25 years of Psychology Internships

Psychology Internships at Hope College are academic semester-long, supervised, pre-professional work experiences related to Psychology and the student\u27s vocational interests. Students pursue agreed upon learning goals in a written learning contract, are supervised on-site, complete weekly assignments, and participate in a class on campus for academic credit

Self-forgiveness and Forgiveness-seeking in Response to Rumination: Cardiac and Emotional Responses of Transgressors

Self-forgiveness and forgiveness-seeking are important and understudied aspects of forgiveness. We examined the cardiac and emotional patterns of healthy young adults (40 women, 40 men) who recalled an unresolved offense they had caused another person. Participants engaged in four imagery conditions: ruminating about the offense, being humbly repentant and engaging in self-forgiveness, seeking forgiveness from the victim and receiving forgiveness, and seeking forgiveness from the victim and being begrudged. Being repentant and begrudged forgiveness by one’s victim was associated with the same level of guilt as when ruminating, but significantly more negative emotion, less control, and less empathy than when ruminating, self-forgiving, and receiving forgiveness from the victim. Compared to ruminating about one’s wrong-doing, self-forgiving alleviated guilt and negative emotion, increased perceived control, decreased heart rate, and increased parasympathetic activation. Imagery of receiving forgiveness from the victim resulted in these same patterns and was equivalent to self-forgiveness across variables

Accountability as a Key Virtue in Mental Health and Human Flourishing

We propose that accountability plays an implicit, important, and relatively unexamined role in psychiatry. People generally think of accountability as a relation in which one party is held accountable by another. In this paper, we examine accountability as a virtue, drawing on philosophy, psychiatry, and psychology to examine what it means to welcome being accountable in an excellent way that promotes flourishing. When people manifest accountability as a virtue, they are both responsive to others they owe a response, and they are responsible for their attitudes and actions in light of these relationships. Psychiatric treatment often aims to correct disordered forms of accountability, including difficulties with empathy and self-regulation. Both the process of treatment and the practice of professionalism depend on relationally responsible accountability. We examine accountability as an overlooked complement to healthy autonomy. Whereas acting autonomously in congruence with one’s values is characteristic of mental health, accountability that is interpersonally responsive and responsible is vital to successful treatment as well as professionalism in psychiatry. We review components of accountability and developmental aspects of the virtue; highlight the role of accountability in healthy functioning; and describe implications for psychiatric assessment, treatment, and professionalism. We aim to catalyze awareness of accountability as intrinsic to mental health care and human flourishing

Compassion-focused reappraisal, benefit-focused reappraisal, and rumination after an interpersonal offense: Emotion-regulation implications for subjective emotion, linguistic responses, and physiology

This repeated measures psychophysiology experiment studied three responses to a past interpersonal offense (38 females and 33 males). We compared rumination with two offense reappraisal strategies. Compassion-focused reappraisal emphasized the offender\u27s humanity, and interpreted the transgression as evidence of the offender\u27s need for positive transformation. Benefit-focused reappraisal emphasized insights gained or strengths shown in facing the offense. Supporting the manipulations, compassion-focused reappraisal stimulated the most empathy and forgiveness, whereas benefit-focused reappraisal prompted the most benefit language and gratitude. Both reappraisals decreased aroused, negative emotion, and related facial muscle tension at the brow (corrugator). Both reappraisals increased happiness and positive emotion in ratings and linguistic analyses. Compassion stimulated the greatest social language, calmed tension under the eye (orbicularis oculi), and slowed heart beats (R-R intervals). A focus on benefits prompted the greatest joy, stimulated smiling (zygomatic) activity, and buffered the parasympathetic nervous system against rumination\u27s adverse effects on heart rate variability (HRV)

Compassionate reappraisal and emotion suppression as alternatives to offense-focused rumination: Implications for forgiveness and psychophysiological well-being

This within subjects experiment (28 females, 26 males) examined three responses to a past interpersonal offender. We contrasted offense-focused rumination with two subsequent, counterbalanced coping strategies: compassionate reappraisal and emotion suppression. Compassionate reappraisal emphasized the offender\u27s human qualities and need for positive change. Emotion suppression inhibited the experience and expression of negative offense-related emotions. Offense rumination was associated with negative emotion, faster heartbeats (i.e., shortened electrocardiogram R-R intervals), and lower heart rate variability (HRV; i.e., the high-frequency component of the R-R power spectrum). By contrast, both compassionate reappraisal and emotion suppression decreased negative emotion in ratings and linguistic analyses, calmed eye muscle tension (orbicularis oculi EMG, electromyography), and maintained HRV at baseline levels. Suppression inhibited negative emotion expression at the brow (corrugator EMG) and slowed cardiac R-R intervals, but without forgiveness effects. Only compassionate reappraisal significantly increased positive emotions, smiling (zygomatic EMG), and social language along with forgiveness

