full-time equivalents were inversely related to hospital size in both surveys. The current survey suggests that urban and religiously affiliated hospitals were more likely to hire chaplains. The sampling method proved problematic, precluding meaningful conclusions but the study focus and questions remain important for future investigation based on this pilot effort.
Routledge eBooks, May 21, 2020
Religion, spirituality and health: a social scientific approach, 2017
The chapter examines the thesis, first advanced by clinical psychologists and psychiatrists in th... more The chapter examines the thesis, first advanced by clinical psychologists and psychiatrists in the 1970s and 1980s, that psychiatric symptoms are rooted in our evolution history. This premise has come to be called Evolutionary Psychiatry. Key among the early advocates of evolutionary psychiatry was the American psychiatrist Randolph M. Nesse who believed that many psychiatric disorders, particularly anxiety disorders, are expressions of proximate mechanisms that are adaptive for survival. This chapter explains how seven anxiety disorders reflect fears that evolved to protect us from different sources of dangers: acrophobia, agoraphobia, small animal phobias, general anxiety, society phobia (anxiety), panic attack, and obsessive compulsive disorder. The prevalence rates and age of onset of subclinical levels of these classes of psychiatric symptoms in the general public are presented wherever possible, and estimates are given regarding when some of the proximate mechanisms underlying these symptoms probably evolved in our animal or human ancestors. The chapter also explains that these proximate mechanisms are prone to making "false alarms," much as smoke alarms do, because they operate under the "better safe than sorry principle." A major point of the chapter is the same as the major premise of evolutionary psychiatry, i.e., that all people have subclinical levels of various psychiatric symptoms because the proximate mechanisms that produce them once were and may still be important for survival. The chapter also notes that the theoretical focus of evolutionary psychology on the last 1.8 million years of human existence is obviously inadequate for understanding how tens of millions and hundreds millions of years of evolution have molded human behavior.
Religion, spirituality and health: a social scientific approach, 2017
The chapter summarizes the findings of large national surveys of U.S. adults and studies of conve... more The chapter summarizes the findings of large national surveys of U.S. adults and studies of convenience samples of American college students about their belief in God and life-after-death. This research shows that most Americans believe in God and that the percentage of people in the U.S. who believe in God is higher than the percentage in almost every other country in the world. However, Americans hold many different beliefs about the nature of God, some of which are overlapping and some of which are contradictory. Moreover, some beliefs about the nature of God are rooted in the Old Testament, some are rooted in the New Testament, and some have no Biblical connection at all. The most commonly held beliefs about God among Americans are that God is ever-present, just, kind, loving, forgiving, and fatherly; less commonly held beliefs are that God is critical, punishing, severe, and wrathful. The chapter also presents results showing that most Americans believe in life-after-death, but these beliefs take various forms. The most common American beliefs about the afterlife are that it entails peace and tranquility, union with God, and reunion with loved ones.
Religion, spirituality and health: a social scientific approach, 2017
The chapter begins with an historical description of the nature of beliefs, including the philoso... more The chapter begins with an historical description of the nature of beliefs, including the philosophical perspective that beliefs represent linguistic propositions about the nature of the world that are either true or false, and the Platonic and Aristotelian concepts of phantasia and doxa. The first section of the chapter also: (a) connects phantasia and doxa to Lewis Wolpert’s concepts of weak and strong causal beliefs, and describes human research findings indicating (b) that beliefs more commonly take the form of mental models than linguistic propositions, (c) that people are born with certain beliefs about the world, and (d) that individuals may simultaneously hold contradictory beliefs. The second section links Wolpert’s strong causal beliefs to so-called folk beliefs about inanimate and animate objects, which are thought to be inherited. The third section describes how folk beliefs are thought to underlie certain religious beliefs and how folk beliefs about biology probably contributed to both the historical rejection and acceptance of the concept of organic evolution. The following section presents clinical and research evidence that negative beliefs about the world, including negative beliefs about people, underlie many psychiatric disorders, such as general anxiety, social anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and personality disorders. The final section discusses the processing of beliefs in the brain, particularly the role of the ventromedial area of the prefrontal cortex.
