Annotated Bibliography Report

By: Leger

Fall 2002 - Generation 17

Instructions for this report can be accessed here

- Part One -

Text Box: Introduction to my First Topic Question

Aloha and welcome to my focus and research on the topic question: What are the differences between men and women in how they handle relationships? Since the relationship stated in this topic question is not pinned down to marital relationships or even romantic/sexual relationships there was a lot of ways to approach this question.

If we think that marital and/or romantically/sexually involved relationships are the normal situations that constitute a platform for the answering of this topic question we are going to miss out on a large amount of research data and information. Information that has been established independent of these specific types of relationships but that are still very much related to how men and women handle relationships differently. I had to inform myself of this fact because at first I found myself looking for studies that dealt specifically with married couples or sexually involve partners. I believe that this distinction was important in formation of my search scope, and progress of my search process.

Let us peer past this introduction of my topic search to get a solid feel for what my presentation of my gathered material on this subject will appear like. The material I found will be presented in a one-by-one manner, with clear visual divisions between them. Within each presentation, I will provide a summary of the contents within the material as well as an analysis of its relationship to the search topic. In consideration of my ability to be judgmental of the quality of the material I collected within the context of my report, I will exercise my right and provide a concluding opinion of it. In order to orient you, the observer, with a direction to the material in its original context I will also provide its location and the process of my acquisition of it. This will make up my formal edited review of the material. To wrap up the paper there will be a bibliography appearing at the end.

I realized that I could look for material that supported gender differences in areas that directly affect the relationship realm, such as emotion and memory differentiation between men and women. Gender differences in interpretation of the world, and in how men and women feel about themselves internally manifest when two people are in relation with each other. There are many influences that have an impact on how men and women handle relationships differently. I needed to stay open to the vast array of gender difference research not directly concerned with men and women in relationship with one another, to get at the root causes of how the genders handle relationships differently.

A quick peek into my quantity of fetched materials on the subject of how men and women handle relationships is in order, so that your attentions are held and you are given motivation to push on and discover more about them. I searched various sources for information including, the Internet and websites on it, scientific journal article databases, independent quality book reviews on the subject, magazine articles, and on-line newspapers for potential answers. What did I find? I will tantalize you with a sample of numerous citations. I found a book review of one of Deborah Tannen’s national bestselling books on the subject of what’s problematic between men and women in relationships;.

The review of her book You Just Don’t Understand: men and women in conversation, is well written and gives several examples from the text. The book is widely read and deserves recognition. In the area of scientific research I found two impressive research reports that established hard evidence that 1) Men and women create memory of emotionally charged differently, and that difference leads to a better memory of these events in women than in men and 2) Women and men have different dream content. The findings where that typical male dreams contain more sex, aggression and appearances of other males than women’s dreams. Women’s dream contain more emotionality, with higher incidences of indoor settings and an even distribution of male and female dream characters. Women were also found to have more reference to clothing in dreams than men.

On a psychological self-help website I found a paper by a Psy.D. in clinical psychology, that outlined what he feels is important in understanding the differences between men and women. His main premise is that men and women are equal, but different, and that getting educated about these difference can help two of the opposite sex involved in a relationship relate better. On google’s groups listings of web forums I found a thread started by a wife complaining about her husband’s laziness and lying, to other people in the user group. This was interesting because it was like taking a look inside someone’s life and seeing the side effects of dysfunctional communication and lying between a man and woman in a close (marriage) relationship. Also interesting was to see how others offered help to a distressed person with this type of problem. More in depth reviews of these articles along with my other findings are what you will be reading in my formal presentation of all my collected materials and articles, following this introductory section.

I thought about investigating homosexual relationship of both men and women to shine a different light on our fixed ideas of how we stereotypically view men and women as treating their partner in a relationship (owning the fact they when we say “how men and women treat their partner”, we exclusively mean one of the opposite sex). To this end I could not produce search result and I decided to end my pursuit of it. But I believe that such extensions of the question would invariably lead to a better and more comprehensive analysis of the question at hand. My introduction to my research on the topic question of how men and women handle relationships differently is now complete.

Communication Differences make a Difference

Source # 1

A. Dr. Beth Vanfossen a researcher for and director of the ITROW, Institute for Teaching and Research on Women, at the University of Towson, in Maryland, prepared research on gender differences in communication for ITROW’s women and expression conference held last year. The document that I collected is a review of that research done by Dr. Vanfossen. The structure for the written review is that of headings in the form of questions regarding different aspects of communication differences between men and women. In reply to the heading questions answers based on research are provided. The main purpose of this review of the full research report is three fold.

First, the full text is for sale, so this edited versions stands to give us a feel for what we might buy. Second, if you want quick access to quality information on the topic of gender differences in communication, this article provides it. Lastly, the review is beneficial to non-scientific minds in that the hard-to-understand concepts and terminology of scientific research (explanation of result and statistics analysis) has been eliminated. This makes it more approachable by a wider range of the population who seek this type of information.

What kind of information on gender differences in communication did this research review provide? There are ten headings that are each their own question that relates to communication differences between the sexes. Following each heading question there is set of bullets that each signify an answer based on research. These answers are no longer than two sentences, with many of them being one sentence. Without recapitulating the entire review I will summarize the contents and also provide a sample from the review itself. The data that the answers are based on comes from research done in the area of communication differences between men and women, therefore it deals mostly with broad questions easily assessed within an experimental/research context, rather than specific questions relating to close personal relationships involving love and marriage.

This is a consideration because men and women interact in all spheres of life and we need to distinguish what the information we read is related to. The answers to the heading questions are in the forms of facts, non-subjective data that illustrate a finding of a particular study. The review touches on the subject of how men and women communicate in formal and informal group meetings, such as business meetings and household hosted parties. The research indicates that in the formal group meeting arena, men are the main contributors to the conversation, holding the speaking “floor” more often and longer than women do. Also, in formal group situations women who ask questions, take less time doing so and also ask less multiple questions. Conversely, in the informal group meeting space, women excel in relationship building speaking as much if not more than men do and display a wider range of language abilities as compared to formal group meetings.

Who interrupts more? This one of the questions presented and the answer is men. A study of faculty meetings was done and the results were that women are more likely to interrupted then men. Interestingly, women are more likely than men to allow an interruption of their talk be successful, as opposed to men who fight back. The review included a heading dealing with assertiveness in women and whether assertiveness in women is look upon negatively by other. The research cited concluded that women who displayed assertiveness were view positively.

In fact the research pointed out that being assertive is more positively looked at than being emotional. The last heading at the end of the review paper dealt with strategies and solutions to empower women pass being abused by men in the arena of communication. If a women is speaking and some one interrupts (probably a man) the women is encouraged to interject “Just a moment, I haven’t not finish”, and to use eye contact to hold other’s attention. Finally women should not adopt men’s interruption model of communication, even thought it may seem to be effective. Here is sample of one of the headings from the research review.

Are gender differences in communication patterns related to power?

When people are strangers, they expect less competence from women than from men.

· But if women are known to have prior experience or expertise related to the task, or if women are assigned leadership roles, then women show greatly increased verbal behaviors in mixed-sex groups.

A study of witnesses in a superior court found that educated professionals who have high social status were less likely to use "powerless language," regardless of gender.

Thus, differences are linked to power, and are context-specific. Differences are socially created and therefore may be socially altered.

· Other studies have found that talking time is related both to gender (because men spend more time talking than women) and to organizational power (because the more powerful spend more time talking than the less powerful).

This is a fair representation of what each section provided considering the question stated. The intended message of this research review is that of information sharing and knowledge imparting, as well as that of enticing us so we are inclined to buy the full text with annotated bibliography included. Since the text is based on social research that is considered valid at the university level there is also a message that this data is serious and correct. I think that this research review is meant as a summary of more complex, in depth view into gender differences in communication.

B. I was attracted to this research review because I feel that communication is a big, in fact a huge part of how two people relate to each other. Differences in how men and women handle relationship are undoubtedly wrapped-up in how the two sexes feel communication should be used. If we look at communication from the standpoint of relationships we see that much of what makes communication function makes a relationship function. Consider for example, language is how we communicate, and language is how we relate to each other. But the similarities don’t end there, relationships of words to other words are how words are defined, this is the idea of relational meaning. So we see that relationships are essential to the existence of language, and language is essential to the existence of interpersonal relationships that involves two more people.

Language is the basis of communication and language is the basis of our relationships. How we wield our tools of language determines the state of our relationships. From a psychological standpoint, we use language, a symbolic method of transferring meaning from one individual to the next, so that we may have interactions with others based on shared or interpersonally understood feelings and concepts. Inherent in this meaning transference is the occurrence of a relationship between the two people sending and receiving messages via the language process. This means that two psyches are aiming their powers towards the same thing; standing on common ground for the purpose of sharing meaning. This psychologically creates a substantive relationship between the two minds.

