Emotion Education without Ontological Commitment?

Emotion education is enjoying new-found popularity. This paper explores the ‘cosy consensus’ that seems to have developed in education circles, according to which approaches to emotion education are immune from metaethical considerations such as contrasting rationalist and sentimentalist views about the moral ontology of emotions. I spell out five common assumptions of recent approaches to emotion education and explore their potential compatibility with four paradigmatic moral ontologies. I argue that three of these ontologies fail to harmonise with the common assumptions. Either those three must therefore be rejected or, if we want to retain one or more of them (for instance, Jesse Prinz’s recent rebranding of hard sentimentalism that I explore in detail), we need to revise our assumptions about the practice of emotion education in ways that are both radical and, I argue, ultimately unacceptable.     

Hippocrates’ Oath: Commitment and Community

Philosophia - In Hippocrates’ Oath and Asclepius’ Snake: The Birth of the Medical Profession, Thomas Cavanaugh focuses on performative aspects of the taking of the oath which bear upon...     

Idiosyncratic Deals and High Performers’ Organizational Commitment

Purpose

We argue that idiosyncratic deals (or i-deals), as objective conditions in employment arrangements that employees negotiate with their employer to meet particular individual needs, attenuate the indirect negative effect of a psychological contract breach on affective commitment via trust.

Design/methodology/approach

The study was conducted via a questionnaire sent to high performers working at the director level of a large Canadian company. These employees were in a privileged position to bargain i-deals for themselves (n = 136).

Findings

We used models of mediated moderation to test the research hypotheses. Findings indicate that trust fully mediates the relationship between psychological contract breach and affective commitment of high performers. This relationship is moderated by i-deals, such that the relationship is weaker when i-deals are high.

Implications

This study provides a deeper understanding of the theoretical mechanisms explaining how i-deals compensate for breaches in the employment relationship. We show that i-deals do not prevent the loss of trust following a breach, but compensate for it in maintaining the bond between high performers and their organization.

Originality/value

This study explores the role of i-deals for a population traditionally well treated by organizations because of their status of stars: high-performing directors. In contrast with previous research that conceptualizes i-deals as building trust, this study shows that i-deals may act as substitutes for trust, in maintaining a bond with the organization in a context of trust loss.

     

Identity Style and Well-Being: Does Commitment Matter?

A case is made for the role that identity processing styles and identity commitment may play in personal well-being. I argue that research on identity commitment is of interest in its own right and it may also serve to clarify some of the relationships found between identity processing styles and outcome variables. Results from 2 studies are used to illustrate 3 ways in which commitment and processing styles may combine to influence outcome variables: a direct-effects model, a mediated-effects model, and a moderated-effects model. Speculations are advanced regarding different types of identity commitments and the functions they may serve in enhancing well-being and everyday functioning.     

Personal Responsibility for Tornado Preparedness: Commitment or Choice?1

A review of the literature reveals that personal responsibility assumed for one's behavior clearly affects behavioral outcomes for a variety of situations, and that personal responsibility is in turn affected by a wide variety of variables. However, limited research has been conducted to determine exactly what personal responsibility fundamentally entails. While duty, moral obligation, choice, and commitment have been suggested as being integral to the concept of responsibility, few investigations have systematically varied more than one of these variables in a single experiment. The present study was conducted to investigate the effects of both choice and commitment on personal responsibility assumed for and behavioral intentions to engage in tornado preparedness. Results indicate that both choice and commitment were required to generate personal responsibility for and subsequent intentions to engage in tornado preparedness. Implications of these results are discussed.     

Worshipping Local? Congregation Proximity,Attendance, and Neighborhood Commitment

Review of Religious Research - The growth of suburban and exurban areas pushed many Americans into commuter lifestyles. People drive automobiles to work, to shop, to play, and presumably to...     

