Which Attitudes Will Make us Individually and Socially Happier and Healthier? A Cross-Culture and Cross-Development Analytical Model

This paper describes a dynamic system for the interrelationships between happiness and health that considers three main attitudes to life: α, β, and γ for Aristotelian, Epicurean, and Stoic, respectively. All variables that have been shown by empirical and theoretical studies to affect individual health and happiness are included (i.e., employment, occupation, education, ethical freedom, equity in achievements). Three main approaches are considered: behavioural and statistical ex-ante, and ex-post behavioural. A model is developed to rank the three attitudes in terms of health for a given happiness level, and consequently, provide insights into which attitude should be adopted by each individual, according to their characteristics: individuals in Protestant and non-Protestant Christian societies should adopt β and γ attitudes, respectively; educated individuals should adopt a γ attitude; and poor individuals should adopt an α attitude. Based on this analysis, this paper provides insights into which attitude actually is adopted by each society by comparing predicted health and achievement levels with the observed life expectancy at birth and per capita gross domestic product levels in 107 countries, thus providing an empirical test of the analytical model. This analysis revealed a prevalence of β attitudes in Protestant Developed Countries, with larger γ shares in less income-unequal countries; a prevalence of γ attitudes in non-Protestant Christian Developed Countries, with larger β shares in more income-unequal countries; a prevalence of α attitudes in Muslim Less Developed Countries, with larger γ shares in more educated countries; and a prevalence of β attitudes in more educated atheist and Jewish countries.     

Does Being Well-Off Make Us Happier? Problems of Measurement

The article uses General Social Survey data (GSS) collected by Statistics Canada from 1986 to 2005 and experience sampling data (ESM) collected in 1985 and 2003 at the University of Waterloo to examine relationships between economic growth, household income, and subjective sense of well-being. The article puts to a test two propositions made by Easterlin (Nations and households in economic growth: Essays in Honor of Moses Abramovitz. Academic Press, New York, NY,1974), namely that personal and household incomes correlate positively with subjective well-being, but this does not apply to the relationship between subjective well-being and societal economic growth. Analyses of GSS data reported in this article support Easterlin’s findings. They show that higher household incomes correlate positively with respondents’ retrospective assessments of life satisfaction, but economic growth has not been accompanied by a corresponding rise of subjective well-being. Analyses of ESM data suggest that when relationships between household income and subjective well-being are measured by “experiential” measures (Csikszentmihalyi and Larson in J Nerv Ment Dis 175: 526–537, 1987), these relationships are not statistically significant and subjective valuations of well-being taper off at the top of the income pyramid.     

Ethics and Social Science: Which Kind of Co-operation?

The relation between ethics and social science is often conceived as complementary, both disciplines cooperating in the solution of concrete moral problems. Against this, the paper argues that not only applied ethics but even certain parts of general ethics have to incorporate sociological and psychological data and theories from the start. Applied ethics depends on social science in order to asses the impact of its own principles on the concrete realities which these principles are to regulate as well as in order to propose practice rules suited to adapt these principles to their respective contexts of application. Examples from medical ethics (embryo research) and ecological ethics (Leopold's land ethic) illustrate both the contingence of practice rules in relation to their underlying basic principles and the corresponding need for a co-operation between philosophy and empirical disciplines in judging their functional merits and demerits. In conclusion, the relevance of empirical hypotheses even for some of the perennial problems of ethics is shown by clarifying the role played by empirical theories in the controversies about the ethical differentiation between positive and negative responsibility and the relation between utility maximisation and (seemingly) independent criteria of distributive justice in the context of social distributions.     

Does More Money Make You Happier? Why so much Debate?

Easterlin’s famous paradox questioned standard economic assumptions about a fundamental relationship in economics: that between happiness and income. In recent years there has been renewed debate about the paradox. In this essay, I highlight some of the methodological issues and challenges underlying that debate. I focus on the sensitivity of the results to the method selected, the choice of micro or macro data, and the way that happiness questions are defined and framed, all of which result in divergent conclusions. I also note the mediating role of the pace and nature of economic growth, institutional frameworks, and inequality. What is most notable is the remarkable consistency in the determinants of individual happiness – including income – within countries of diverse income levels and, at the same time, how happiness is affected by cross-country differences that are related to average per-capita income levels, such as political freedom and public goods. Income clearly plays a role in determining both individual and country level happiness. Still, assessing its role relative to other more difficult to measure factors as countries develop in new ways and at different rates will remain a challenge for the foreseeable future.     