The experiences of your life don’t get implanted in to other people’s head unless we do the planting. Our life as we know it is totally based on being able to communicate with other people. Our entire system of relating to other humans beings is based on making symbolic sends between people. Relationships are based on communicated meaning and ultimately, communication itself, this is of unprecedented importance. I was please to find this review of gender differences in communication and even more please that it was written by a women, because men have biases when it comes to telling the truth about how they abuse other’s with their communications practices.

What are the applications of this new injection of knowledge? How can we benefit from finding out that men are domineering when it comes to communication and in turn relating? Establishing that communicating is relating is a key component to understanding the inner workings of relationships, because without basic knowledge, you can’t build advanced knowledge. Well, as they say knowledge is king. Now that we know it or have been alerted to it, we have a chance to become conscious of it and start to turn the tables in the right direction. Buy this I mean, women car start to be defend their right to equality in amount of time spent speaking, and their right to a non-discriminating environment to communicate within.

This turning of the tables part usually tests-out to be the hardest because it requires co-operation between one’s mental and physical facilities, as well as participation from the outside world, of uninformed and resistant people. The interface of behavior and concept, is hard to access because we are always on, we can not be operated on and have a new engine placed in us that runs on different fuel, this change is something we need to enact slowly, every waking hours of your lives. This type of change requires a construction of an environment that is conducive to it. Related to relationships, this means that the two people involved must vow to build a fair communication ground so women are not constantly abused and thought of as less valuable.

C. The information given to us via this review of Dr. Beth Vanfossen’s research in to the topic of gender difference is very informative and well established. All of it is derived from scientific investigation into the matter and has been endorsed by an educated mind for validity and correctness. I rate this research review very high, because it is non-basis and substantiated, as well as simple and concise.

The usefulness of the knowledge afforded is also high due to its connection to relating. If communicating is relating, then all of the information in this research review is of great value to the perceptive observer. I myself came across new information that led to new understanding of how man’s style of communicating is belittling and denigrating to woman. I take this in and store it as repulsion dust to my conformity to it, since I am a man.

D. The path I took that found me this review of Dr. Vanfossen’s research was done on the Internet. I used the web search engine at google.com. I searched for “Gender Differences in Communication” and was given the normal 20 plus search result pages in return, each full of links of all different types. Many of the linked sites that were returned in response to my search were commercial sites selling me, self-help books on communication differences between the sexes, i.e. J. Grey’s Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus. After navigating through 3 pages of containing at least 10 links each I got to this one. I noticed that the linked address was a .edu address, and this prompted me to follow it. Because I value university based materials more than commercial material or the .com material. The exact location of this article is: http://pages.towson.edu/itrow/wmcomm.htm.

I was able to find this article without struggle, although as you read on you will see that not all of my searches went so smoothly. After about 20 minutes of navigating past the commercial sell-all sites I encounter this article and was happy I did, because it was exactly what I was looking for.

Text Box: Memories Matter

Source # 2

A. If men and women exhibit different methods of communicating, there must a reason. Be it genetic, physiological, sexual, social, or motivational. My next piece of research is an exploration into to the brain of men and women to see what differences there is in the way memory is created for the two genders. With this I am taking us deeper down the causal path of relationship differences, approaching the question from the base level. I strongly propose that differential memory creation has an effect on how men and women handle relationships differently, because relationships, like life, are filled with meaningful decision to be made everyday and that our decision making process relies to a large extent on our memory of past events. It make logical sense than that if men and women do remember the same event differently, there would arrive a time in space within a relationship between and man and woman that would ask them to make a decision based directly on the same event that they both experienced together, e.g. a fight they had or an experience they shared in the context of their relationship.

The outcome could result in differing decisions due to the fact that they both remember the event differently. This subject deserves our attention since memory is such a big part of how we construct our knowledge of the world. I give us insight into the realities of brain function associated with memory creation in men and women on the subject of emotionally charged events. I searched out a study on the Internet of an experiment done in the state of New York. It was a university supported research project with funding and involvement from Stanford University, State University of New York and Stony Brook University, looking into the different encoding mechanisms men and women use in memory formation of emotionally charged events.

The research was done to find out why gender differences in remembering emotionally charged events exist. The research data of the mapping of the brain mechanisms was collected with the use of event-related fMRI (functional MRI) technology. The subjects, an even distribution of men and women, were first given the initial test of the experiment which involved being hooked up to the fMRI unit while they were shown images ranging in emotional intensity from neutral to emotionally negative.

The male and female subjects gave researchers feed-back as to their subjective experience of the images viewed and rated them independently of each other so that emotional intensity could be correctly measure based on their subjective experience. After the fMRI step of the experiment was done the subjects were sent home. Three weeks later they were called back in to undergo a recognition test of the images they had been exposed to. Two interesting findings came as result this contemporary research. First, it was noted that men and women rated the same image with very different intensity of emotion; a picture of gun was rated as neutral by most the men and highly emotional by all the women. Secondly, the result of the recognition test, in combination with the recorded fMRI data, revealed that women do indeed remember emotionally charged events better then men.

This difference exists because (and this is where the fMRI data fits in) women “possess a different neural mechanism for emotions that enables them to enhance their memory of those emotions more powerfully than men can.” The message to the reader of this research report is strictly informative and news oriented, since all it does is provide facts related to the findings, procedures and methods of the research. The context of where the article was founded does raise the question of commercialism, because I found it on a healthcare related site that offers services in the field for diagnostic imaging, this cannot be overlooked. The bottom line of this study is that it produced clear evidence that brain differences are responsible for the differing memories and memory abilities between men and women. I found it extremely interesting, because it shows me that there is a concrete difference in the brain function across the gender spectrum, which makes me wonder about other brain functions being different between the sexes. Overall I found this research report to be though provoking and intelligentualy stimulating.

B. Upon reviewing this document for the first time I was excited because it helped me establish a solid foundation for a causal root of the gender differences in relationship management at a basic or functional level. What makes men and women handle relationships differently? This study sheds light on this subject because at least we know that men and women are at least processing emotionally charged events differently, with women having enhanced ability for memory of this specific type of interaction. My excitement was heightened with my application of intelligence to the subject of relationship, bringing me to the conclusion that “Hey, relationships are certainly emotionally charged events or at least emotionally charged environments”. I think that women are always using their enhanced functioning of their brain while in relationship settings, my reasoning and deduction lead me to be pleased with this article I found. I think to myself finding this article was not mistake, because it plots a important part of the map of how men and women handle relationships differently.

I think that my research report has received a boon by me finding this research report. The main thing about this study that I think is central to my discovery of fuller truth on the subject of how men and women handle relationships differently is my proposition that the environment of a relationship is an emotionally charged event or space. Leading me to think that this would lead to a constant activation of this different neural mechanism for emotions that women possess which helps them create more powerful memories of emotionally charged events. It makes me think what else does this unique neural mechanism do. I was captivated by this study because the brain is so interesting to me, and I feel like the brain is the starting place of everything we experience externally.

I feel that the brain contains corresponding causative agents in the form of thoughts that put into effect our external realties. So if women experience a relationship differently than men do, there should be some brain function that varies from that of the women to that of the men. This research gives good evidence for this, if we regard my postulation that relationships constitute an extended emotional event.

C. As a scientific study containing an experiment headed by major universities, I value this research and the report I found on it. I accept it and don’t hold any skepticism about. There is much to learn and so little time do it in. I guess this is why science will be an ever evolving method of theory construction and reconstruction. That is destined to growth to new heights as the generations of scientist come and go always adding to the ever-growing data pile of objective knowledge. Sometime I want to question science and its unholy approach, but one can not deny the tangible benefits that science readily offers, and this study is a fine example of such benefits. We can see with your own eyes a presentation of the human brain function via the fMRI technology. This is imaginable while being incredible.

The idea that men and women have different mental or brain operations for creating memory and that the result of it is that women remember emotionally charged events better than men do, feels right to me. I am not a woman, so I can’t detect the enhanced more powerful creation of memory of this type, but as a man I would say I am less inclined to record emotionally filled or charged events than women, I don’t become hyperaware within them. This is something I am trying to work on, because I need to become more in touch with my emotions and my emotional self because my feelings are important to me. I can see that I have been socially reinforced to place less importance on my emotions and as a result have learned to ignore and shut them out. I actively partake in the denial of my own emotions, what the hell am I doing? Emotions are important, in fact essential guides of our lives, we need to accept them and heed them.

