The International Journal of Transpersonal Studies, medyczne- książki w j ang
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T
he International Journal of
ranspersonal Studies
Volume 31(1), 2012
Table of Contents
Editors’ Introduction—
Glenn Hartelius
iii
Spirituality and the MMPI-2 Restructured Clinical Scales
Diana M. Mendez & Douglas A. MacDonald
1
Connecting the Spiritual and Emotional Intelligences:
Conirming an Intelligence Criterion and Assessing the Role of Empathy
David B. King, Constance A. Mara, & Teresa L. DeCicco
11
he Scale for Existential hinking
Blake A. Allan & C. Branton Shearer
21
Trauma and Transformative Passage
Reed A. Morrison
38
SPECIAL TOPIC: Parapsychology
Introduction to Special Topic Section
Sean Avila Saiter & Glenn Hartelius
47
Transpersonal Psychology, Parapsychology, and Neurobiology:
Clarifying their Relations
Douglas A. MacDonald & Harris L. Friedman
49
Mental Health and the Paranormal
Simon Dein
61
How Should herapists Respond to Client Accounts of Out-of-Body Experience?
Alexander De Foe
75
Is the Reincarnation Hypothesis Advanced by Stevenson
for Spontaneous Past-life Experiences Relevant for the Understanding
of the Ontology of Past-life Phenomena?
Sergei Slavoutski
83
Psychoactive Substances and Paranormal Phenomena: A Comprehensive Review
David Luke
97
International Journal of Transpersonal Studies
i
he International Journal of Transpersonal Studies
Volume 31, Issue 1, 2012
Editor
Glenn Hartelius
Publisher
Floraglades Foundation, Incorporated
1270 Tom Coker Road
LaBelle, FL 33935
© 2012 by Floraglades Foundation, Inc.
All Rights Reserved
Senior Editor
Harris Friedman
Coordinating Editor
Les Lancaster
ISSN (Print) 1321-0122
ISSN (Electronic) 1942-3241
Assistant Editors
Maureen Harrahy
Courtenay Crouch
Board of Editors
Manuel Almendro (Spain)
Rosemarie Anderson (USA)
Liora Birnbaum (Israel)
Laura Boggio Gilot (Italy)
Jacek Brewczynski (USA)
Søren Brier (Denmark)
Elias Capriles (Venezuela)
Michael Daniels (UK)
John Davis (USA)
Wlodzislaw Duch (Poland)
James Fadiman (USA)
Jorge N. Ferrer (Spain/USA)
Joachim Galuska (Germany)
David Y. F. Ho (Hong Kong, China)
Daniel Holland (USA)
Chad Johnson (USA)
Bruno G. Just (Australia)
Sean Kelly (USA)
Jefrey Kuentzel (USA)
S. K. Kiran Kumar (India)
Charles Laughlin (Canada/USA)
Olga Louchakova (USA)
Vladimir Maykov (Russia)
Axel A. Randrup (Denmark)
Vitor Rodriguez (Portugal)
Brent Dean Robbins (USA)
Mario Simöes (Portugal)
Charles Tart (USA)
Rosanna Vitale (Canada)
John Welwood (USA)
Honorary Editor
Stanley Krippner
Editors Emeriti
Don Diespecker
Philippe Gross
Douglas A. MacDonald
Sam Shapiro
Guest Special Topic Editor
Sean Avila Saiter
Associate Managing Editors
Cheryl Fracasso
Adam Rock
Rochelle Suri
Associate Circulation Editor
Adrian Andreescu
Editorial Assistant
Lila Hartelius
Student Interns
Liz Caine
Rashmi Chidanand
Nick Fortino
International Journal of Transpersonal Studies
ii
Editors’ Introduction
T
ranspersonal scholars at times suggest that their
Humanistic psychology began with the premise
that mental health is not merely the absence of disease,
but the cultivation of human potential. Transpersonal
psychology applied this inspiring stance to human
spirituality, adopting the vision of democratized trans-
cendence crafted by the American transcendentalists
and put into practice by the anti-authoritarian youth
revolutions of the 1950s and 1960s. Unlike the great
Eastern traditions to which transpersonal scholars
often give deference, the transpersonal movement sees
transcendence not as the province of the few, but as the
birthright of every human being. his conluence of
human potential and spiritual democracy is the particular
heritage of transpersonalism. It is an approach resonant
with a widespread contemporary interest in personal
growth, popular spirituality, alternative approaches to
healthcare that seek to align themselves with the healing
powers of the body, and concerns for social justice and
environmental sustainability.
