Promoting Honesty: The Influence of Stories on Children's Lie‐Telling Behaviours and Moral Understanding

Moral stories are a means of communicating the consequences of our actions and emphasizing virtuous behaviour, such as honesty. However, the effect of these stories on children's lie‐telling has yet to be thoroughly explored. The current study investigated the influence of moral stories on children's willingness to lie for another individual. Children were read one of three stories prior to being questioned about an accidental wrongdoing: (1) a positive story, which emphasized the benefits of being honest; (2) a negative story, which outlined the potential costs of lying; and (3) a neutral story, which was unrelated to truth‐telling or lie‐telling. Initially, most children withheld information about the event. Older children were better able to maintain their lies throughout the interview. However, when asked direct questions, children in the positive story condition were more likely to tell the truth than those in the negative and neutral conditions. No significant differences were found between the negative and neutral story conditions. The present study also investigated the relationship between children's conceptual understanding and behaviour. The findings revealed that children's knowledge of truths and lies increased with age. Children who lied had significantly higher conceptual scores than those who did not lie. Furthermore, the type of story children were read had a significant impact on their evaluations of true and false statements. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Men's likelihood of sexual aggression: the influence of alcohol,sexual arousal,and violent pornography

Previous research findings have indicated that both alcohol intoxication and violent pornography exposure may contribute to increased sexual aggression by men. This study used an experimental paradigm to examine the effects of a moderate alcohol dose, alcohol‐related beliefs, and victim response on men's self‐reported likelihood of committing sexual aggression. A community sample of male social drinkers (N=84) participated in an experiment in which they read an eroticized rape depiction after completing an alcohol administration protocol. The stimulus story varied whether the victim, who initially expressed unwillingness to engage in sexual activity, expressed pleasure or distress in response to the man physically forcing her to perform several explicit sex acts. A path analytic model illustrated that participants' self‐reported likelihood of behaving like the sexual aggressor in the story was directly related to their own sexual arousal. Heightened sexual arousal was reported by participants who had consumed alcohol, those who read the victim‐pleasure story, and those who believed that drinking women are sexually vulnerable. Results suggest that sexual arousal to violent pornography, as influenced by acute alcohol intoxication and other factors, may be an important component of men's perceptions of their own sexual aggression likelihood. Aggr. Behav. 32:581–589, 2006. © 2006 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.     

Birds of a feather bully together: Group processes and children's responses to bullying

Recent research has shown that a group‐level analysis can inform our understanding of school bullying. The present research drew on social identity theory and intergroup emotion theory. Nine‐ to eleven‐year olds were randomly assigned to the same group as story characters who were described as engaging in bullying, as being bullied, or as neither engaging in bullying nor being bullied. Participants read a story in which a bully, supported by his or her group, was described as acting unkindly towards a child in a different group. Gender of protagonists and the bully's group norm (to be kind or unkind to other children) were varied. Identification affected responses to the bullying incident, such that those who identified more highly with each group favoured this group. Moreover, children's group membership predicted the group‐based emotions they reported, together with the associated action tendencies. Implications for understanding the processes underlying bullying behaviour are discussed.     

The major's therapy: Ernest Hemingway's “In Another Country”

“In Another Country” draws upon Hemingway's experiences during World War I. Narrated by a wounded young American, this story is a parable of early machine-rehabilitation therapy, one in which the strong optimism of a physician employing new machines is contrasted with the skepticism of an Italian major (“the greatest fencer in Italy”) who, disbelieving in the machines, nevertheless comes regularly for therapy to his hand. That daily attendance is interrupted only when the major's young wife dies suddenly. The major, who had instructed the American never to put himself “in a position to lose,” has himself just “lost” the wife he had married when he felt sure that his own wounding had effectively taken him out of danger of being killed at the front. His continued stoicism offers the young soldier an example of ethical and moral behavior, for after her funeral he resumes his daily routine of machine-therapy. Seen against the ineffectiveness of the machines, the major's behavior seems to offer an example of the only “therapy” possible in this world of wounds and machines.     