Religion, spirituality and health: a social scientific approach, 2017
The first section of the chapter briefly presents historical (Augustine of Hippo and Thomas Aquin... more The first section of the chapter briefly presents historical (Augustine of Hippo and Thomas Aquinas) and modern (James H. Snowden and Paul Tillich) theological perspectives about religious doubt, as well as psychological perspectives about religious doubt, including Gordon Allport’s ideas about the causes of religious doubt. The rest of the chapter summarizes the research findings from convenience samples of religious Americans and several large studies of random samples of Americans (including a random sample of Christian Americans), all of which demonstrate that religious doubt has a pernicious association with psychological well-being. The chapter also presents the results of several large national and regional U.S. studies that indicate religious doubt has a pernicious association with psychiatric symptoms. Based on ETAS Theory, the pernicious effects of religious doubt at least partly reflect the fact (a) that doubts undermine the sense of meaning and security provided by religious faith, and (b) that uncertainty about one’s beliefs increases anxiety, just as uncertainty about the future increases anxiety. Some of the large studies also found that the adverse effects of religious doubt on mental health were more pronounced in persons who had a strong religious commitment or religious identity. This finding is important because it suggests that religious doubt threatens the social role (and therefore, the self-esteem) of religious people within their religious community, which is consistent with Identity Theory and ETAS Theory. According to ETAS Theory, this threat to self-esteem makes people more vulnerable to other forms of threats, which further exacerbates psychiatric symptoms.
Religion, spirituality and health: a social scientific approach, 2017
This chapter reviews most of the major points made in Part 1 of the book. The first chapter of Pa... more This chapter reviews most of the major points made in Part 1 of the book. The first chapter of Part I (Chap. 2) describes the philosophical and theological beliefs held in the Western world from the 5th Century (BCE) through the 13th Century (AD) that were impediments to the recognition of organic evolution. The Protestant Reformation, which began in the early part of the 16th Century, rejected Scholasticism (which had dominated Christian theology and learning), and stressed the supremacy of the Holy Scriptures in Christian theology and the belief that the Scriptures were literally true. As Chap. 3 notes, this context transformed the study of Natural History into Natural Theology, which became a mechanism to understand God through his creations. Although some areas of science flourished during this time, religious orthodoxy hampered evolutionary thought. The Age of Enlightenment, which began in the late 17th Century, questioned accepted beliefs about the world, opening the door, ever so slightly, for scientific explanations of the origin of the universe and the origin of life. The latter part of this chapter (which covers portions of Chaps. 3 and 4) summarizes the contributions of the Enlightenment thinkers Georges-Louis Leclerc Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin, and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck to the development of the theory of organic evolution, and presents conclusions to be drawn from Part I.
Religion, spirituality and health: a social scientific approach, 2017
The chapter explains the American neuroscientist Paul MacLean’s concept of the “Triune Brain,” il... more The chapter explains the American neuroscientist Paul MacLean’s concept of the “Triune Brain,” illustrates its basic structure, and discusses the evolution and functions of the major brain structures involved in instinctual and emotional behavior in animals and humans. These include the brain stem and basal ganglia, which form the most primitive parts of the brain, and are involved in self-protection and other basic functions needed to survive. The basal ganglia, for instance, is known to control species-specific, fixed-action patterns related to eating, drinking, courtship, and territorial behaviors in lizards. The limbic system, which MacLean thought evolved in early mammals and incorporated many of the functions of the brain stem and the basal ganglia in animals, has been implicated in at least six basic emotions in mammals: anger/aggression, fear, grief, lust/mating, maternal love, and joy. As the chapter explains, emotions, which probably did not exist until the evolution of the limbic system, provided mammals with superior flexibility to respond to life challenges and other circumstances. The chapter further explains that the evolution of the neocortex added even greater flexibility to respond to a variety of life situations by inhibiting the more or less automatic reactions of the brain stem, basal ganglia, and the limbic system. Finally, the chapter introduces the idea that the expansion of the neocortex reflects the evolution of causal beliefs about the nature of the world in our primitive human ancestors.
Religion, spirituality and health: a social scientific approach, 2017
This chapter covers all the chapters in Part IV of the book in abbreviated form, including the ma... more This chapter covers all the chapters in Part IV of the book in abbreviated form, including the material contained in each section and subsection of the chapters. The first portion of the chapter briefly describes the general timeframe of the evolution of the brain stem, the basal ganglia, the limbic system, and the neocortex in vertebrates, and the function of these brain areas in self defense and threat assessment. Special attention is given to the role of the amygdala (which is part of the limbic system) in the generation of fear and the role of the prefrontal cortex (PFC) in modulating fear generated by the amygdala. The next section explains the adaptive functions of psychiatric symptoms associated with fear of small animals, acrophobia, panic attack and agoraphobia, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), general anxiety, social anxiety, depression, somatization, and paranoia, and the estimated times in our evolutionary history that the proximate mechanisms underlying them developed. The nature of beliefs (including “folk beliefs”) and the relationship between dysfunctional beliefs and psychiatric symptoms are discussed next. The remaining sections describe the degree to which the brain stem, the basal ganglia, the limbic system, and the PFC are involved in fear of small animals, panic attack, OCD, general anxiety, social anxiety, depression, and paranoia, and the operation of evolutionary threat assessment systems, especially the role of the ventromedial PFC in assessing threats and safety and the influence on beliefs on its assessments.
