Clinical psychologist Dr. Deborah Tyler writes here about a UNC Chapel Hill psychology department research project that has undergraduate students imagine they have an incestuous relationship with a family member and that the person is involved in a car accident. There is also some serious religion bashing going on with the study.
Using the same data as this study did, the case could as easily be made that feeling uncomfortable about incest and a statement wishing harm to a family member is a positive indicator of mental health. Having little or no anxiety in response to highly threatening thoughts or feelings is generally considered to be symptomatic of mental illnesses called dissociative states. Minus the anti-Christian bias, this study could have been used to show not that Protestant Christians are obsessive, but that atheists/agnostics are dissociative and unable to respond in a healthy manner to extremely negative ideation.
The UNC-Chapel Hill psychology department spent public funds and risked the psychological well-being of undergraduates to discover that devout Christian students exhibit more discomfort after thinking about incest than do other students, and therefore may be more prone to mental illness. Do parents send their children to UNC to participate in this kind of research? Do North Carolinians understand the biases of the psychologists they are supporting? Do North Carolina taxpayers want to pay for this stuff?