Why are Wise People Happier? An Explanatory Model of Wisdom and Emotional Well-Being in Older Adults

This research investigated the relation between wisdom and emotional well-being in older adults, with an aim to elucidate pathways of positive development in adulthood. Three-hundred and sixty recently retired individuals completed a series of questionnaires including measures of wisdom, dispositional coping, perceived control, life engagement, and positive and negative affect. Structural equation modeling controlling for social desirability, health, and sociodemographic variables revealed that problem-focused coping, positive reappraisal coping, perceived control and life engagement mediate the positive relation between wisdom and positive affect. In addition, perceived control and life engagement, but not dispositional coping, were found to mediate the negative relation between wisdom and negative affect. The results demonstrate that higher levels of perceived control and life engagement in conjunction with an increased use of problem-focused and positive reappraisal coping account for the enhanced emotional well-being associated with wisdom. Findings are discussed in terms of the characteristics of wise individuals that promote positive aging.     

Do Overgeneral Memories Make us feel better? An experimental examination

A critical assumption of the CaR-FA-X model, that overgeneral memory is partly attributable to the “functional avoidance” of specific details about one’s past experiences, has not been experimentally tested. Further, while it is assumed that the reinforcing properties of said avoidance leads to the emergence of an overgeneral recall style over time, this question has not been addressed developmentally. To explore these issues, two studies were conducted. In Study 1, 41 children and adolescents (M_age?=?12 years) were randomly assigned to recall overgeneral or specific negative memories on the Autobiographical Memory Test; participants later listened to their memories and provided pre- and post-tests of their emotional states at four time points: before and after memory generation and before and after memory exposure. In Study 2, 52 college-aged participants (M_age?=?19 years) completed the same protocol. Results indicated that children and adolescents in the overgeneral condition reported higher levels of positive affect relative to those in the specific condition, while recall condition did not impact adults’ emotional states. These findings were not explained by differences in emotion regulation strategies or psychopathological symptoms. Implications for developmental models of autobiographical memory and emotion regulation are discussed.     

Scan the QR Code of Happiness: Can Mobile Payment Adoption Make People Happier?

This research note investigates the association between mobile payment adoption and happiness. We employ the conditional mixed process model to address the selection bias and estimate the open-access 2017 Chinese General Social Survey data. Our findings reveal that mobile payment adoption significantly improves rural residents’ happiness but does not significantly influence urban residents’ happiness. Exploring gendered differences finds that regardless of urban or rural residence, females are happier than males when adopting mobile payment. Our findings suggest that promoting mobile payment adoption could bring favourable well-being returns.

     

Virtue Ethics: A Misleading Category?

Virtue ethics is standardly taught and discussed as a distinctive approach to the major questions of ethics, a third major position alongside Utilitarian and Kantian ethics. I argue that this taxonomy is a confusion. Both Utilitarianism and Kantianism contain treatments of virtue, so virtue ethics cannot possibly be a separate approach contrasted with those approaches. There are, to be sure, quite a few contemporary philosophical writers about virtue who are neither Utilitarians nor Kantians; many of these find inspiration in ancient Greek theories of virtue. But even here there is little unity. Although certain concerns do unite this disparate group (a concern for the role of motives and passions in good choice, a concern for character, and a concern for the whole course of an agent's life), there are equally profound disagreements, especially concerning the role that reason should play in ethics. One group of modern virtue-theorists, I argue, are primarily anti-Utilitarians, concerned with the plurality of value and the susceptibility of passions to social cultivation. These theorists want to enlarge the place of reason in ethics. They hold that reason can deliberate about ends as well as means, and that reason can modify the passions themselves. Another group of virtue theorists are primarily anti-Kantians. They believe that reason plays too dominant a role in most philosophical accounts of ethics, and that a larger place should be given to sentiments and passions -- which they typically construe in a less reason-based way than does the first group. The paper investigates these differences, concluding that it is not helpful to speak of virtue ethics, and that we would be better off characterizing the substantive views of each thinker -- and then figuring out what we ourselves want to say.     

Value Dissonance and Ethics Failure in Academia: A Causal Connection?

Ethics failure in academia is not new, yet its prevalence, causes, and methods to prevent it remain a matter of debate. The author’s premise is that value dissonance underlies most of the reasons ethics failure occurs. Vignettes are used to illustrate value dissonance at the individual and institutional levels. Suggestions are offered for ways academic institutions can assume greater responsibility as a moral agency to prevent the occurrence of ethics failure.

Are Ethics Training Programs Improving? A Meta-Analytic Review of Past and Present Ethics Instruction in the Sciences

Given the growing public concern and attention placed on cases of research misconduct, government agencies and research institutions have increased their efforts to develop and improve ethics education programs for scientists. The present study sought to assess the impact of these increased efforts by sampling empirical studies published since the year 2000. Studies published prior to 2000 examined in other meta-analytic work were also included to provide a baseline for assessing gains in ethics training effectiveness over time. In total, this quantitative review consisted of 66 empirical studies, 106 ethics courses, 150 effect sizes, and 10,069 training participants. Overall, the findings indicated that ethics instruction resulted in sizable benefits to participants and has improved considerably within the last decade. A number of specific findings also emerged regarding moderators of instructional effectiveness. Recommendations are discussed for improving the development, delivery, and evaluation of ethics instruction in the sciences.     

