We surveyed a total of 315 spiritual directors, psychologist members of the Christian Association for Psychological Studies (CAPS), and psychologist members of the American Psychological Association (APA) to determine their respective values on ten mental health themes derived from Jensen and Bergin (1988), and three spirituality scales drawn from the writings of John of the Cross. All three groups endorsed the value of expressing feelings, personal autonomy and maturity, and integrating work and leisure. CAPS psychologists and spiritual directors endorsed more than APA psychologists the values of spirituality, forgiveness, and the three John of the Cross scales. Spiritual directors reported greater endorsement of the self-awareness and growth theme than did psychodynamic psychologists who, in turn, reported greater endorsement than cognitive-behavioral psychologists. The results are examined in light of the pre-Enlightenment paradigm and value system in which spiritual direction and Christian theology are rooted.

The spiritual disciplines of silence and solitude have long been practiced within the contemplative Christian tradition as a means of character transformation and experiencing God. Do these disciplines affect the use of silence in psychotherapy for Christian clinicians in a graduate training program? Nineteen graduate students in clinical psychology were assigned to a wait-list control condition or a training program involving the disciplines of solitude and silence, and the groups were reversed after the first cohort completed the spiritual disciplines training. One group, which was coincidentally comprised of more introverted individuals, demonstrated a striking increase in the number of silent periods and total duration of silence during simulated psychotherapy sessions during the period of training. The other group, more extraverted in nature, did not show significant changes in therapeutic silence during the training. These results cause us to pose research questions regarding the interaction of personality characteristics and spiritual disciplines in training Christian psychotherapists.

The transition from adolescence to young adulthood is a dynamic developmental period during which youth are striving for social independence while simultaneously undergoing maturation of cognitive control skills. Variation in growth trajectories of adolescent neurocognitive development has been hypothesized to contribute to adverse outcomes in the transition to adulthood, such as experiencing violence. However, there remains a lack of consensus on the normative trajectory of cognitive maturation. To address this problem, we derive a Cognitive Maturity Index (CMI), to estimate the difference between chronological and cognitive age predicted with latent factor estimates of inhibitory control, risky decision-making and emotional processing measured with standard neuropsychological instruments. Age prediction with latent factor estimates of cognitive skills approximated age within 10 months (Pearson's Correlation r=0.71). Males in advanced puberty displayed lower cognitive maturity relative to peers of the same age; manifesting as weaker inhibitory control, greater risk taking, desensitization to negative affect, and poor recognition of positive affect. Elevated risk for future violent outcomes was effected by delayed CMI and fully mediated by drive for achieving rewards, illustrating adolescent maturation as a risk traversal process into young adulthood. This work provides a foundation for deriving a more precise definition of cognitive maturity to aid empirical assessment of individual-specific developmental risk factors for adverse outcomes in emerging adulthood.