D. I found this research report after a long session of searching for journal articles on journal article databases on-line via UH’s Voyager system of affiliated search partners, EBSCOHost & ScienceDirect, and Science Citation Index. I had become frustrated at the fact that I could not find articles on my specific quarry of gender differences in maintenance of relationships. I put in a good 1.5 hours rooting around trying to find pertaining material to my research question of how men and women handle relationships differently. It was like I was using all the wrong search phrases because I kept getting results that had some of what I searched for in their title but none were what I wanted.

After I had decided to stop my cat and mouse game with the journal article searches, I was empty handed and felt like I needed to secure a quality reference on something related to my search topic on gender differences of handling relationships. So I went to one of my favorite Internet search engines, search.com’s metasearch engine. It is a search engine that searches other search engines. I typed in “scientific gender differences” and got the normal load of varied results. I found a link to this research report on the second page of my search result. I was hesitant to follow it, but did anyway. I was happy I did because I see the value in it and I think it adds a nice component to my report. The exact web location is: http://www.diagnosticimaging.com/dinews/2002073002.shtml

Source # 3

A. This enlightening report on understanding some of the important differences between men and women is helpful to my research because it focuses on the relational differences across the sexes. The content is excellent, the author provides a clear and accurate introductory section and follows it with a break down of what he feels are important areas for approaching understanding to gender differences. These areas are gender differences in: problem solving, thinking, memory, and sensitivity. In closing he provided an analysis of what he thinks men and women can do to build better and more understanding, with the intention of fostering tolerance of these differences in relationships. As stated by the author at the beginning, the explicit intention of the electronic publication of this paper on understanding gender differences, is for increasing the education of both sexes on their differences from the other and for generating stimulation for discussion of these differences.

In the author’s view men and women see the world differently and are coming from two different places of understanding, but that does not automatically result in problematic interaction between the two. The underlying stream of sameness, the fact that they are both bound to being human, between the sexes can allow for a co-operative situation in which a man and a woman can exist together happily in a close relationship. Although a price is attached to attainment of such harmonious personal relationships, it can be manifested. The price in this case is education according to this psychologist. What are we to educate our self on? His answer is his paper on understanding differences between the genders, of which I am critiquing now.

Important and relating to relationships are the differentiated problem solving processes men and women engage in. Men and women approach problems with similar goals, but with highly different considerations. Women are more concerned with how problems are solved, than with just the solution of the problem. Women use other people to collective solve problems. This is not like men’s approach to problem solving; their mindset is much more concerned with deriving the best and most efficient solution to the problem, with little care pointed at the problem solving process. Men are interested in performing their best when dealing with problem solving because they feel their competence is on display.

In single gender groups presented with a problem to solve, the problem solving methods employed by each gender can be seen and clearly noted. A group of girls will solve a problem using a collective intelligence approach that involves everyone and relationships among group members are co-equal in nature. In high contrast to this is the way in which the group of boys solves a problem. They created a hierarchy within the group establishing a members as the dominant leader who directs or leads the others. Instead of relationships taking on the form of co-equal they resemble a chain of command paradigm The subject of memory is included in this paper on gender differences, but the information presented mirrors that of the study on gender differences in emotionally charged memory products, that I have already reviewed. Although this adds to my hypothesis that how men and women handle relationships differently is connected with their memory creation of the relationship it self, I do not feel inclined to re-iterate what I have already said.

As I would assume, the thinking styles of men and women differ as well. These differences have to do with consideration and processing differences in information digestion. Women tend to be global thinkers trusting their intuitive sides. This global perspective means that women look at the interconnectedness of things when analyzing something. They consider it as a part of the whole. Men do not share this thinking pattern with women. Men tend to think about one thing at a time and have a enhanced ability to separate themselves from what they are thinking about, which lead to less complex thought schemas of the world because the interconnectedness factor is largely reduced. Men see things as more independent from each other, whereas women focus on relational and connectedness meanings. The final pages of the paper explain sensitivity differences across gender and offer solutions and suggestions on how to construction a healthy relationship observing the differences between men and women.

Within the paper sensitivity is related to its importance of meaning to a relationship. The basic gender difference is that men and women have sensitivities to certain things within a relationship that signify to them that the relationship is stable and in good health. Men are sensitive to activities such as sports, competition, outdoor excursions, and physical sexuality, and doing these things with his partner tells a man his relationship is in good repair. This is not the case for women’s sensitivities in the context of a relationship. Women receive an increase in sense of relationship well being when they engage in communication, dialogue, intimate sharing of experiences and emotional content with their partner. There is certainly a gap in what makes relationship seem safe and healthy to men and women. This is big. By understand the special difference that exist between men and women we can learn to avoid taking gender differences personally, and this will reduce greatly our frustration at them. We need to learn to accept each other and realize that hoping difference to go away is appropriate.

B. The paper prefaces it examination of gender difference in everyday functions, by clearing establishing that physical gender differences are apparent and accepted without question. We are introduced to the subject of the brain again and informed that there are gender differences in brain structure that lead to differential systems of processing of information. One major difference is that the female brain, in comparison to the male brain, has four times as many brain cells connecting the right and left sides of the brain. This leads to greater abilities in multitasking and global thinking processes which require greater involvement of the left and right sides of the brain, working in unison. Males on the other hand who have four times less brain cells that connect the left and right sides of their split brain tend to do more things one at a time and have a hard time understanding the complexities of connections between things.

This is more evidence that brain composition makes up the differences in how men and women handle relationships differently. My theory that external differences in our subjective experiences of reality are linked or correspond to different brain productions seems to gaining value. This paper caught my interest, because it attributes the differences between the genders as a function of brain make-up. In addition to this, I was also attracted to this paper because from a psychological perspective, we know that motivation is a huge part of why people act the way they do. So, in applying that idea to this paper on gender differences, we can see a clear relationship between the ability to do something and the motivation for performing it. For example, if women can think using multitasking as a part of their thought process, and they feel that it offers advantages over less complex cognitive systems of information processing, like that of men which requires less left brain-right brain connection and cross communication, they are motivated to engage in it. Motivation for doing the preferred action is reinforced by our ability to do that action.

C. How much truth was there in this paper, by Michael Conner Psy.D in clinical psychology? I access that the information provided by his paper was rooted in founded truths, from research and experiments, truth enough for my information gathering purposes. I found the presented data to be well established, in that all of the conclusions provided were reinforced by scientific research and also supported by Dr. Conner himself, who has been a practicing psychologist since 1989. His approach to constructing this paper took on the form of information concentration and reduction; printed it was only five pages long. The examples he used clearly illustrated what he was talking about and helped me understand his point better.

His introduction to the subject gave an informative overview of what was included in the deeper regions of the work. The conclusion was healthy, offering people suggestions and advice on common mistakes that people fall into when dealing with gender differences and problems that arise from them. Also included in the conclusion was an affirmation that stated the most important thing to rely on when it comes to gender differences is we are all different and unquice and that we all need to be loved for who we are regardless of how differently we are from each other. Rating the paper for what is it, a compilation of research findings from his life experience. I rate it highly creditable.

D. The Internet has an awesome amount of information on it. If you point your web browser to www.google.com, there on that page in small fine print adjacent to the copywrite indicator at bottom of the page you will see that 2,469,940,685 (this is almost 2.5 billion) web site pages are searched when you type in a search quarry and place a search in motion. And it does the search in less than a second if you have a high speed internet connect, like cable modem access or DSL telephone access. If you are searching from a university or coroprate setting the connection to Internet is normally ultra-fast resulting in even faster search times. My point is that finding a report, or a paper such as this one on gender differences is greatly sped up by the existence of the Internet and computers with assess to it. Personally, I feel that the Internet has more power to change the world then The Beatles did. Music is important but information is king. Where would The Beatle have been without knowing how to play music?

My search for this particular paper started at the above mentioned google.com search engine. I typed in “male and female differences understanding” hoping I did not enter too many words for an intelligible search. The results were handsome. There were links to commercial dating services, counseling services for any personal relationship difficulties one might be experiencing, but at least half of the resultant links were for informative sites containing a work written work on understanding the differences between the genders. On the fourth page of search results I noticed the link that brought me to this paper. The first thing that attracted me it to was that Internet address or URL was a .org address instead of .com address. The .org ending stands for organization, and the .com ending stands for commercial. When looking for material I am always pulled toward .edu or .org addresses because they are not commercially oriented. The web URL of this paper is here.

Source # 4

A. This next article in my research collection is a thread posting on a user group web site. The author, a woman, asks for advice as how to handle her husband who laziness and lying is getting in the way of their relationship. The situation is that the husband has announced that he will do some household chores to help out the wife. The only problem is that he is not fully keeping to what he said he would do. For example, the husband said he would do the grocery shopping, but only picks-up milk at the store. And he said he would do the dishes but only “puts some cups in the dishwasher and leaves everything else.” Then the husband will make sorry excuse for his incomplete task like “sorry I did not get to the rest of the dishes.” The woman, who’s identity is unknown, is annoyed with her husband for his laziness in conjunction with his lying to her about how much of a job he will contribute to the household chores. She explains his efforts as half-jobs instead of fully completed jobs.