Role Ethics or Ethics of Role-Play? A Comparative Critical Analysis of the Ethics of Confucianism and the Bhagavad Gītā

Both Confucianism and the Bhagavad Gītā emphasize the moral authority of social roles. But how deep does the likeness between these ethical philosophies run? In this essay I focus upon two significant points of comparison between the role-based ethics of Confucianism and the Gītā: (1) the interrelation between formalized social roles and family feeling, and (2) the religious dimension of moral action. How is it that Confucians ground their social roles in family feeling, while the Gītā emphasizes rupture between role and sentiment? Furthermore, are we to understand Confucianism as presenting a social philosophy that eschews religious concerns, whereas the Gītā denies the moral significance of family feeling in lieu of obtaining soteriological freedom? Examining the aesthetic and religious dimensions of the ethics of Confucianism and the Gītā clarifies a key distinction that both views implicitly make, albeit for divergent reasons: the difference between living one’s roles and playing one’s roles.     

Between an Example and a Precept,Which Has Greater Importance? A Comparison of the Channels of Socialization in Military Ethics

In this study, I examined what channels of socialization influence the moral behavior of cadets. We conducted a regression analysis of the effects of parents' attitudes to moral education, the standard and potential curriculum of schools, peer groups, and communication media on individual ethics and discipline using 399 sample participants. The participants were recruited through a questionnaire survey on cadets from academy of military, naval, and air force, and four-year based students from R.O.C. National Defense University. The analysis results showed that the cultivation of morality among cadets was directly influenced by the school's potential curriculum (i.e., intern cadres and officers in company) and their parents' attitudes to moral education during early childhood. The results also indicated that the influence of teaching by example was more significant than that of teaching by precept.     

Companion Animal Ethics: A Special Area of Moral Theory and Practice?

Considerations of ethical questions regarding pets should take into account the nature of human-pet relationships, in particular the uniquely combined features of mutual companionship, quasi-family-membership, proximity, direct contact, privacy, dependence, and partiality. The approaches to ethical questions about pets should overlap with those of animal ethics and family ethics (and, for veterinary issues, with healthcare ethics), and so need not represent an isolated field of enquiry, but rather the intersection of those more established fields. This intersection, and the questions of how we treat our pets, present several unique concerns and approaches for focused examination.     

Hursthouse’s Virtue Ethics and Abortion: Abortion Ethics without Metaphysics?

This essay explicates and evaluates the roles that fetal metaphysics and moral status play in Rosalind Hursthouse’s abortion ethics. It is motivated by Hursthouse’s puzzling claim in her widely anthologized paper “Virtue Ethics and Abortion” that fetal moral status and (by implication) its underlying metaphysics are “in a way, fundamentally irrelevant” to her position. The essay clarifies the roles that fetal ontology and moral status do in fact play in her abortion ethics. To this end, it presents and then develops her fetal metaphysics of the potential and actual human being, which she merely adumbrates in her more extensive treatment of abortion ethics in her book Beginning Lives. The essay then evaluates her fetal ontology in light of relevant research on fetal neural and psychological development. It concludes that her implied view that the late-stage fetus is an actual human being is defensible. The essay then turns to the analysis of late-stage abortions in her paper and argues that it is importantly incomplete.     

A Developmental Perspective of Marriage and Family Therapist's Ethical Principles: Support for the Practitioner–Ethics Relationship Model

This study explored therapists' professional ethics by assessing therapist at-risk behaviors as they relate to ethical proficiency in the field of Marriage and Family Therapy. A survey assessing practice behaviors was distributed among marriage and family therapists (MFTs) of varying levels of experience. Data gathered were analyzed using factor analysis, structural equation modeling, and multiple regression. Results indicate a positive relationship between the latent variables of risk and justification, as well as a significant relationship between these variables and years of clinical experience. Findings provide evidence to support the practitioner–ethics relationship model proposed by the authors. Implications of these findings, as well as future directions for research and policy are suggested.     

Analytical Psychology and Science: Adversaries or Allies?

This article examines C. G. Jung's relationship to science as a paradigm and the relationship between the Jungian community and science. The impact of Jungian “isolation” in terms of academic dialogue, cross-theoretical influence, and absence from the public sphere is also discussed. The author examines how findings from science can enhance our functioning as analytic clinicians and improve our ability to communicate the wealth found in analytical psychology to a variety of audiences outside Jungian circles. Finally, research on analytic interaction and analytic theories of the mind/psyche is explored as well as general research that has implications for analytical psychology and psychoanalytic theory.