Yet as a scholarly discipline, transpersonal psych-
ology has been long on discussion and short on empirical
evidence. A recent review of literature in the
Journal of
Transpersonal Psychology
and the
International Journal
of Transpersonal Studies
during the irst four decades of
the ield’s existence showed that from 1970 to 1979, only
4% of articles were empirical in nature; three decades
later, during the period 2000 to 2009, the percentage
of empirical papers had risen to no more than 17%
(Hartelius, Rothe, & Roy, in press). While this shows a
clear positive trend, the amount of empirical evidence that
the ield has produced is still modest at best.
he resistance to empirical work is understand-
able, even laudable, given that it is inherited from
humanistic psychology, and relects a similar concern
that the richness and nuanced complexities of human
experience not be reduced to numbers and categories
and statistics. Yet the tools of empirical study within
psychology are vastly improved from the era in which
these concerns took root—the 1950s and 1960s. Not
only are there now scores of measures for qualities such as
compassion, empathy, spirituality, mindfulness, and other
transpersonally-related constructs (see MacDonald &
Friedman, this issue), but qualitative inquiry has developed
to the point where it is now represented by a division within
the American Psychological Association (Division 5).
work is an extension of an area of study that
reaches far back into human history, that in
the spirit of the great spiritual traditions it inquires into
transcendent human capacities, but within the context of
contemporary Western psychology and the humanities.
However, it is also possible to see the contemporary
transpersonal project as something quite new.
Within cultures where religious traditions still
hold considerable inluence—India or Indonesia, for
example—the average person participates in religious
ritual but does not typically partake in the transformative
esoteric practices reserved for mystics or renunciates.
hese are used by a small percentage of the population,
who devote themselves to advanced spiritual study.
Such an arrangement is resonant with the structure of
traditional cultures throughout much of the world—a
spiritual version of the sorts of social hierarchies in which
political power and wealth is vested in a monarchy or
small ruling class.
he American and French revolutions of the late
18th century, however imperfect their implementation,
brought a novel idea: Everyone can participate in political
power. American transcendentalism, a movement of the
mid-19th century that took shape around such luminaries
as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emily Dickenson, and John
Muir, took a similar view of spiritual power. It planted
the notion that the esotericism of the East was something
in which a simple-living American might partake. In the
words of horeau (1854/2008), “I lay down the book and
go to my well for water, and lo! there I meet the servant of
the Bramin, priest of Brahma and Vishnu and Indra, who
still sits in his temple on the Ganges reading the Vedas, or
dwells at the root of a tree with his crust and water jug. I
meet his servant come to draw water for his master, and
our buckets as it were grate together in the same well. he
pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the
Ganges” (p. 183). hough short-lived, the transcendentalist
vision was revived by best-selling books of the Victorian
era such as
Light of Asia
(Arnold, 1879/1995)—a ictional
account of the enlightenment of the Buddha—by the
poets of the Beatnik generation, and by the counterculture
revolution of the 1960s. Esoteric visions were now not just
for a few in the East, but available to everyone through either
meditation or communion with psychedelic substances.
International Journal of Transpersonal Studies
,
31
(1), 2012, pp. iii-iv
International Journal of Transpersonal Studies
iii
In short, at this date the sparseness of empirical papers
within the transpersonal ield appears to be more habitual
than justiiable on grounds that once held validity.