The Impact of Religious Commitment on Women’s Sexual Self-Esteem

Religious commitment is associated with decreased sexual activity, poor sexual satisfaction, and sexual guilt, particularly among women. The purpose of this paper was to investigate how religious commitment is related to sexual self-esteem among women. Participants included 196 female undergraduate students, 87 % of whom identified as Christian. Participants completed the Sexual Self-Esteem Inventory for Women (SSEI-W), Religious Commitment Inventory-10, Revised Religious Fundamentalism Scale, Brief Sexual Attitudes Scale, and a measure of their perception of God’s view of sex. Results suggested that women with high religious commitment held more conservative sexual attitudes. Significant relationships between religious commitment and two subscales (moral judgment and attractiveness) of the SSEI-W revealed that women with high religious commitment were less likely to perceive sex as congruent with their moral values and simultaneously reported significantly greater confidence in their sexual attractiveness. A significant relationship between religious commitment and overall sexual self-esteem was found for women whose religion of origin was Catholicism, such that those with higher religious commitment reported lower sexual self-esteem. A hierarchical regression analysis revealed that high religious commitment and perception that God viewed sex negatively independently predicted lower sexual self-esteem, as related to moral judgment. Implications of the findings are provided.     

Can Civility Norms Boost Positive Effects of Management Commitment to Safety?

We proposed that civility norms would strengthen relationships between management commitment to safety and workers' safety motivation, safety behaviors, and injuries. Survey data were obtained from working adults in hazardous jobs—those for which physical labor is required and/or a realistic possibility of physical injury is present (N = 290). Results showed that management commitment positively related to workers' safety motivation, safety participation, and safety compliance, and negatively related to minor injuries. Furthermore, management commitment to safety displayed a stronger positive relationship with safety motivation and safety participation, and a stronger negative relationship with minor worker injuries when civility norms were high (versus low). The results confirm existing known relationships between management commitment to safety and worker safety motivation and behavior; furthermore, civility norms facilitate the relationships between management commitment to safety and various outcomes important to worker safety. In order to promote an optimally safe working environment, managers should demonstrate a commitment to worker safety and promote positive norms for interpersonal treatment between workers in their units.     

Goblet Words and Indeterminacy：A Writing Style that Is Free of Commitment

The Zhuangzi is a collection of ancient Chinese anecdotes and fables that serves as a foundational Daoist text. The style in which it is written is significant because it obscures rather than reveals the text’s philosophic positions. If the text cannot be translated into plain language while preserving its content, as the Mozi or the Mencius generally can be, then the writing style is not merely rhetorical. The style is itself indispensable to the content. In this study, I analyse a linguistic device mentioned in the Zhuangzi and use it to reflect the text’s writing style—namely, “goblet words” (zhi yan 巵言). I argue that various logical forms of goblet words defy the act of fixing a definite answer in any conceptual distinction or disputation. The forms, which include dilemmatic questions, oxymora and double denial, all serve to preserve indeterminacy. Reading goblet words may affect readers by making them more open-minded towards distinctions. However, readers cannot ascertain that the text’s authors produced this effect intentionally. Therefore, the text may cause readers to be open-minded while the authors remain free of commitment.     

Effects of Principal-Teacher Gender Similarity on Teacher’s Trust and Organizational Commitment

In many Western public primary school systems, the gender composition of the principals is more heterogenic than that of the teachers, but research on the effect of gender on social psychological processes related to school leadership is scarce. The present work aims to address this lacuna by exploring the effects of principal-teacher gender similarity in the Israeli public primary school system, where most teachers are women, on teachers’ trust in their principals and on organizational commitment. Data from 594 female public primary teachers working with male and female principals were analyzed. The results show that when the principal and teacher are of the same gender, both affective and cognitive trust in the principal are higher. Moderation analysis indicated that female teachers’ affective trust in male principals increases with relational duration. A second moderation effect that was found indicated that gender similarity and cognitive trust in principal have a negative interactive effect on teachers’ continued commitment to school, countering the positive effect of gender similarity on commitment. The results and their implications are discussed, and future research is recommended.     