How Attention Partitions Itself During Simultaneous Message Presentations

Television producers, across all types of programming, assume young viewers can parallel process simultaneously presented messages. For instance, television news producers appear to believe that young viewers can attend to weather icons, lexical news crawls, and sports scores while they also attend to news anchors who present the news. Nonetheless, attention theory suggests parallel processing on this scale cannot be executed efficiently. Given the format's popularity, perhaps those messages take advantage of perceptual grouping, as described by Treisman, Kahneman, and Burkell (1983). Perceptual grouping describes a process where separate but semantically related messages are attended to simultaneously with minimal effort. Using secondary task methodology, we measured participants' attentional capacity while they watched an example of this format: CNN's Headline News. In addition to this visually complex condition, we created a visually simple condition by deleting graphics and news crawls. Participants in this latter condition attended to both the auditory and visual channels, thus retaining story facts conveyed by both channels. Participants in the complex condition, however, shifted attention to the auditory channel. Ten percent of the factual information contained in news stories was lost to participants. It appears that this multimessage format exceeded viewers' attentional capacity. In conclusion, we discuss the implications for attention theory.     

Medical Family Therapy for a Woman with End-stage Crohn's Disease and Her Son

Medical family therapy grew out of the experiences of family therapists working with other professionals to provide comprehensive, integrated healthcare for patients (McDaniel, Hepworth, & Doherty, 1992). This is the story of one such patient, her son, and those of us who were the three primary participants on her treatment team. To provide an account that comes closest to the experience itself, we have taken quotes from videotaped sessions and electronic mail communications that occurred throughout the course of therapy. Each provider tells part of the story in his or her own voice. The commentary is provided by Susan McDaniel.     

The Recognition of Adults' and Children's Facial Expressions of Emotions

The purpose of this study was to compare the recognition performance of children who identified facial expressions of emotions using adults' and children's stimuli. The subjects were 60 children equally distributed in six subgroups as a function of sex and three age levels: 5, 7, and 9 years. They had to identify the emotion that was expressed in 48 stimuli (24 adults' and 24 children's expressions) illustrating six emotions: happiness, surprise, fear, disgust, anger, and sadness. The task of the children consisted of selecting the facial stimulus that best matched a short story that clearly described an emotional situation. The results indicated that recognition performances were significantly affected by the age of the subjects: 5-year-olds were less accurate than 7- and 9-year-olds who did not differ among themselves. There were also differences in recognition levels between emotions. No effects related to the sex of the subjects and to the age of the facial stimuli were observed.     

Addictive states of mind

This paper explores the meaning of the pregnancy of the therapist as a challenge to the maintenance of the setting for therapy. The patient I shall describe was born ‘black’ in a ‘white’ family and was thus a challenge to her father's sense of paternity and her parents as a couple. She was the visual evidence of an infidelity. The problem had been denied in various ways, going as far as the attempt to deny her very existence. The therapist's pregnancy signified a betrayal of the ideal of a stable setting which was compounded by an earlier absence through illness. This ‘breaking of rules or promises' was then the setting for a re-working of the patient's story.

Setting, it is argued, can helpfully be seen as the mental space created by the partnership within the therapist between maternal and paternal relating to the ‘baby’ of the therapy. This enables a sense of negotiation and relationship in the creation of setting, which can include disruptions and other babies. At the same time the therapy had to work with a fundamental issue of illegitimacy or lack of belonging and the therapist's response to this. The ‘rules' of setting are a means to ensure a place to belong or attach to, but this work emphasized ‘setting’ and belonging as issues of relationship supported and enabled by our rules of engagement, but not reducible to them.     

The Atonement of the Alleged Perpetrator's Daughter: Understanding of Model Scenes and Space Attachment in Analytical Dance Therapy

In this rich paper the analysand Annabelle is sent by her analyst to the dance therapist who reports in great detail how Annabelle manages to throw off and—to a certain extent—integrate not only her own life-long misunderstanding but also those of her parents. The reason for Annabelle's referral was straightforward: the analysis had ground to a halt. Words no longer reached her. The reader is reminded of the emotive-relational-motor clusters described in Chazan's and Shahar-Levy's papers. Body image distortions and space misperceptions curtailed this patient's ability to function. When she began to bring her distress to her analytic dance therapy sessions, she could not associate verbally but made use of props her therapist had in store. As she slowly progressed toward true symbolization and expression, her therapist found herself embroiled countertransferentially. The patient's long-suffering mother was remembered as someone who would, or could, only give partial information about the family's history. The father had been a Nazi and was now blamed for all the suffering the family had lo endure. This fact resonated both with Annabelle's analyst and the dance therapist who managed to take a long look at their own family's records during that troubled time.     