Religion, spirituality and health: a social scientific approach, 2017
The chapter discusses the major topics presented in Charles Darwin’s books The Descent of Man and... more The chapter discusses the major topics presented in Charles Darwin’s books The Descent of Man and The Expression of Emotions. As the chapter explains, the primary scientific importance of The Descent of Man is that it extends the evolutionary concept of descent from an ancient common ancestor, which was proposed by Charles Darwin, Erasmus Darwin, the Comte de Buffon, Jean-Baptise Lamarck and others, to humans. However, by the time The Descent of Man was published, two other books had already made the claim that humans had evolved from lower types of animals. The other major contribution of the book, from a psychological perspective, was its claim that the mental abilities of animals and humans differ only in degree, not in kind, a concept that has come to be called the theory of the “continuity of mind.” As the chapter explains, the major contribution of The Expression of Emotions, which has been called the first book on Evolutionary Psychiatry, is that it explicitly extends the concept of the continuity of mental abilities in humans and other animals to the experience and expression of emotions. The chapter describes the parallels Darwin saw between the human and animal expression of anger, fear, and other emotions.
Religion, spirituality and health: a social scientific approach, 2017
This chapter provides a precis of Part II of the book, including a brief discussion of Charles Da... more This chapter provides a precis of Part II of the book, including a brief discussion of Charles Darwin’s basic ideas about evolution, and the major theories presented in his three books on evolution: the theory of common descent (or descent with modification), the theory of natural selection, the theory of sexual selection, and the theory of continuity of mind. The chapter explains that Darwin’s ideas about evolution were rapidly and widely accepted by the general public in the U.K. and U.S., with the exception of Conservative Christians in the U.S. The chapter also briefly describes the reactions of American psychology and the development of Evolutionary Psychology, as well as the development of Ethology in Europe. The scientific concepts of ultimate causes and proximate causes are discussed and several examples of proximate causes (or proximate mechanisms) are given in the section titled Ultimate Causes and Proximate Mechanisms. The final section of the chapter highlights the key conclusions to be drawn from Part II of the book.
Religion, spirituality and health: a social scientific approach, 2017
The chapter summarizes current knowledge about the brain structures involved in fear in animals a... more The chapter summarizes current knowledge about the brain structures involved in fear in animals and humans. The periaqueductal gray of the brain stem is the most primitive structure known to be involved in defensive and fear-related behavior in animals and fear in humans. The basal ganglia are also involved in defensive and fear-related behavior in animals, but their role in human fear is not clear. As the chapter explains, the amygdala, which is a part of the limbic system, is the neural nexus of fear in the brain, and it appears to be the primary source of fear in mammals, including humans. Fear as we know it may not have existed before the evolution of the amygdala. The amygdala generates fear as part of its function to assess potential threats of physical harm and to warn us about them. The chapter explains how the amygdala, which is said to operate under the “better safe than sorry principle,” tends to over-react to ambiguous stimuli as if they are threats, and therefore, produces fear even when something may not actually pose a threat of harm. This over-reaction can be countered by the prefrontal cortex, which makes it own threat assessments and can suppress the fear generated by the amygdala if it decides the fear is not justified.
Religion, spirituality and health: a social scientific approach, 2017
This chapter examines key scholars’ ideas related to organic evolution during the historical peri... more This chapter examines key scholars’ ideas related to organic evolution during the historical periods known as The Reformation and The Enlightenment. The Protestant Reformation, which began in the early 16th Century, ended the Roman Catholic Church’s control over learning and Christian theology. The Reformation’s rejection of Scholasticism revitalized interest in science, but its emphasis on the Bible as the core of Christian theology turned the study of Natural History into Natural Theology, which saw the hand of God in every aspect of nature. While significant advances were made in biology and zoology during the 16th and 17th Centuries, as demonstrated by the research of John Ray and the systemization of these fields by Carolus Linnaeus, the chapter explains how belief in Biblical literalism and belief in the immutability of plant and animal forms, hampered the development of ideas about organic evolution. Much of the chapter is devoted to explaining how the writings of The Enlightenment thinkers Georges-Louis Leclerc Buffon and Erasmus Darwin during the 18th Century set the stage for the theory of organic evolution proposed by Charles Darwin in the 19th Century.