The most irritating thing to the wife in this case it that sometimes, the husband is dependable, that is he does what he says he will do. So this throws the wife for a loop because most of the time is not truth worthy and sometimes he is. The wife finds this especially frustrating because she can’t know what the next encounter will bring, failure of success, or in this case a job well done or a job left to be done. The wife describes her reaction to the husband’s lying and incomplete jobs as “sending her into a spin.” The wife asks the group members about what options there are to change what happens to her when her husband does these things. The wife tells us that she has confronted her husband on the issue when she encounters it but that doing that result in a big power struggle between them which makes her stomach go into knots.

The other part of this research piece is the group member’s responses to this distressed wife’s cry for help. These replies are interesting because they show how other feel about the situation, and solutions they offer. The first three replys, all posted by men, offer pretty much the same advice: You husband needs you to encourage him, try not to nag him about the job not being good enough and honor him when the job is done correctly, do it with him to show him how its done correctly, and give him big hugs when he does a good job. All of these post assumed that the husband was willing to do the jobs, just that he needed more positive reinforcement to pull him through to finishing them. Their postings were short no more then five sentences each, one of them being only one sentence. They sympathized with the husband, and defended his action by saying that men just don’t see those small chores as being that important and things of that nature.

Then on the fourth posting, a woman offered a different viewpoint. She suggested the wife, just go ahead and assume the jobs that were not being completed by her husband, in her post she made it clear that she thought the husband was being manipulative, trying to achieve his goal of having her assume his incomplete chores permanently. Then the last post of the thread, by another women agreed with the other’s woman notion of the husband trying to pull a fast on the wife, to have her do all the household chores. The last women pointed out that the first three posters (all men) had offered solutions that sounded like “ways to deal with a strong willed child.”

B. After first reviewing this discussion between the distressed wife and the five people who replied I was not sure I if was going to include it in my formal annotated bibliography report. I was not sure because no one seemed to be an authority on the subject at hand and I questioned the validity of the solutions offered, as to their being right and good solutions. I saved the webpage to my hard drive and wondered how I could justify adding it to my finally paper. I was bothered by the fact that the user group environment is unregulated and open to anyone who has Internet access. Honestly I thought I was not going to be able to include this user group thread because I saw it as being unconventional and thus not worth using. But after consulting with Dr. James I felt empowered to include the user group thread posting because science is not the only platform for learning and spreading of new intelligent knowledge. User groups may contain valid and valuable data as well.

The solutions to the problem the distressed wife was experiencing were varied, but not varied within the gender that provide them. All the men sided with the husband of the distress wife asking for help in forms of suggestions as to how to handle the situation. On the other hand the women who responded to the wife’s post sided with the wife and regarded the husbands actions as being manipulative and negatively purposeful. This obvious rift between how the men responded and the women responded is what I thought was intriguing about this interchange on relationship advice in the open setting of a user group forum. On intellectualizing the meaning of such a rift I came to ask myself about how a man and woman would offer advice to each other in the context of a relationship. Maybe the man would try to convince the woman that his actions are good even if they are not, and that the woman might ask the man for advice about how to handle something.

This does not sound too far from reality. A man is concerned with his egg-shell ego, he is prompted at certain times, to lie about the truth of his actions to protect himself from shame and embarrassment. In the posting the three men who replied first defended the husband, why? I don’t know why, but may they thought that if their wife was posting a similar message about them they would want other men to do as they did. Do the genders stick up for each other even when they do know each other? What about women? As established above from another resource woman are more concerned with how a problem is dealt with than men are. Asking questions about a subject in the search for collective intelligence to function on a problem is what women do. Women are more inclined to include others in their problem solving ventures than men are.

C. For this source of my research material I am at an impasse as to how to rate it. As I stated above at first I was skeptical of including it in my report because of my questioning of it’s validity. What can I find wrong or for that matter right with people sharing ideas in an informal setting such as a message thread. I agree with myself to not rate this source and leave it as is, because I have nothing to compare it to. I will continue my comment on what I started to state about how the men who replied to the wife’s request for help seem to stand up for their brethren, the wife’s husband. And that this seemed be the case with the women involved. They offered the same protective nature towards each other. The two women who replied supported the wife’s dissatisfaction with her husband.

Is there a psychological reason for why the genders sided with each other in this sample of reality? The fact the last poster, a woman, made fun of the men’s postings from the beginning of the thread also adds to this mini hypothesis. This was an aggressive act, but maybe it was provoked by a perception on the woman’s part that his message was an insulting message to start with. I can postulate on the subject, but I will let the material speak for itself. It is revealing and fresh and unlike other sources I have presented because it spontaneous communication about relationships.

Looking for alternative forms or information on the subject of how men and women handle relationships differently, proved to be an interesting search session. At first I tried to visit user groups associated with yahoo.com, but the system at yahoo’s group page wanted me to sign-up to gain access to the different forums of discussion. I left yahoo’s groups and surfaced to the yahoo.com main page. From there I used the Internet search function and looked up blogs (web logs) on relationships. The search results were horrible, mostly business blogs dealing with how to handle corporate relations and international relationships with venders in the Asian market. This was not what I wanted. I needed to find group discussion postings on relationship issues. It was imperative to do since I had gathered other material from a variety of sources but none from user groups in a discussion atmosphere.

D. I referred to the instructions for this report and noted that a searchable user group site within google.com was suggested as a good place to start one’s search for user group citations. I went to group.google.com and found searching the database of groups much easier than what I was required to do at yahoo’s group site, which I never did anyway. At google’s group search engine I entered “handling relationships differently” and submitted my quarry. This thread I have just completed reviewing appeared on the first page of the search results. I followed the link and was taken to the actual thread. Only six message were contained were in the thread, so I figured it was enough but not too much, so I collected it. I would supply a URL to the thread so you could see it in its original context, but the URL I had in my browser address bar while viewing the thread was a big long search description inside of a www.groups.google.com address, that would not produce the thread after I had quit my browser and logged back on to the net.

Source # 5

A. This journal article of a scientific experiment of the differentiated dream content men and women experience offers critical insight into the minds of the different genders. The study was done by German researchers who were interested in investigating the correlation between dream content and waking life experiences. They approached this research project with one question in mind: Do gender differences in dreams reflect gender differences in waking life? To make less the work they had to perform, the researcher decided to only actually do the dream analysis portion of the of the required research, and to use meta-analysis results of other studeis done on gender differences in waking life. The result of their own investigation into gender different in dream content showed that men and women do share commonalities of general dream features such as dream duration, the amount of dream characters, dream realism, and verbal interactions within a dream.

Looking beyond these shared dream features, there became a distinct difference in what men dreamed about compared to what women dreamed about or in other words; gender specific dream content. More specifically, the research showed that men’s dreams are dominated by male dream characters, and contain more sexuality and physical aggression. Women’s dream showed quite different content; women dream of males and females dream characters in equal proportion and show more inwardly directed aggression, and themes of depression in their dreams. Also it was discovered that women seek help for coping with a problem in their dreams. These findings are tendencies of gender dream patterns and the researches make it clear that men and women do vary in their dreams content at an individual level.

What about the relationship between gender differences in dream content and gender differences in waking life. Is one predictive of the other? The researchers hypothesized that continuity between waking life and dreaming exists. To test their hypothesis they looked at previously completed meta-analyses compiling studies of gender difference in waking life. The meta-analyses showed that in waking life men have higher rates of, masturbation, sexual intercourse, and physical acts of aggression than women. Within the meta-analyses of waking life women were found to have higher incidences of depression, and problem solving methods that involved seeking help. These meta-analyses findings certainly support the researcher’s continuity hypothesis.

B. I included this research on gender differences in dream content because it was compelling to me. It activated different interests in me related to how men and women handle relationships differently. When we dream we are drawing upon our brain for images and sound generation or at least stimulation. Our brain is internalizing reality of what we know the world to be. Differences in dream content are interesting, but differences in dream content between the genders are even more interesting. Men are different than women; they handle relationship differently, but why and how? Vise versa, women handle relationships differently then men do. If a man is unaware of his environment and has no one to interact with, as in a dream state, his mind paints a world where certain things occur that make up life. This is true for a woman as well; her mind paints a world meaningful of life.

What can this tell us about the genders when it come to handling a relationship? If dreams are a measure of what we think life should contain to constitute our existence then we might think that men want to construct a relationship that involves sex, aggression and more males than females. Women might want to construct a relationship that has communal exchange for problem solving, involves aggression towards oneself and an even distribution of male and female participants. Do these conditions seem like what men and women aim at creating in their personal relationships? They don’t sound to far off the mark.