How Television News Viewers Deal with Facts that Contradict Their Beliefs: A Consistency and Attribution Analysis1

This study was conducted to investigate the effect of a counterattitudinal news story on the perceived credibility of a television newscaster. In the basic 2 × 2 design, subjects, who were either pro-student or pro-police, viewed a newscast in which either students or police were blamed for initiating a violent confrontation. The results indicated that subjects, for whom the newscast's conclusion was counterattitudinal (as compared to those for whom the conclusion was consistent with initial student-police attitudes), rated the newscast as less objective, rated the newscaster as less credible and more intending to persuade, and attributed to the newscast and newscaster more extreme political positions consistent with the newscast's conclusions The implications of these results for the problem of newscaster credibility are discussed, as are the connections between the present results and previous research on communicator credibility.     

The story of Joseph in the Qur'an and the old testament

The story of Joseph in the Qur'an has been approached by many non‐Muslim writers1 who were content to list which details of the biblical story have been missed out from the biblical story and which points have been added, maintaining that these had their origins in biblical or other Jewish sources. Our treatment here concentrates on the texts of the story in the Qur'an and the Old Testament, attempting to identify the differing functions and preoccupations of the two accounts in their respective contexts, to show how this difference affects the choice of material and the treatment given to it. This article concludes that the two versions should be approached by readers, Muslims and non‐Muslims, with this difference in mind in order to appreciate the message and the qualities of each.     

REX

This article is based on personal experience, an experience of grief and now, years later, an understanding of its transformative power in one's life. It is a true story and began some 25 years ago. As those who have gone through grief themselves know, it never ceases, it only changes, moves through its own cycles and permeates one's life. It almost has a life of its own within one's daily tasks. Eventually, grief can become a subtle and profound force in the act of living that is no longer felt as loss but as gain. In this story, I wish to present the idea that the relationship between the grieved and the person who has died continues to evolve and grow after the death process.     

Bruno Bettelheim and the Chazon Ish: Toward a New Jewish Psychotherapy

Jeremiah is quoted and cited to show the basic optimism of Judaism. Why did Freud create an “Oedipus Complex,” rather than a “Joseph Phenomenon”?—especially since Freud had such a great knowledge of the Bible, including the Joseph story; and the Biblical Joseph made frequent appearances in Freud's dreams. Many of the advances in psychology and psychiatry were made in part as a rebellion against the ideology of psychoanalysis—this includes family therapy, behavioral therapy, and psychopharmacology. Bettelheim saw the shortcomings of psychoanalysis, both as a theory to explain human behavior and as a cure for psychological problems. The experiences of Bettelheim and of The Chazon Ish can give us new hope. The Chazon Ish and Bettelheim both sought to help in the context of a type of community. Reading of the Bible throws light on people's problems; and people can be helped by identification with Biblical characters. There is often specific advice in the Bible. Bible therapy can strengthen the bond between the therapist and the patient, which is important for patient improvement. There is a need for this type of psychotherapy.     

Follow the Bird—A Story of Survival in the Treatment of Addictions Commentary on Paper by Lisa Director

Lisa Director proposes a relational model with an emphasis on enactment for the treatment of chronic drug and alcohol use. She illustrates her thesis with an extensive case report. The story of her patient's addiction, and of the embroiled analytic developments, is engaging, disturbing, and rewarding. I suggest that the telling of this inspiring story, and the narration of her theoretical framework, is a response to the devastation involved in the encountering of addictions and that this story unintentionally obscures some basic issues about addiction and the psychoanalytic treatment of it. I believe that the survival of patient and analyst was achieved with the help of three underemphasized factors: Director is an expert in the assessment and treatment of chemical dependency problems, and her patient, Helena, knew this; despite her chronic addiction, Helena brought exceptional resources for survival to the analysis; and the authority of the analyst was used for leverage to help replace Helena's reliance on drinking and drugs.     

Effects of Popularity-Based News Recommendations (“Most-Viewed”) on Users' Exposure to Online News

This experimental study (N = 107) aims at investigating how the “most-viewed” recommendation features of online news affect users' news story choices, by employing an unobtrusive measurement for news exposure. The major findings clearly support the thesis that the presence of recommendations influences users' selection of news stories. First, the participants' self-reported assessment of the reasons for their story choices indicates that the incorporation of recommendations heightened their awareness of formal salience features. Second, these recommendations decreased the time for website exploration, and therefore increased the time available for reading news articles. Third, when the recommender system was available, approximately 50% of the participants' total story exposures came through the recommendation features. Fourth, those participants who were in the recommendation condition selected a larger number of the most-viewed stories featured in the recommender system than their counterparts in the no-recommendation condition; and a majority (about 80%) of the former group's access to those most-viewed stories was via the recommender system, in terms of either number or time. Last, the mean exposure time per recommended story did not differ across either recommendation conditions (with vs. without) or access routes (recommender system vs. front/topical sections).     

