Teaching Media and Religion: Emerging Best Practices

This preface summarizes the emergence of religion and media courses from the 1950s to the present day. It makes the case for why analysis of religion and media coursework is a challenge and reports on research that shows enormous diversity among the types of courses commonly classified as within the “religion and media” subject. The preface furthermore summarizes the other articles in this special issue.     

Stress From Daily Hassles in Couples: Its Effects on Intradyadic Stress,Relationship Satisfaction,and Physical and Psychological Well‐Being

According to the systemic‐transactional stress model (STM; G. Bodenmann, European Review of Applied Psychology, 1997; 47: 137), extradyadic stress from daily hassles can have a negative impact on the individual psychological and physical health and the couple's relationship. This study is the first one to test the STM propositions in a model that includes both partners’ individual and relational outcomes simultaneously. The model also includes actor and partner effects as well as the interdependence between partners’ processes. Cross‐sectional, self‐report data were collected from 110 community couples in Switzerland. Consistent with STM predictions, results from the path model analysis indicate that for actor effects extradyadic stress from daily hassles relates directly to lower psychological (increase in anxiety symptoms) and physical well‐being and only indirectly to lower relationship satisfaction through increased intradyadic stress from relationship problems and also through more depressive symptomatology in men. The female extradyadic stress and intradyadic stress had partner effects on the male intradyadic stress and the male relationship satisfaction, respectively. Limitations as well as research and clinical implications for marriage and family therapists are discussed.     

Household Income and Trajectories of Marital Satisfaction in Early Marriage

Are the marriages of lower income couples less satisfying than the marriages of more affluent couples? To address this question, we compared trajectories of marital satisfaction among couples with a wide range of household incomes. The marital satisfaction of 862 Black, White, and Latino newlywed spouses (N = 431 couples) was assessed five times, each 9 months apart, during the first 4 years of marriage. Lower income couples did not have less satisfying marriages on average, nor did their satisfaction decline more steeply on average. They did, however, experience (a) significantly greater fluctuations in marital satisfaction across assessments and (b) significantly more variability between husbands and wives. If efforts to support the marriages of low‐income couples are to address the unique characteristics of their marital development, these findings suggest that efforts to stabilize their marriages may be more effective than efforts to improve their satisfaction alone.     

Antisocial Propensity,Adolescent School Outcomes,and the Risk of Criminal Conviction

Data from the 1986 Northern Finland Birth Cohort Study (n = 4,645) were used to examine the influence of mid‐adolescent (age 15) school outcomes on late‐adolescent (ages 17–19) risk of criminal conviction. Consistent with social‐developmental theories of offending, we found that poor academic performance and reduced school attachment increase the risk of criminal conviction independently of pre‐existing differences in antisocial propensity and other confounding factors identified in prior research. Moreover, in support of an integrated model, our research suggests that academic performance and school attachment mediate the effects of childhood antisociality and learning difficulties on late‐adolescent risk of criminal conviction. The implications of findings for policy and future research are discussed.     

Study Abroad,Global Citizenship,and the Study of Nongovernmental Organizations

Nonprofit education and management programs often recognize the efficacy of including experiential learning opportunities such as study abroad in their curricula. In addition, higher education institutions increasingly prioritize global citizenship as a learning outcome. However, challenges abound for educators who want to evaluate study abroad courses that expect students to acquire or deepen their levels of global citizenship. This study seeks to evaluate the impact of a short-course study abroad program on students’ global citizenship orientation. Our qualitative findings suggest that students indeed grapple with the notion of global citizenship in various ways while immersed in such a course. They can also express conflicting views, further confounding scholarly understanding of how to best measure global citizenship. We discuss implications for students expressing more of an observational role than an inclination to act on global issues.     

Erratum to: Token Reinforcement of Verbal Responses Controlled by Temporally Removed Verbal Stimuli

In the present study we examined the effects of token reinforcement on the convergent control of immediate and temporally removed verbal stimuli over the verbal behavior of three school-age children with autism who showed specific deficits in intraverbal responding. Throughout the study, participants were systematically introduced to a series of visitors to a university-based autism center, and subsequently probed for information about the visitor they had most recently met. Results show that contingent token reinforcement was effective at establishing control by temporally removed verbal stimuli.