My final opinion of this research into the gender differences in dreams as related to waking life is that it is wonderful study within itself. To examine the possibilities of what makes our dream be what they are is necessary to the our advanced civilization. If we are to explore the deeper reasons for human behaviors then we need to study dreams in relationship to our lives.

C. At the level of connection to my topic question of how men and women handle relationships differently, I found this journal article and to help solidify that men and women have different attentions in life, as exemplified by their dreams and that attractions to different expression of self are at the root of this differentiated attention. Men are pulled toward sex and outward aggression, whereas women are pulled toward others for help and inward or self-aggression.

The findings of this study parallel with what people commonly associate with the dreams of men and women. I found this to be true, when I told my boss at work about this study and he laughed at the fact that research was done to establish something that seemed to be common sense. He told me that women are more inclined to dream about social interactions and things of beauty, whereas men are more inclined to dream about sex, physical activity and violence. He was pretty close to knowing without reading the research report. What his points out is that men are women are aware of their differences.

D. Finding this formal research journal article, was time consuming and hard. The total time it took to forage through social science journal article databases was close to two hours before I came across this journal article on dreaming. I have to admit that I am new to searching scientific research by using on-line databases so I am educated as to using them at full capacity, but not to the point of disablement. I encountered other studies along my path of arriving at this particular one, but these studies dealt with gender differences in areas that I was not interested in. At first I was search for journal articles on the EBHOST which I accessed trough UH’s Voyager system. I was getting frustrated with the search result at this database of journal articles, so I abandoned ship and used Voyager’s connection with the Science Citation Index database search engine for journal articles.

The Science Citation Index database search did not prove any better then EBHOST at giving me what I was looking for. I was be coming suspicious about my specific search wording, I thought that maybe I wasn’t do it effectively. I did not follow up on my suspicion, I just though about and tried different wordings for my searches. Finally I had to leave Science Citation Index database search. I had to jump ship again, finding myself back Voyager’s list of searchable journal article databases. I found this article within the journal of personality and individual differences, in the social sciences index database on UH’s Voyager website.

A web link to this article cannot be supplied since it was only in pdf format not in html format. I downloaded it as pdf and worked with it from my hard drive.

Source # 6

A. Deborah Tannen, the bestselling author of the book, You just don’t understand: Women and men in conversation believes that men and women have different styles of communicating. I have collected a book review of You just don’t understand: Women and men in communication, to uncover what expertise Tannen can offer on trying to understand how men and women handle relationships differently. Basically men and women use communication for different reasons, according to Tannen. Women use communication to create feelings of closeness and intimacy, whereas men use communication to establish or set-up dominance hierarchy and display status.

Tannen says that the way in which men use communication parallels the way wild male beasts interact within the group they live. This theory says that as men grow-up they challenge each other for the dominant position of leader of the family. Just like wild male beasts that grow-up and challenge the leader of the herd for mating rights with the females of his choice. The only difference between the beasts and the male humans is that human uses language to gain dominance and the beasts use brute force.

The book review gives multiple excerpts from the text and I will include one at the end of this paragraph. How do the different communication style of men and women effect the way they handle relationships? There are many times when the communicated message sent between the sexes is misunderstood, because the sender is using one style of communicating and the listener or receiver is interpreting it with a different style. This results in a clashing of meanings assigned to the messages, which can lead to frustration for both parties involved. For example, men don’t understand that when women talk to them for extended periods of time that the women is engaged in relationship building because she feels that by talking a closeness is being established supported. The uneducated male thinks that the woman is just talking his ear off and his can not see value in so much communication. His style of communication, which is used for status displays and dominance reinforcement, does not know how to label or handle the woman’s prolonged talking.

Here an excerpt from the book You Just Don’t Understand: men and women in converstaion.

“For males, conversation is the way negotiate your status in the group and keep people from pushing you around; you use talk to preserve your independence. Female on the other hand, use conversations to negotiate closeness and intimacy; talk is the essence of intimacy so, being best friends means sitting and talking. For boys, activities, doing things together, are central. Just sitting and talking is not an essential part of friendship. They’re friend with the boys they do things with.”

Tannen points out that men have a resistance to do that which has been ask of them, because in their style of communication, following other’s directives show weakness on the part of the follower, and since men are all about dominance and maintaining status, they resist being told what to do. Conversely, women are just opposite, viewing being asked to do something as a chance to help out and add to the relationship. The overall message Tannen has for us concerning the difference in communication styles of men and women is both sexes need to stop expecting the other sex to communicate like them and to understand the inherent difference present.

B. I enjoyed this book review. I was short and clear and highlighted major points of Tannen’s book. After taking it in I was thought that Tannen had good points as to the differences of communication sytle of men and women. Her theories seem insightful, and are backed by some research that was cited in the book review. Tannen herself is a professional woman practicing as sociolinguist. The book review included two excerpts that help illustrate what the author was explaining from the book.

The thing that held my attention to this book review was the book it was reviewing. Tannen is a famous, or I should say bestselling author of various books that deal with the subject of male and female differences in communication. Her writing is very popular and this interested me in it. She must being say things that people can relate to. I found from reading the book review of her book that I too was attracted to the way she depicts gender differences in communication. I have been aware that women use communication differently, but I was not clear on the fact that they use it gain closeness in a relationship, this was new knowledge for me. I am a man so I could relate to what Tannen said about male’s use of communication, I think that most male communicate is as she describes it, but not all.

C. My opinion of this review of Tannen book, is it summed up the critical points made by Tannen that are instrumental in backing up what she is proposing as a theory of communication differences between the sexes. The author kept the flow of the review constant and used quotation from the book to spice up the reading. There is a certain degree of trust that is required for a person to accept a book review as good or relating the actual book content. From the quotation and excerpts that the author use, and from ideas and concept that she was able to convey about points Tannen had made in the book I was convinced that she was a intelligent book reviewer who was offering a quality work.

As I was looking for material on the subject of gender differences in relationship understanding I came across this book review of Tannen’s book. I was using the search engine at northernlight.com, to look up “gender relationship differences”. The search results were packed full of good stuff, this search engine is one of the top search engines on the net, it is known for its exceptional results. I think it taps into more sources for quarry then most engines do. I find that the results are as good as google’s search engine, and I value google’s search engine. I followed a couple of the links and found them to be too short in content to use for search materials. On the second page I noticed a link to a review of Deborah Tannen book. I click on it and was transported to this review of the her book You Just Don’t Understand: Women and men in conversation.

My search for this book review required little effort and I was please to find it so fast. Normally searching for specific material takes considerably longer than this one did. I guess you could say I got lucky, or just chose the right search engine.

The gross total of what I collect for my research into how men and women handle relationships differently is a wide range of information, each with its own implication for an answer. First we looked at a review of research on gender differences in communication. This article gave us an introduction into the different methods or ways of communicating that men and women use. We saw that men abused women’s right to have fair or equal rights in the area of speaking time. We also saw that men interrupted women much more then women interrupted men. This research review set-up our understanding that there is different behavioral patterns that accompany different communication practices. This article closely relates to that of the last article presented, the review of Tannen’s book You Just Don’t Understand: Women and men in conversation, because they are both on the same topic.

The review of Tannen’s book implies a set difference in gender related communication styles based on sexual make up. Tannen relates the communication style of men to that of wild beasts in nature vying of dominance within the group structure. She asserts that the communication style displayed by women is in heavy contrast to that of men. The women’s style is one of relationship centeredness and talking for intimacy creation purposes. Men build relationship by doing things with other, whereas women build relationships by talking with others. From Tannen’s book it looks as if the fair relationship builder of our world are the women, while men function in mode of independence, promoting unfair hierarchies of rule that constitute a relationship. From Tannen’s perspective, men treat a relationship differently then women do.

The user group discussion posting I included as research showed us different view of how men and women handle relationship. In this case, we saw a husband make a commitment to help his wife with household chores and then not follow through on his promise. This annoyed this wife who in turn asked the user group members for help with how to handle the situation. The men who replied offered advice that supported the husband, and the women who replied offered advice that supported the wife. We can hypothesize then that in a relationship of only two people say a husband and wife, the two would offer different solutions to problems, because they think about problems differently, and that their differentiated solutions might be more supportive to the one giving the solution.

I concentrated a third of what I presented on research of the brain in relationship to gender differences. I did this because I feel the brain is responsible for all human behavior, I see it as command central. In the first research presented we saw that men and women have different capacities of creating memory of emotionally charged events. The result being that women can remember better than men things they experience within emotionally charged situations. I proposed that relationships are emotionally charged environments and that women might have an edge on remembering relationship connected things. This enhanced memory may lead to different styles of handling a relationship form the woman’s perspective. The other article on brain function with gender differences being examined was dream research article. I consider this brain research since the brain creates dreams.

