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In light of the modern phenomenon of increased institutionalized deaths occurring in hospitals and in nursing homes, much of recent death attitude research has focused on health professionals. The present study explored possible relationships among measures of death anxiety, communication apprehension with the dying, and empathy in undergraduate nursing, premedical, and control subjects. Main effects for year in school indicated that seniors scored lower than freshmen on communication apprehension with the dying. The multivariate effects for field of study were also significant, with univariate results indicating that nursing students scored lower than controls on communication apprehension with the dying.

This study assessed the association between spirituality and psychopathology in a group of sexual abuse victims and controls with a focus on whether spirituality moderated the association between sexual trauma and psychopathology. Seventy-one sexual trauma victims were compared to 25 control subjects on spiritual well-being, the Eating Disorder Examination, the PTSD Symptom Scale, and the SCID-I/P. The data showed that the two groups did not differ in terms of spiritual well-being. Sexual trauma status was associated with most of the psychopathology outcomes, but its impact on psychopathology was largely unmoderated by spirituality. Among sexual trauma victims, the level of spiritual well-being did not alter the probability of current psychopathology. However, increased spiritual well-being was generally associated with lower psychopathology for the entire sample.

where his primary teaching responsibilities fall in the area of mental illness and psychotherapy. Dr. Krejci received his PhD in counseling psychology from the University of Notre Dame and completed a clinical psychology internship at the Norfolk Regional Center in Norfolk, Nebraska. For the past 14 years he has been seeing clients through a part-time private practice at a local Roman Catholic church. Dr. Krejci is a practicing Roman Catholic whose therapeutic orientation is influenced by both humanistic and cognitive-behavioral approaches to psychotherapy. He became interested in the use of religious coping in the lives of his clients beginning in graduate school. His research, investigating the acceptance of nontraditional (female) God images, developed as he worked with clients whose use of male God imagery reinforced traditional female/male stereotypes. Dr. Krejci recently served as editor of the Psychology of Religion Newsletter, a publication of Division 36 (Psychology of Religion) of the American Psychological Association.

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