As psychology moves toward being an evidence-
based science, it will be necessary to take positions on what
constitutes evidence, what philosophical assumptions may
be implicit within a given methodological approach, and
whether reductionistic and materialistic values should
determine what is or is not reasonable to examine.
However, for the ield to gain the prominence that it
deserves based on the importance of its subject matter and
the care for preserving the authenticity of experience that
permeates its approaches, a steadily increasing emphasis
on empirical work can and should be made a priority.
he modest occasion for this rather large
preamble is the fact that in the current issue, nearly
half of the papers are empirical in nature. Small though
this milestone might be, it serves as an opportunity to
re-state this journal’s commitment to the support and
publication of empirical research within transpersonal
psychology and other areas of transpersonal studies, and
to call for additional empirical papers in these areas.
he irst paper, by Mendez and MacDonald,
takes direct aim at the sort of quantitative work that is
sorely needed, both by transpersonal scholars and by others
interested in the practial task of assessing spirituality as a
dimension of human functioning. In this paper, the authors
examine correlations between measures of spirituality
and the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-2
Restructured Clinical (MMPI-2 RC) scales, a common
tool for identifying deviations from what is considered to
be mental health. hese results were then compared with
earlier work that made a similar assessment of the original
MMPI scales, and the diferences explained in the context
of how and why these scales have been reformulated.
he second paper, King, Mara, & DeCicco, uses
a measure of spiritual intelligence previously published
in this journal (King & DeCicco, 2009) to examine
possible correlations between spiritual intelligence and
measures of both emotional intelligence and empathy.
It is not only the fact that correlations were found,
but the speciic nature of those correlations, that ofers
perspectives on how spiritual intelligence might be
framed. As such, this work helps to give context and
substance to the notion of spiritual intelligence, which is
remains a new and somewhat controversial construct.
Next, Blake and Shearer introduce a new
measure, the Scale for Existential hinking, which is
designed to measure how much an individual examines
basic concerns about human existence and how adept
they are at meaningfully situating themselves relative
to these issues. he study presents validation data on
the scale as well as correlations with constructs such as
curiosity and meaning in life. Given that transpersonal
psychology considers matters of ultimate concern, this
scale ofers a novel and valuable tool for measuring the
tendency to think in those terms.
Finally, Morrison proposes that the experience of
initiates who undergo experiences of controlled violence
in traditional rites of passage signiicantly parallels the
phenomenon of trauma disorder, and the fact that such
initiates are apparently able to integrate their experiences
usefully may ofer insights into how trauma suferers
might be guided into similar positive outcomes. his
suggestion is accompanied by two short clinical case
histories, one success and one failure, that illustrate the
clinical challenges and potentials of such an approach.
In addition, there are ive papers in a special
topic section on parapsychology, prepared by Special
Topic Editor Sean Avila Saiter. hese are introduced
separately at the beginning of that section. Here, it is
noteworthy that parapsychology is perhaps the aspect
of transpersonal research for which there is the most
extensive and rigorous empirical research.
he
International Journal of Transpersonal Studies
will continue to encourage and support empirical work
in the transpersonal ield by giving priority and expedited
consideration to empirical submissions, in the hope that
the lurry of empirical papers in this issue will grow into
a steady stream of research that can bring transpersonal
aproaches into the prominence that they deserve.
Glenn Hartelius, Editor
Soia University
Arnold, E. (1995).
Light of Asia
. Whiteish, MT: Kessinger.
(Original work published 1879)
Hartelius, G., Rothe, G., & Roy, P. (in press). A
brand from the burning: Deining transpersonal
psychology.
he Wiley-Blackwell handbook of trans-
personal psychology.
Oxford, UK: Wiley-Blackwell.
King, D. B., & DeCicco, T. L. (2009). A viable model
and self-report measure of spiritual intelligence.