What was revealed by the dream research was that gender differences in dream reflect gender differences in waking life. This affects the way men and women handle relationships because it shows that men and women cognate the world differently and even in the subconscious space of dreamland they show vastly different expressions of life. I hold that if the dreams of the genders are different, we know that the brains of the two are different and think about the world differently. This leads me to say that the relational styles of the two are different as well. For men life is meaningful by having aggression and sex in it, and for women life is meaningful if they consult with other about their problem, and express aggression inwardly.

Since our main mode of interacting with other people is to create some kind of relationship with them, relationships become the places that these differentiate needs will be met. Men and women’s goals within a relationship are different because they want different thing out of them. There is a clash of motivation. This can create conflict. How this conflict is handle is big part of how people handle relationships.

If I were to delve deeper into researching how men and women handle relationship differently I would start to look for books and research on what men and women see as motivating force for being relationships. I am sure this would produce interesting and telling results that would go along in explaining the differences in how the sexes manage relationships. Also I would check to see if any materials had been produced to this question directly. I tried to find documents of this kind in my primary search but failed to uncover any. I have to rely on related information, such as communication differences across the genders.

Bryannan, L., 1990. You Just Don’t Understand by Deborah Tannen: A book review. www.homestar.org/bryannan/tannen.html, William Marrow and Company

Conner, M., 1998. Understanding the difference between men and women. www.oregoncounseling.org/articlespapers/docuements/differencesmenwomen.htm

Editor at the Institute for Teaching and Research on Women, Towson University (no author name provided), 1998. Gender Differences in communication. http://pages.towson.edu/itrow/wmcomm.htm

Schredl, M., 1997. Gender differences in dreams: do they reflect gender differences in waking life? Personality and Individual Differences 25, 433-442

Unknown, X., 2002, How do I handle my Husband?. Google groups discussion posting, group.google.com

Annotated Bibliography Report Continued

-Part Two-

Introduction

Upon completing my search for the differences between men and women in how they handle relationships, I set my sites on my next topic question for research: What are the forms of spirituality in our society? In understanding the scope of my quarry into the highly subjective world of religion, notions of gods, heaven and hell, spiritual truth and the such, I had to ask myself what spirituality meant to me, the researcher. I knew this would be critical in my accumulation of material on the subject. This was necessary for me, because I was not raised religiously and in this I felt fortunate that I had not been force fed a spiritual knowledge system with heavy life impact. Instead I have been afford the freedom of choosing my own spiritual framework, without having to undo one, already taught or put onto me.

Within the first week of asking myself the question of what spiritual beliefs mean to me, I was confused on the subject. I know that there are the common, widely held and practiced religions based on Christianity, Judaism and Islam and that these most certainly comprise spirituality. Still, where do I see my self in all of this? Do I want to become spiritual, or should I remain uncommitted to and unconnected from spiritual belief? I had to ask myself these questions, because this is how I felt on the subject of spirituality; ungrounded and uncommitted. As my search for articles, newspaper stories, journal articles, web sites and web blogs (web rings) on the topic of different and varying spiritualities in our society progressed, I started to acquire more understand of what spirituality means.

I encountered a pleasing range of information from a variety of different sources and my final compilation of materials is informative, thought provoking and deep. I came across evidence of private spirituality, that of individuals who seek their own connection with god, without the need of a mass organization of followers. Their private spiritual practices are held in their backyard. Of course we can’t forget about those unwelcome cults, such as the Heaven’s Gate Cult, who ascended life to flying saucers by committing suicide in 1997.

To my surprise I ran across an official Untied Nations document titled “Declaration on the elimination of all forms of intolerance and of discrimination based on religion or belief”. The document states a set of articles that ensure the freedom of thought, religion, conscience, and belief. This is based on the fact that these rights are considered human rights. I did not know of a declaration of this sort. The idea of a person’s three fold self, in terms of mind, body and spirit, is discussed by a poster at google.com’s group of spirituality postings. He describes the spirit as being “life or intelligence conceived of entirely apart from physical embodiment. It is vital essence, force, energy, as distinct from matter.” This is what spirit means to him. We all have the choice to derive our own spiritual meanings, and this is even protected by a UN declaration, and of course our nation’s own built-in freedom of human rights.

The ancient practice of mysticism must grace the pages of this report because it is very much a part of our society. I studied a web site that promotes this type of spirituality and they based their teachings on the tarot deck of symbolic pictograms and the Jewish Qabalah or Kabala. The idea is that encoded or encrypted secret knowledge exist in the Hebrew scriptures of the Kabala and that if learned and studied, can allow us greater consciousness, which leads to higher consciousness or higher states of consciousness. They seek the truth and connection with the higher meaning of life. These are samples of the works I have researched, see my full report of them in the next section.

In a loose definition I come to see spirituality as that dealing with the non-material world; the spirit world. We all have spirits and this is why there exists such an abundance of spiritualities. Many of us chose to express our spiritual convictions in alternate fashions. This was the key to my search; find the different ways people chose to relate to the spiritual side of their lives. I related to this definition of spirituality with more understanding of the connection with my own self – my own spirit, than I had ever done with the word religion. Maybe since my parents discarded their strong catholic religious teaching from their first family environment, I got the idea that religion was unwelcome, and not having to do with the self. Through my research, I was gaining a new knowledge of what being spiritual means.

This was good since I was not only gathering sources the purpose of good grade generation, but also for personal knowledge acquisition. I was motivated to seek a diverse collection of literature on the subject of the different forms of spirituality in our society, because I had placed personal meaning upon this task. My intentions could be better guided because of my two-fold purpose for the hunt of information. This is beneficial to the end user of my published bibliography, because I am affording them that which I would afford myself: my best effort with clear intentions to provide intelligent meaningful data.

The collected records from my research will be presented in the form of sections, one after another with a review and summary of their spirituality related content and well as my intellectual analysis of it. I will offer a final opinion of the source as to its validity to offering information on different spiritualities. In addition, I will also show from where I found the information, with a small explanation of the search process that led me to it. Of course a list of references will be included, for citation and expanded reading purposes.

Text Box: Formal Evaluation and Description of My Collected Research Materials Topic Question: What are the forms of spirituality in our society?

Source # 1

A. Here is an example of a deviant spirituality not widely accepted and publicly condemned. It appeared as a newspaper article in the Seattle Times, I found it by searching the achieves on their website. On Easter Sunday, 1997 as millions of people celebrated the resurrection of Jesus Christ the Son of God, a shocking and radical media story was racing across the country. The Heaven’s Gate cult, based in Rancho Santa Fe, California had completed its mission of transcendence in the form of mass suicide of everyone involved. The cult related their mission to the media through notes that they left behind. They believed that by killings themselves they would take on heavenly bodies and live on another planet as the “next level in human evolution”. They also believed that flying saucers would transport them to this new planet.

In addition to relating the extreme tale of religious belief that lead to 39 deaths, the news piece had collected reaction to the cult and its suicides from local community members. One minister who made a comment about their leader of the group is quoted as saying “How is it that one person can get people to follow him literally to death, and someone else who has a true and genuine faith in the Almighty – take him or leave him.” A Seattle policeman felt enraged about the cult because he felt that “legitimate Christianity is automatically associated with the nuts who do this kind of thing.”

The article took a step into examining the ever-expanding spiritualities in our postmodern US culture. An expert on the subject, J. Gordon Melton the director of the Institute for the Study of American Religion is also quoted, but not about his view of the Heaven’s Gate cult, instead on the numerous spiritualities that exist today within America. He estimates ‘that there are over 2,000 distinct religious groups in America.” These differing religions range from traditional Christianity and Buddhism practices to the radical groups exemplified by the Heaven’s Gate cult.

B. Upon first reading this article I was captivated by its bold content. The telling of the story of the Heaven’s Gate cult was enough for me to be interested in it. Heaven’s Gate cult is not the only of its kind; there are other spirituality out there that hold a common belief in fly-saucers and next levels of human evolution on distant planets. The idea of the cult, such as that of David Koresh and his Branch of Davidians who were taken out by the FBI in the early 1990 is certainly a real thing within our society that from time to time demands our attention. The fact that differing spiritualities can lead to social disruptions, the mass suicide of Heaven’s Gate’s follower, or end up in mini wars (Waco, Texas) is impressive. Our government grants us religious freedom but also does not want us to get out of control with it.

Included in this article was the approximation of over 2,000 religious groups in America. This estimate is supported in full, because it is provided as quote from an expert in American religious studies. This is worthy of noting because, 2,000 is a lot more then I expected to encounter or do research on. I was shocked to read this fact. What are all these forms of religion or spiritualities? Maybe we can name a 50-100 but 2,000 is just too much. This estimation is substantial in that it shows us just exactly what depth of quantity we should expect to find when searching for varied forms of spirituality.