The Benefit of Gratitude: Trait Gratitude Is Associated With Effective Economic Decision-Making in the Ultimatum Game

The current research investigated the role of gratitude in economic decisions about offers that vary in fairness yet benefit both parties if accepted. Participants completed a trait/dispositional gratitude measure and then were randomly assigned to recall either an event that made them feel grateful (i.e., induced gratitude condition) or the events of a typical day (i.e., neutral condition). After the gratitude induction task, participants played the ultimatum game (UG), deciding whether to accept or reject fair offers (i.e., proposer: responder ratio $5:5) and unfair offers (i.e., proposer: responder ratios of$9:1, $8:2, or$7:3) from different proposers. Results showed that trait gratitude was positively correlated with respondents’ acceptance of unfair offers. However, experimentally induced momentary gratitude did not influence acceptance of unfair offers. The trait or disposition to be grateful involves the enduring capacity across different types of situations and benefactors to see the good that is present, even when that benefit is small. Accordingly, dispositional gratitude – but not momentarily induced gratitude – was associated with a greater propensity to accept even the small benefits within unfair offers which otherwise pose barriers to making the effective economic decision of accepting offers regardless of their relative size

Positive Reappraisals After an Offense: Event-related Potentials and Emotional Effects of Benefit-finding and Compassion

Using a within subjects design, three emotion regulation strategies (compassion‐focused reappraisal, benefit‐focused reappraisal, and offense rumination) were tested for their effects on forgiveness, well‐being, and event‐related potentials (ERPs). Participants (N = 37) recalled a recent interpersonal offense as the context for each emotion regulation strategy. Both decisional and emotional forgiveness increased significantly for the two reappraisal strategies compared to offense rumination. Compassion‐focused reappraisal prompted the greatest increase in both decisional and emotional forgiveness. Furthermore, both reappraisal strategies increased positively oriented well‐being measures (e.g., joy, gratitude) compared to offense rumination, with compassion‐focused reappraisal demonstrating the largest effect on empathy. Late positive potential (LPP) amplitudes in response to unpleasant affect words were larger following the benefit‐focused reappraisal strategy, indicating frontal LPP augmentation due to affective incongruence of the unpleasant stimuli with the positive, silver‐lining orientation of the benefit‐focused reappraisal emotion regulation strategy

Apology and Restitution: The Psychophysiology of Forgiveness After Accountable Relational Repair Responses

Apology and restitution each represents wrongdoers’ accountable repair responses that have promoted victims’ self-reported empathy and forgiveness in crime scenario research. The current study measured emotional and stress-related dependent variables including physiological measures, to illuminate the links between predictors of forgiveness and health-relevant side effects. Specifically, we tested the independent and interactive effects of apology and restitution on forgiveness, emotion self-reports, and facial responses, as well as cardiac measures associated with stress in 32 males and 29 females. Apology and restitution each independently increased empathy, forgiveness, gratitude, and positive emotions, while reducing unforgiveness, negative emotion, and muscle activity above the brow (corrugator supercilii, CS). The presence of a thorough apology—regardless of whether restitution was present—also calmed heart rate, reduced rate pressure products indicative of cardiac stress, and decreased muscle activity under the eye (orbicularis oculi, OO). Interactions pointed to the more potent effects of restitution compared to apology for reducing unforgiveness and anger, while elevating positivity and gratitude. The findings point to distinctive impacts of apology and restitution as factors that foster forgiveness, along with emotional and embodied changes relevant to health

Conceptualizing Spirituality and Religion as Psychological Processes: Validation of the Factor Structure of the BMMRS

This study validated previous principal component analyses of the Brief Multidimensional Measure of Religiousness/Spirituality (BMMRS) that have been conducted with persons with diverse medical conditions and traumatic brain injuries from diverse cultures (India, US), ethnicities (African American, Caucasian, South Asian), and religions (Christian, Hindu, Muslim). Participants included 398 healthy undergraduate students who completed the BMMRS online. A principal components factor analysis identified a five factor solution accounting for 64.00% of the variance in scores, labelled as: (1) Positive Spiritual Experience; (2) Negative Spiritual Experience/Congregational Support; (3) Forgiveness; (4) Religious Practices; and (5) Positive Congregational Support. The current analysis is supportive of a conceptual framework in which the BMMRS spiritual and religious variables are best conceptualised in terms of positive/negative psychological processes including: (a) emotional connection with the divine (i.e., spirituality); (b) behavioural rituals/beliefs (i.e., religiosity); and (c) social support (i.e., congregationally based). Implications for psychoneuroimmunological research are discussed