Benefit System Effects on Employees’ Benefit Knowledge,Use, and Organizational Commitment

We identified four attributes of benefit systems thought to influence employee attitudes and behavior: employee participation, system quality, communication quality, and benefit importance. Survey data from 974 employees of a Fortune 500 energy industry firm supported a partially mediated model in which these benefit system features exerted both indirect and direct effects on benefit knowledge and use, as well as on affective and continuance commitment. However, the findings differed across benefit system features and across types of benefits. Specifically, improving organizational communications about benefits appears more useful than increasing employee participation or improving benefit system service quality.     

Values Congruence and Organisational Commitment: P—O Fit in Higher Education Institutions

This study examines business students’ individual values and their perception of their university’s values and the relationship between these values and affective organisational commitment. Findings indicate that both groups of business students rated their personal values as consistent with the rankings of the major pan—cultural values with strong ethical orientation and self—development and learning values. In both educational institutions organisational vision values and individual conservatism values predicted affective commitment. Findings also indicate statistically significant differences between the students’ personal values and their perception of their university’s values, suggesting a degree of lack of P—O fit between the students’ values and their university’s values.     

Commentary on Rosefeldt: Should Metaphysics Care About Ontological Commitment from Casual Utterances?

Tobias Rosefeldt argues that in order to reconcile a physics-based fundamental ontology with the ontological implications of our everyday utterances, philosophers should pursue a ‘linguistics-based conciliatory’ strategy: They should refer to the results of linguistic research in order to avoid ontological commitment to problematic entities. Whereas Rosefeldt is not an advocate of radical forms of naturalized metaphysics, his argument is driven by the motivation behind pleas for a naturalization of the discipline. I claim that although there is a need for reconciliation, Rosefeldt’s favored account falls short of this goal. More generally, I argue that so-called ‘conciliatory accounts’ fail to do justice to the motivation that necessitated them in the first place, as the role they assign to analyses of everyday speech in search of ontological commitments is at odds with said motivation. ‘Conciliatory accounts’, hence, sit uneasily between radically naturalistic and traditional armchair approaches to metaphysics.     

Is Evil Good for Religion? The Link between Supernatural Evil and Religious Commitment

“The devil made me do it” is a familiar cliché often used to justify a bad decision. However, are beliefs in a devil or other evil supernatural beings actually beneficial for religion? Building upon Stark and Bainbridge (1987) and elements of the supernatural punishment hypothesis, this study proposes and tests the hypothesis that a positive relationship exists between the belief in supernatural evil and religious commitment. Data from 2007 Baylor Religion Survey reveal a strong positive correlation between the belief in supernatural evil and four measures of religious commitment: church attendance, religious perception, tithing, and faith sharing. This study not only contributes to a long discussion of religious commitment, but it also has implications for the growing literature on god images and the supernatural punishment hypothesis.     

Commitment in romantic relationships as a function of partners’ encoding of important couple-related memories

The purpose of the present study was to investigate how significant couple-related events are encoded in the episodic memory of each partner of a romantic relationship and how they relate to each of these partners’ level of commitment in an independent and additive fashion. Each partner of a couple reported a significant couple-related memory and rated their level of need satisfaction experienced during the event of the memory. In addition, each partner was shown his/her partner’s memory and also rated their own level of need satisfaction for this event. Results showed that partners need satisfaction ratings of their own memory positively predicted their own commitment to the relationship directly (for women) as well as through their need satisfaction generally experienced in the relationship (for men). In addition, men’s need satisfaction ratings of their own memory were associated with women’s commitment while controlling for women’s need satisfaction ratings of men’s memory, but no such cross-partner effects were found for women. Overall, the findings shed light on an initial understanding of how a person’s own memory of an event can impact another person’s attitudes even when taking into account this other person’s memory encoding of that same event.     