C. With regard to my objective of finding information sources on different types of spirituality in society, this article was a good starting place. It pointed out and gave background on the heaven’s gate cult, which is a form of spirituality, weather we like it or not. Also the article took a look at the raise of spiritual diversification in across the US, and quoted an expert as saying that there are more than 2,000 different religions with America. I found the story of the Heaven’s Gate cult disturbing, but appreciated the information from the standpoint of research in to the subject. Overall the article brought to the mass level the message that spirituality is dynamic and not only related to massive religious organizations such as the Catholic Church or the Jewish faith.

I saw this article as being valid to my search because it gives us direct information on a particular form of spirituality as well as presenting us with information as to the amount of other forms of spirituality within America’s walls. I was compelled to collect this article for my report because it is a sample from mass media that dealt with the subject of varied spirituality and different method of expressing it. The fact that we in America are promised freedom of religious expression leads to an environment that is conducive to many alternate forms of spiritual manifestation.

D. To begin my search for resources on the forms of spirituality in our society I wanted to look for articles published in newspaper or magazines. At first I went to the LA Time web site, and rooted around within their search engine to find relevant materials or articles. I must have been having bad luck, because I was getting search results that contained spirituality in the titles but the articles had nothing to do with different forms of spirituality in our society. I was becoming frustrated so decided to move on.

I am from Seattle and know that the Seattle Times is a quality newspaper. I was prompted to search for articles on different kind of spirituality in the Seattle Times newspaper because I was familiar with it. I accessed their web site and searched the achieves for related material. I searched for “spiritualities in America” and was supplied with many pertaining articles. I wanted to find an article that dealt with spiritual information across our country. This was a restriction I put on searching my search results. I found this article on the second page of the search results, that read “UFO cult twisted Christian Doctrine” I was intrigued. I followed the link and reviewed the article, which I found satisfactory to include as a source for my research. The exact URL is unaviliable is because I had found the article by searching archieve, and the URL that was in my web browser while I was at the article, was a search query command and not an address. The Seattle Time Web is here if you want to visit.

Text Box: Hidden Meaning

Source # 2

A. My next item to relate is a web site of a spiritual school named the BOTA. The name is an acronym for Builder Of The Adytum, with Adytum meaning the inner most temple of the self. Their teachings are based on the occult sciences of alchemy and magic. They value the results of self-study and acknowledge that effort is required to achieve spiritual attainment. They trace their linage back to the ancient Greek philosopher and teacher of religion and magic, Hermes Trismegistus. The main tools used within their schooling are the tarot deck of cards and the Jewish Kabala. These devices work upon the mind of the student to activate higher states of consciousness, which allow the student a higher understanding of life and its connection to God.

The BOTA is classified within occult sciences as a Mystery School of ageless wisdom, that is wisdom that is unchanging through-out time, or as quoted from the web site “ageless, because it is not susceptible to the mutations of time.” Religious affiliation is a non -issue for those who wish to joint the BOTA, and anyone may become a member. The tarot deck of cards is viewed by the BOTA as a pictorial representation of information that directly communicates with our subconscious mind. The kabala is studied for its secret knowledge concerning the mysteries of Nature, and more explicitly, the hidden teachings concerning the Hebrew Torah. The Torah is the first five books of what Christians call the Old Testament. Following is a description of the Kabala from the BOTA website:

“The kabala is an ancient Hebrew mystical system of thought. It is a symbolic representation of the path the Divine followed in the creation of the universe, including man. It is, by definition, humanity's process of returning to divinity along the same path.”

In examining forms of spirituality, I had to include a sample from the mystery school category. I know that mystery schools and esoteric/occult schools of spirituality are alive and well in our society. The BOTA is not only within the US, on their website they had international links for studies in Europe, and New Zealand, as well as a link to a Spanish version of the site. I was surprised to discover that the BOTA uses the Kabala as one of its main sources for knowledge considering that it is based on hidden teachings in the Torah, and the Torah is directly the beginning of the Christian Bible. This caught my eye, because it seems that the Torah is held as spiritual information by more than two different religions and schools of spirituality.

The BOTA promotes a western tradition of study, learning and meditation. These activities are preformed proactively as opposed the eastern tradition of passive acceptance of spiritual growth. The BOTA holds that the evolution of form upon this planet corresponds with the evolution of consciousness and that in due time all humans will evolve to be aware of higher consciousness. But the time it will take for all human to become aware of higher consciousness is incomprehensible and will not be within one’s lifetime. The school offers forcing methods of spiritual growth that can offer “shortcuts” to this long process and make it attainable within a lifetime.

B. The BOTA and other mystery and mystical schools like it offer very serious paths of life to the inspired student. These schools, including the BOTA promise enlightenment to the hardworking and devoted spiritual aspirant. The strength of one’s involvement in the school’s teachings is directly proportional to the benefit received. These schools normally ask for life long membership and yearly dues to keep the organization in financial health. The cost of enrollment in the BOTA is $144/year. The lessons and teachings are mailed to you on a monthly basis. You are given a special set of tarot card that you are asked to color in as an exercise.

Considering the amount work involved in the attainment of spiritual enlightenment within the BOTA school system, I am attracted to it. Personally I know that enlightenment does not come easily. The forcing of evolution as the BOTA puts it also seems correct. We can plod along at the rate of constant spiritual growth or we can chose to take charge of our spiritual growth and force hundreds of years of change onto ourselves if we take the rights steps, hard steps. I feel this way, that we can do what we want.

C. I see the BOTA as upholding a long line of formal teachings of sacred knowledge. Its application to our lives today, maybe different than that of 2000 years ago when the same information was being pass from generation to generation, but as stated above the knowledge is ageless wisdom, and is not affected by the passage of time. It is an old Greek saying that states “Know thy Self” and this is the motto of the BOTA. I think that there is truth to what is being spread by the BOTA. It’s roots are closely related to other spiritual religions that have massive amount of followers, and this adds some weight and depth to what they are proposing.

D. In tracking this web site down for examination of the its spiritual content, I used google.com’s search engine to search “BOTA”. I have had previous knowledge of the school and knew that it dealt with occult sciences and mystery school teachings. My search on google produced their web site on the first page of the search results. The address is www.bota.org.

Text Box: Our Threefold Nature

Source # 3

A. A poster on the Google user group of spirituality related topics, relates our threefold nature to us. There are three distinct attributes of our being and the co-existence of these three within us creates a unity that is a person. The three attributes are: spirit, soul and body.

Our spirit is the first cause or God. Spirit is the conscious mind. Next, our soul is described as the medium of the thought, power and action of spirit. Lastly, our body is what physically contains the soul and spirit and restricts them from being elsewhere. We are alive, because we have a body that holds the spirit and soul in one place together.

This account of spiritual function and description of each separate part of our whole being is a person’s idea of what make up our being on earth. Their view that the spirit, the soul and the body are three different things is not uncommon. The person shows us our connection to god as being within ourselves. We are god ourselves, because god is everywhere spirit is and we all have spirits.

B. Reading this posting at google’s group on someone’s account of spirituality was interesting, but also a bit disappointing. His statements about the threefold nature of our being, seem recycled, like it was presented to this person and then recreated by them with a slight twist on the functions of the three elements involved. I found the posting to be boring and not well written.

What I did like about it was that the concept of god being within us seems right to me. The post described god as being spirit based, within all of our spirits. In my own opinion we are our own god, that is we are our own universe with our own god, as we encounter others we interact with their universe and in turn their god.

C. I am critical of this person’s view of spirituality. There were too many holes in the explanation of how the three part of the threefold nature function together. The idea that spirit, soul and body make up who we are is acceptable, but not enough background material is provided for development of a solid argument.

The poster sort of assumes that we as readers already understand a portion of what is being described as the threefold nature. I don’t agree with what this poster is saying because it is too vauge. It is useful in that it is another view of spirituality, but a lesser supported one. This posting was made in response to another question about what the spirit means in relationship to the body.

D. At groups.google.com I searched for forms of spirituality and found this posting made by an unknown author. The search results that eventually got me to this article were extensive and I had to wade through 5 pages of search results before finding this one, which fit what I was looking for.

I try to be selective with the material I gather at a user group forum such as groups at goolge, and being selective guide me to this article, even though I was crital of the it I found much more in-depth than many of the other peoples posts on the forum related to spirituality.