When story characters communicate: readers’ representations of characters’ linguistic exchanges

Klin, Ralano, and Weingartner (2007) found transfer effects when a phrase, described as part of a note one character had left for another, was repeated across two passages. However, when the phrase was part of a note in story A and part of a conversation in story B, transfer effects were eliminated (Klin & Drumm, 2010). Klin and Drumm concluded that readers encoded the perceptual features of story characters’ linguistic exchanges and that the mismatch (visual vs. auditory) eliminated transfer effects. The present experiments support this conclusion and also demonstrate that readers encode details of the social interaction that surrounds the characters’ linguistic exchanges: Effects were reduced when the phrase in story A was part of a direct social interaction between the characters (e.g., phone conversation), whereas in story B, the interaction was indirect (e.g., voicemail). More generally, readers are exquisitely tuned to subtle aspects of characters’ linguistic exchanges.     

Perceptions of Rational Discrimination: When Do People Attempt to Justify Race-Based Prejudice?

This research investigated the role of situational context and personality factors in moderating perceptions of race-based decisions made by others. White participants were presented with a short story that described a taxi driver who refuses to pick up a Black man. The primary dependent variable concerned the perceived rationality of the taxi driver's decision. Analyses of these perceptions revealed 2 main findings, both of which involved need for cognition (Cacioppo, Petty, & Morris, 1983). First, need for cognition moderated the effects of participants' attitudes toward Blacks, such that anti-Black participants judged the taxi driver's decision as more rational than did pro-Black participants, but this was only true when participants also scored high in need for cognition. Second, participants who were experimentally induced to think about the task in an "analytical" fashion also judged the taxi driver as relatively rational, but this again was only true for participants who scored high in need for cognition. The implications of these results for a controversial set of arguments regarding rational discrimination by the social critic Dinesh D'Souza (1995) are discussed.     

Lucy's dividing family: My discovery of the person in the subject

Abstract

This essay is excerpted from a larger project the author conducted with adolescent and preadolescent children of divorce. It tells the personal story of the author's first interview experience with her first participant in this project, here called Lucy. At the time of the interview, she was 11 years old and her parents had been divorced for 3 years. In the effort to engage the reader as an outside interpreter of her story, this essay invites the reader in, to the “raw data” of Lucy's experiences, as described in her words. Presented here in dialogue are the two voices of participant and researcher, as well as researcher reflections and recollections of this memorable experience.     

Effects of timing and justification of witnessed aggression on the observers' punitiveness

Sixty university men who had been treated harshly by the experimenter's accomplice were distributed evenly among four conditions comprising a 2 × 2 factorial design and a “control” group. All of the men watched a moderately aggressive segment from a TV program but in the former case they were given a story summary which depicted the witnessed aggression as either justified or less justified and this summary was provided either immediately before or just after the scene was shown. The fifth group did not have any story synopsis. When the men had an opportunity to punish the confederate at the conclusion of the film, they were nost punitive if they had heard the justified aggression summary after the movie just before they shocked the confederate, and were least punitive if they had been given the nonjustified aggression version before they watched the aggressive incident. These results extend the generality of the findings obtained by other research in this area and also suggest that the violent scene had elicited as well as disinhibited aggression-facilitating reactions in the viewers.     

Occupational Therapy in a Community-Based Prevention Program

Occupational Therapists have shifted their practice base from a primarily medical model to one involving many different services within the community. Members of this discipline as well as those of the entire health-care field have discovered that preventionj based programs better anticipate and meet consumer needs. The community program described here serves 3, 4, and 5-year -old socio-culturally disadvantaged preschoolers. The program occurs weekly in a local library and includes the librarian's story hour and special activities designed and implemented by the occupational therapists. By observing each child's behavior, occupational therapists can compare normal growth and development with a particular population. The design and delivery of such programs is influenced by many factors including, but not limited to, financing, community values and institutions, and the occupational therapist's understanding of prevention. Increased understanding, as well as the potential application, of occupational therapy's contribution to the prevention of health related problems are further enhanced by the utilization of this program as a field training site for occupational therapy students.