International Journal of Transpersonal Studies
,
28
(1),
68-85.
horeau, H. D. (2008).
Walden: Or, life in the woods.
Radford, VA: Wilder. (Original work published
1854)
International Journal of Transpersonal Studies
iv
Spirituality and the MMPI-2 Restructured Clinical Scales
Diana M. Mendez & Douglas A. MacDonald
University of Detroit Mercy
Detroit, MI, USA
he present investigation examined the relation between spirituality, measured by the
Expressions of Spirituality Inventory (ESI; MacDonald, 2000); and the Minnesota
Multiphasic Personality Inventory-2 Restructured Clinical (MMPI-2 RC) scales (Tellegen et
al., 2003) using data from a previously published study (i.e., MacDonald & Holland, 2003).
Zero-order, multiple, and partial correlations were calculated to explore the association.
All multiple correlations, wherein the ive ESI dimensions were used collectively to predict
MMPI-2 RC scales, emerged signiicant for all MMPI-2 RC scales. For zero-order correlations,
all RC scales were found to have a signiicant relation with at least one ESI dimension.
Existential Well-Being (EWB) was found
to be signiicantly negatively associated with all
MMPI-2 RC scales except RC9-Hypomanic Activation. When compared to correlations
between the ESI and the MMPI-2 Basic Clinical Scales, the RC scales seem to produce a
similar pattern of coeicients but of lower magnitude. he study concludes with a discussion
of the indings, limitations, and suggestions for clinical practice and future research.
Keywords
:
spirituality, Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-2
Restructured Clinical (MMPI-2 RC) Scales, measurement, psychopathology
I
n the last few decades, spirituality has been
Based precisely on such reasoning, MacDonald
and Holland (2003) completed a study examining the
association of the Basic Clinical scales of the Minnesota
Multiphasic Personality Inventory, Second Edition
(MMPI-2; Butcher, Dahlstrom, Graham, Tellegen, &
Kaemmer, 1989) to self-reported religious involvement
and to a multidimensional measure of spirituality
called the Expressions of Spirituality Inventory (ESI;
MacDonald, 1997, 2000) with a nonclinical sample
of 239 university students. For those unfamiliar with
the test, the MMPI-2 is one of the most widely used
measures of psychopathology (Greene, 2011), and while
it contains a variety of scale sets, the Clinical scales are
the most venerable and widely used of them all. In their
original incarnation on the irst MMPI (Hathaway &
McKinley, 1940), the clinical scales were derived using
an empirical test construction strategy (as opposed
to a theory driven strategy) where items from a large
item pool were assigned to scales based on their ability
to diferentiate between normal people and known
diagnostic groups. his approach ultimately resulted
in the creation of 10 scales that were preserved in the
MMPI-2. hese scales are called Hypochondriasis (Hs,
increasingly recognized as an important aspect of
human functioning, which demonstrates a robust
but complex association to health and well-being
(Elmer, MacDonald, & Friedman, 2003; Gartner,
1996; MacDonald & Friedman, 2002). Despite such
recognition, there appears to be a lag in how spirituality
is being incorporated into assessment practices by health
professionals (e.g., psychologists). Even more simply, there
appears to be minimal published research that examines
the relation of spirituality to instruments commonly
used in clinical assessment. If spirituality is indeed an
area of functioning that is important, then it would be
logical that research should be done to establish how it
relates to popular clinical tests since such investigations
will help practitioners better incorporate spirituality into
assessment. he fact that the Diagnostic and Statistical
Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV-TR; APA, 2000)
includes a diagnostic category for religious or spiritual
problems further reinforces arguments about the need
for research to be done that supports ways in which
spirituality can be considered in formal psychological
assessment.
International Journal of Transpersonal Studies
,
31
(1), 2012, pp. 1-10
Spirituality and the MMPI-2
International Journal of Transpersonal Studies
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