Religious Rites

Source # 4

A. This next item in my research collection is a UN declaration of human’s rights to practice religion and spiritual belief safe from discrimination or intolerance within the countries that make up the UN and since the US is part of the UN it is applicable to our society. Based on the premise that practicing a belief or a religion is considered a basic human right, the UN outlined this declaration that ensures every human the freedom of religious expression. The declaration has an introduction describing the consideration and approach to it’s 8 articles which clearly spell out what it is exactly means when it states freedom of religious practice from discrimination or intolerance. To UN sets out its concern on the subject by acknowledging that “religion or belief, for anyone who professes either, is one of the fundamental elements in his conception of life and that freedom of religion or belief should be fully respected and guaranteed.

The title of the document Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Intolerance and of Descrimination Based on Religion or Belief is long but states the purpose of the document. I will give an example of one of the articles in the declaration, it follows:

Article 3

“Discrimination between human being on the grounds of religion or belief constitutes an affront to human dignity and a disavowal of the principle of the Charter of the United Nations, and shall be condemned as a violation of human rights and fundamental freedoms proclaimed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and enunciated in detail in the International Covenants on Human Rights, and as an obstacle to friendly and peaceful relations between nations.”

The other 7 articles are in accordance with the one stated above. They provide safety to all forms of spirituality that wish to function like an established church, and tell governments that discrimination or intolerance against any religion is unethical and a breach of human rights among other provision.

B. When I came across this official UN declaration of freedom of religious expression I was excited because it shows us that not only in our country and within other countries are these freedoms persevered. To have an international organization such as the UN outline and declare that religion and beliefs are of such importance they deserve protection like other human rights is a major sign that tells us of the importance of religion and beliefs in our society. They are viewed as being fundamental as the declaration states.

What grabbed my interest about this article was its high level concern for the religious rights for humans. It says the UN sees the religious differences within our world (its states) as functioning toward the same thing; establishing a quality of life that is indispensable and important enough to protect by social law. Religious groups may wage war against each other as is the case in the Middle East, but the UN protects their lawful expression of faith if their country is a member of the UN. The weight of importance of religion is what most interested me about this declaration.

C. For giving us more information on forms of spirituality in our society this article does not hit the mark. However, for supplying us with an understand of why there is differentiated groups of spirituality in our society this article is valuable. It establishes a solid construct for assuming the protection of any religion is wide spread. I personal agree with this declaration, I feel it is important to protect the rights of human beings to study and practice the belief or religion of their choice.

I feel that more over it is the right thing to do. If it were not done UN member governments would not be internationally held responsible for discriminating on the basis of religion or belief. We, in America, take freedom for granted sometime and automatically think that other countries function under the ideas that we do, this is not true and so a high level international protection of religious freedom and is order, and I am glad to see that the UN had made such stand on the issue.

D. I found this document, related to the protection of all forms of spirituality and religion on the Internet at a university website. To start my search I visited the search engine at yahoo.com. In the search field I typed “religion and united states” I was trying to search for a combination of different ideas, just to see what results I would be supplied with. The results were varied, some informative and some commercial. The link to this document attracted me because I noticed the .edu domain name, and I know that is a college or university domain name ending so I selected the link because I know that universities have quality materials that they are not trying to sell.

The link brought me to the University of Minnesota and inside their on-line human rights library, and directly to this UN declaration of religious rights. The exact URL of the document is http://www1.umn.edu/humanrts/instree/d4deidrb.htm, for your viewing if you want.

Text Box: Solo Spirituality

Section # 5

A. Private spirituality is gaining popularity and demanded my attention while searching for forms of spiritual practice in our society. The article I collected on this subject is a report from a staff writer at St. Paul’s Pioneer Press, a local newspaper in St. Paul, Minnesota. The reporter tells us of a couple he personally knows and how they live an alternative life that supports their private form of spirituality. The couple seeks energy, spiritual energy and engages in strange activities in search for this energy. The energy they seek comes from the earth. They believe that this spiritual energy will make them feel better and also help them raise their productive. The main practice of their spiritual life is to enter into a labyrinth, in the woods on their property, and walk in it slowly for an hour or two.

During their paced walking about the labyrinth, they will pause and stand still when they feel like an energy exchange between themselves and the earth. This exchange can be from their bodies to the earth or from the earth to their bodies. Whichever direction it flows in, they maintain their stillness while it occurs. What is all this talk about energy? The writer introduces the Chinese idea of Ch’i or Qi. Qi can be loosely defined as “life force” and has been part of Chinese spiritual practices for millenniums. The Qi is “a force that is both unifying and healing.” The couple in this newspaper report bases their private form of spirituality on the idea of Qi.

The popular form of practicing spirituality based on the qi within the US is Qi Gong. Qi Gong classes are available in all fifty states and the spread of Qi Gong in America has been rapid meeting the society’s need to experience alternate forms of spirituality other then the widespread faith of Christianity and its denominations.

B. The practice of private spirituality seemed interesting to me, and my curiosity gravitated me to it. As for its meaning to my research report on different spiritualities in society, it was very applicable. I have always thought of spiritual practice as needing to be mediated by a regulatory factor, such as a church or congregation of people that validated a particular stance on spiritual meaning. I thought that there needed to high authorities on the subject to say what is spiritually acceptable as holy conduct. From this newspaper reporter’s personal story of a couple’s distinct development of their own private form of spirituality I was shown that this is not necessarily true. Spiritual practice needs only a person to create it, give meaning to it, and to practice it, to make it real and true. I guess that the belief in it is what makes it real.

For people to break free from the mainstream and initiate their own form of spirituality, they require the freedom to do so. I see this report of private spirituality as an example of how our personals freedoms granted by our country’s foundation in human rights, allows diversity of spiritual and religious patterns among the population. We are not discriminated against in America based on our religious faith and this is very basic but also special that we have it. It secures the growth of differences, which leads to advances in understanding more at one time, because more is happening at one time. Our environment is not static it is dynamic and this is reflected in differentiated practices of spiritual and religious beliefs.

C. My opinion of this report on private spirituality is that it fits into my search for different forms of spirituality, and that it is also a fresh look at an interesting practice of spirituality. I know of no one who has his or her own private spirituality, but I am guessing that I will as time pushes forward and our society starts to diversify even more than it is now. To know about this form of private spirituality, shines the light on our conscious that tells us that if one couple is doing it, more are as well.

I enjoyed reading this article on personal spiritual belief, because it was nice to see that others are searching for what is satisfactory for them. Obviously, church attending would not meet the needs of the couple described in this report. It is encouraging to encounter people who are not scared to search for spiritual meaning in their lives by the walking around a labyrinth in the woods for hours on end. This is refreshing because its relationship to life is clear; it has meaning to the individual. At the same time this practice is not yet socially acceptable. Time is what is at work here, we will tolerate this behavior more as time passes by.

D. From where did I find this report on private spirituality? On a individual’s personal web site hosted by geocities.com. My search process to get to it was typical of an Internet search. First I started at a major Internet search engine, in this case google.com. I searched “types of spiritualities” and was given a myriad of results and had to wade through them to find appropriate and related materials. I did not find any websites that supplied what information on specific examples of spiritualities of the type I was looking for. I retried my search I typed in “spiritualities different”. The results were different to say the least.

There were a lot of commercial sites that were selling spiritual books about angels and healing. There were self-help sites offering spiritual beginners a place to find out about prospective religions. None of these were my aim. I pushed on through the search results. I finally found the link to this report on private spirituality. The link contained “private spirituality” in it. I was curious and clicked it. The URL of the site is here.

Text Box: Conclusion

Only we can search and discover how many forms of spirituality there are, because there is no national registry of spiritual practice or religious manifestation. What we can know without searching for the answer is that people are spiritually inclined and the majority of them externally express it. My research into the question of what are the forms of spirituality in our society produce the results I have presented above. There was a newspaper article on a suicidal cult, a website that promoted the mystery school of spiritual attainment, a posting on a user group explaining someone’s idea of spirituality, a report on private spiritual practice, and a UN declaration of religious freedom for all peoples in its members countries.

These make up a slice of the spiritual spice rack. We can not know all of the spiritual paths people take, but if you are inclined find out about more, you can look for evidence of others. I enjoyed searching using the Internet to access different kind of information sources, and I know that my searching behavior has increased in skill since I begun. Thank you for enduring my lengthy inspection into these two subjects. I appreciated your attention to my work.

Bibliography

BOTA Website of Mystical – Occult Spirituality., 2002 – www.bota.org

Morphew, C., 2000. People are searching for personal, private forms of spirituality. Pioneer Press. URL: http://geocities.com/heartland/7309/labyclark3.html

Tizon, Alex., 1997. UFO cult twisted Christian Doctrine. The Seattle Times – March 30^th

United Nations,1981., Declaration of All Forms of Intolerance and of Descrimination Based on Religion or Belief. University of Minnesota, Human Rights Library URL - http://www1.umn.edu/humanrts/instree/d4deidrb.htm

Unknow, X., 2002, Our Threefold Nature. User group forum posting at groups.google.com No specific web address available for this source.

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