For Better or for Worse? Gender Ideology,Religious Commitment,and Relationship Quality

Few studies have considered how religion moderates the ways gender ideology influences heterosexual relationship outcomes. Drawing on a national random sample of American adults who report being married or living as married, we focus on the extent to which religious commitment moderates the link between gender ideology and reported relationship satisfaction, and whether this moderating effect varies across gender. We find that gender traditionalism is negatively associated with relationship satisfaction; however, interaction effects reveal that religious commitment moderates the effects of gender ideology such that the negative effects of gender traditionalism on relationship satisfaction only apply to people who are less religious. Gender traditionalism, by contrast, is not negatively related to relationship satisfaction for the highly religious. Splitting the sample by gender reveals that this moderating relationship is significant for women only. Thus, while gender traditionalism is negatively related to relationship satisfaction in the main, this effect is contingent on both gender and religious commitment. Religious commitment appears to mitigate negative effects of gender traditionalism on relationship outcomes, particularly for American women.     

Is Lying Bound to Commitment? Empirically Investigating Deceptive Presuppositions,Implicatures, and Actions

Lying is an important moral phenomenon that most people are affected by on a daily basis—be it in personal relationships, in political debates, or in the form of fake news. Nevertheless, surprisingly little is known about what actually constitutes a lie. According to the traditional definition of lying, a person lies if they explicitly express something they believe to be false. Consequently, it is often assumed that people cannot lie by more indirectly communicating believed-false claims, for instance by merely conversationally implicating them. In this paper, we subject this claim to an empirical test. In a preregistered study of 300 participants, we investigate how people judge cases of implicit deceptions that would usually be excluded by the traditional definition of lying (i.e., conversational implicatures, presuppositions, and nonverbal actions). Our results show that people do in fact consider it possible to lie by indirect means, suggesting that people have a broader concept of lying than is usually assumed. Moreover, our findings indicate that lie judgments are closely tied to the extent to which agents are perceived as having committed themselves to the believed-false claims they have communicated. We discuss the implications of our results for the traditional definition of lying and propose a new commitment-based definition of lying that can account for the findings of our experiment.     

Commitment and Reasons – A Comment on Ruth Chang, ‘Three Dogmas of Normativity’

Ruth Chang has argued convincingly that we must recognize that some choices will not involve strict, univocal comparison of options. How, then, can such choices be made well? Chang suggests that commitment is a fundamental way of ‘putting one's very self’ behind a normative consideration, thereby ‘endow[ing] that consideration with the normativity of a reason’. This view challenges what Chang deems to be three dogmas of normativity, and the current comment critically assesses the relation of her view to the first and third of these dogmas. I suggest some alternative ways of thinking about these dogmas, which enable us to see how her work might uncover a fourth dogma, and which can, I believe, lend strength to a position very close to Chang's.     

Religious and Spiritual Values and Moral Commitment in Marriage: Untapped Resources in Couples Counseling?

The authors investigated the relationship between religious and spiritual values and moral commitment in marriage to further inform marriage and family counselors about the nature of committed relationships. Using a qualitative research design, they examined individuals' perceptions of moral commitment in their marriage and how their religious and spiritual values influence those perceptions. Narrative text was analyzed through an iterative process, involving constant comparison of emerging themes, and 6 categories materialized. Findings build on existing knowledge regarding the importance of moral commitment to marital health specifically as it relates to the counseling profession.     

Commitment to one’s spouse as a predictor of marital quality among older couples

The present study examined the relationships between several independent variables (ego development, commitment to the spouse, length of marriage, church attendance, and sex of subject) and three marital quality variables (marriage problems, expression of love, and dyadic adjustment) in a community sample of 72 married couples age 50 and up. Commitment to the spouse was the strongest and most consistent predictor of marital quality; commitment was negatively related to marriage problems and positively related to expression of love and dyadic adjustment. The other independent variables were generally unrelated to marital quality.