A 51-item Death Anxiety Scale-Extended was constructed. This scale consists of the 15 Death Anxiety Scale items plus 36 new items which were generated on a rational basis that both survived content validity ratings and correlated at the .001 level with three out of four groups (one Kuwaiti, one Sudanese, and two American) participants. The Death Anxiety Scale-Extended correlated .
Do your clients talk about using various complementary/alternative medicine (CAM) approaches to deal with their problems? Are you aware of the research on these approaches and their possible effect on health? Many popular CAM approaches are described, and the background and efficacy literature on several of them is reviewed and discussed. Ethical, legal, and practical issues for psychologists are discussed. Data from a preliminary survey of members of the American Psychological Association (N ϭ 202) on their knowledge and use of CAM are reported. A majority held favorable opinions of the potential legitimacy of alternative modalities, but many correctly assumed that state laws are ambiguous on this matter. This information may help the practicing psychologist respond more effectively when clients talk about their CAM interests and practices.
A 12-item Animal-Human Continuity Scale with a Likert-type 7-option format was constructed to measure the extent to which the respondent views humans and animals in a dichotomous fashion vs. on a continuum. After the generation of items on a rational basis, item selection was based
on ratings of content validity followed by item-total score correlation based on a sample of 88 graduate students, faculty and university staff participants. The scale contained such items as “Humans can think but animals cannot”, “People evolved from lower animals”,
and “People have a spiritual nature but animals do not”. A Cronbach's alpha of .69 was obtained. The scale yielded three factors– “rational capacity”, “superiority vs. equality”, and “evolutionary continuum”. More traditionally religious
participants tended to respond in the dichotomous direction. In another validation project a significant difference in the expected direction was found for participants from a Unitarian Universalist church (in the continuous direction) and a conservative Methodist church (dichotomous direction).
Implications for the use of this instrument in the measurement of individual differences are discussed.
In recent years, there has been an increasing acceptance of the notion that the mind can influence the body. This is psychosomatic medicine, and is a major step toward restoring the holistic view of health. However, there has been less recognition of the effect that physical health interventions can have on the functioning of the mind; somatopsychic medicine. This paper surveys two of the many available holistic healing modalities that treat the mind through interventions other than psychotherapy and psychopharmacology. Homeopathy and Traditional Chinese Medicine are described, and case material and research are reviewed. Potential advantages of holistic healing approaches are listed as are possible topics for future research.
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