Religion, spirituality and health: a social scientific approach, 2017
This chapter explores the evolutionary roots of three classes of psychiatric symptoms that are no... more This chapter explores the evolutionary roots of three classes of psychiatric symptoms that are not anxiety disorders: depression, somatization, and paranoid ideation. Although depression might seem to be the least likely psychiatric disorder to be an evolutionary adaption, the chapter discusses over a half dozen theoretical articles that propose that it is. The chapter also describes how the proximate mechanisms underlying different types of paranoid delusions (i.e., persecutory and jealous delusions) may have evolved from different modes of evolution, Charles Darwin’s “Natural Selection” and “Sexual Selection,” respectively. The end of the chapter discusses why the proximate mechanisms underlying anxiety disorders and other psychiatric disorders, which evolved to protect us from harm, do not seem to be adaptive to us in everyday life, including the frequency, intensity, and duration of symptoms, and the fundamental problem that the mechanisms trigger fear and anxiety when no real threat of harm exists. Finally, the chapter highlights some of the shortcomings of evolutionary psychology, which is interested in only the last 1.8 million years of human evolution.
Religion, spirituality and health: a social scientific approach, 2017
The chapter describes how psychologists and biologists reacted to Charles Darwin’s The Expression... more The chapter describes how psychologists and biologists reacted to Charles Darwin’s The Expression of Emotions, which has been called the first book on Evolutionary Psychiatry. The reactions of psychologists have been mixed over the years. Evolution became an element of the Functionalist school of American psychology in the early 20th Century, but evolution was ignored by the Behaviorist school of American psychology for the rest of the century. As the chapter explains, it was not until the end of the century that a group of U.S. researchers began the field of Evolutionary Psychology to apply evolutionary principles to understand the cognitive processes underlying human culture and social relationships, including gender roles, mate selection, and parental investment. The Expression of Emotions and evolutionary theory, in general, had a more profound and sustained effect on the field of ethology, which originated in Europe as a branch of biology that studies the evolutionary adaptiveness of instinctive behavior in animals. The chapter introduces the ethological concept of fixed-action patterns in animals, which has implications for understanding certain human psychiatric symptoms, as discussed in later chapters. The chapter also explains the relationship between Aristotle’s four causes and the modern scientific concepts of the proximate causes (or proximate mechanisms) and the ultimate causes of behavior (and anatomy), and gives examples of the proximate causes and ultimate causes of territorial aggression in animals and eating in humans.
Religion, spirituality and health: a social scientific approach, 2017
The chapter traces the development of Charles Darwin's ideas about the concept of organic evoluti... more The chapter traces the development of Charles Darwin's ideas about the concept of organic evolution, discusses the reasons why he delayed publishing his ideas for many years, and describes the major elements of the theories of evolution presented in his 1859 book, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. The influence of his grandfather's ideas about evolution is also discussed, as well as the common themes found in Charles Darwin's Origin of Species and the writings of Erasmus Darwin (his grandfather), the Comte de Buffon, and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. These similarities include their emphasis on the similarities between the breeding of domesticated plants and animals (which Charles Darwin called Artificial Selection) and the natural processes underlying the evolution of wild plants and animals (which Charles Darwin called Natural Selection). The chapter discusses key elements of Darwin's theories of evolution, including that: (1) animals reproduce at a rate that exceeds their food resources, (2) which creates competition for resources, (3) that members of a species vary in terms of their inherited characteristics, (4) that some inherited characteristics enhance survival and reproduction, (5) that such adaptive characteristics are inherited by offspring, (6) which leads to the spread of these adaptive characteristics within the population, such that (7) successive generations of the descendants of members of the original species may become sufficiently different from their ancestors that they become a different kind of animal over time through the accumulation of adaptive characteristics. Keywords Adaptation • Common ancestor • Darwin • Evolution • Natural Selection • Origin of Species 5.1 Development of Darwin's Ideas Charles Darwin was born into an affluent English family in 1809 [1, 2], the same year Lamarck published his book about evolution, Philosophie Zoologique [3]. In 1825, Charles went to Edinburgh University, where his older brother Robert was studying medicine, to try his hand at medicine too. While there, he did coursework in geology and zoology and became interested in Natural History, especially invertebrate sea animals, which he studied throughout the rest of his life. Abandoning the
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Papers by Kevin J Flannelly