Many individuals use prayer to manage negative emotions, but scholars know little about how prayer accomplishes this task. Using in-depth interview data from victims of intimate partner violence, I argue that prayer is an imaginary social support interaction that provides individuals with resources they use to perform individual emotion management strategies. In particular, interactions with God through prayer provide individuals (1) an other to whom one can express and vent anger; (2) positive reflected appraisals that help maintain selfesteem; (3) reinterpretive cognitions that make situations seem less threatening; (4) an other with whom one can interact to ''zone out'' negative emotion-inducing stimuli; and (5) an emotion management model to imitate. Most of these resources help individuals deal primarily with a particular type of emotion and have an appreciable influence on social action. The analysis presented suggests that scholars should investigate how interactions with imagined others help individuals manage emotions.

In-depth interviewing is now a common method in sociology. Although there are many potential benefits of in-depth interviewing assignments for both majors and nonmajors, few have developed tools one can use to teach this method at the first and second year, especially in substantive classes where instruction in interviewing is constrained by time and practical circumstances. In this note, the authors present an in-class exercise and tip sheet they developed to teach beginning undergraduates how to conduct quality in-depth interviews. Comparative analysis of students’ preliminary and final interview guides, as well as the results of a student survey, support the teaching effectiveness of the workshop and tip sheet.

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Prayer is one of the most common religious activities practiced by Americans. In this review, I make the argument that prayer is a social psychological phenomenon that scholars should treat as such. After a discussion of the use of prayer as a proxy for overall religiosity and a brief excursus on current typologies of prayer, I provide three main arguments for the claim that prayer is a social psychological phenomenon. First, I review evidence that prayer is a legitimate social interaction with ''imagined others'' that shares many characteristics with and involves the same cognitive and interactional processes as human-human interactions. Second, I review evidence that shows that individuals' social positions influence the frequency of prayer. Third, I review evidence that prayer influences social action through psychological and interactional processes.

Religious coercive control refers to the use of religious beliefs and doctrine as means to coercively control intimate partners. Scholars have shown that some abusive partners use the Christian doctrine of submission as a means of religious coercive control. I explore how victims who experience the doctrine of submission qua religious coercive control actively resist it. I argue that victims' successful resistance of the doctrine is contingent on their religious capital-that is, the knowledge and mastery that people have of a particular religious culture-and interpretive confidence-that is, people's subjective confidence in their interpretations of religious culture-related to the doctrine.