Love: American style,Russian style,and Japanese style

This study was undertaken to examine young women's and men's orientations toward love in three very different cultures: Japan (N = 223), Russia (N = 401), and the United States (N = 1,043). The love variables examined were: frequency of lore experiences, attachment types, love styles, love as a basis for marriage, romantic attitudes, and predictors of falling in love. Many cultural differences were found in the love variables, but the effect of culture was not always in the expected direction. We also examined how the pattern of gender differences in love variables differed across the three societies. Some of the gender differences and similarities found in previous love research and also in the U.S. sample of this study were not replicated in the Japanese and/or Russian samples. We discuss the importance of studying love and other aspects of close relationships with data collected from more than one culture.     

EFFECTS OF SELF-EFFICACY AND POST-TRAINING INTERVENTION ON THE ACQUISITION AND MAINTENANCE OF COMPLEX INTERPERSONAL SKILLS

This study examined the effects of self-efficacy and a two-stage training process on the acquisition and maintenance (i.e., retention) of complex interpersonal skills. In stage one, all participants received basic training in negotiation skills; behavioral measures of negotiation performance were taken following this training. During stage two, alternative post-training interventions (goal setting and self-management) were offered to facilitate skill maintenance. Six weeks later, behavioral measures of performance were repeated. Results indicated that pre-test self-efficacy contributed positively to both initial and delayed performance. While training condition contributed to skill maintenance, self-efficacy also interacted with post-training method to influence delayed performance. Specifically, self-management training attenuated the self-efficacy performance relationship, while goal-setting training accentuated performance differences between high and low self-efficacy trainees. Implications of these findings are discussed for researchers and practitioners concerned with interpersonal skills training.     

The long-lasting now: Disorganization in subjective time in long-standing pain

This paper presents a phenomenological-hermeneutical case study on long-standing pain (LP), a public health problem of great importance. Although there has been intensive research interest in this phenomenon, most studies have been based on traditional medical and cognitive-behavioral approaches. Our thesis is that new frames of reference can provide additional heuristic insights.
The phenomenon of LP shows a strong association with existential factors. Our case study focuses on the meaning-structure of lived temporality , a fundamental existential constituent in the lifeworld of the pain patient. A series of in-depth interviews with four subjects showed that lived temporality is disrupted in pain experience, causing a disorganization of the patient's being in the world. The results generate several hypotheses about implications for time estimation in pain experience.     

Vegetarians and their Children

abstract There are estimated to be five million vegetarians in the United Kingdom and another four million in the United States. There are numerous vegetarians elsewhere in the world: around fifteen million, for instance, in India. Some of these vegetarians are parents. And some of the vegetarian parents will bring up their children to be vegetarian, too. Is this a permissible course of action? Or should vegetarian parents raise omnivorous offspring? In this article, I consider three arguments that aim to show that a parent should not raise a child on a vegetarian diet. None of these arguments are convincing and I know of no better ones — so I conclude that it is permissible for a parent to raise her child as a vegetarian.     

Formulation of Policy and Strategy in Developing Creativity Education in Four Asian Chinese Societies: A Policy Analysis

The present study sought to compare and contrast educational policies on creativity education in four Asian Chinese societies, namely mainland China, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan. It establishes five criteria on creativity education policy, including policies regarding legislation on creativity education, definitions of creativity, standard implementation, explicit identification of special populations of creative students, and creativity education in the community. Among the four societies, Taiwan has an official document — the White Paper on Creative Education published in 2003 — whereas in Hong Kong and Singapore, creativity has been identified as an ability to be nurtured in students of all levels in their national curriculum reform. In mainland China, innovation is regarded as a synonym for creativity. Definitions of creativity have at times not been clearly defined, although multiple levels of creativity development (individual, school, societal, industrial, and cultural) have been discussed in Taiwan. In Hong Kong, creativity has been defined as a generic skill in various key learning areas (e.g., language education, mathematics education, science education, etc.) in the school curriculum. In Singapore, creativity is a learning outcome to be developed in students. None of these societies use standard creativity assessment tests as evidence of creative competence in students. When creativity has entered the central stage in the curriculum reform and creativity education is made available to every student, efforts have been made to identify highly creative students and provide them enrichment opportunities, mainly using performance assessments and performance in creativity competitions in these societies. But mainland China, Hong Kong, and Singapore do not sufficiently emphasize creativity education in the larger community.     

Theory of mind and attentional bias to facial emotional expressions: A preliminary study

Ribeiro, L. A. & Fearon, P. (2010). Theory of mind and attentional bias to facial emotional expressions: A preliminary study. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology. Theory of mind ability has been associated with performance in interpersonal interactions and has been found to influence aspects such as emotion recognition, social competence, and social anxiety. Being able to attribute mental states to others requires attention to subtle communication cues such as facial emotional expressions. Decoding and interpreting emotions expressed by the face, especially those with negative valence, are essential skills to successful social interaction. The current study explored the association between theory of mind skills and attentional bias to facial emotional expressions. According to the study hypothesis, individuals with poor theory of mind skills showed preferential attention to negative faces over both non‐negative faces and neutral objects. Tentative explanations for the findings are offered emphasizing the potential adaptive role of vigilance for threat as a way of allocating a limited capacity to interpret others’ mental states to obtain as much information as possible about potential danger in the social environment.     

“Before You Formed in the Womb I Knew You”: Sex Selection and Spaces of Ambiguity

The spaces provided by biotechnologies of sex selection are rich with epistemological, ontological, and ethical considerations that speak to broadly held social values and epistemic frameworks. In much of the discourse about sex selection that is not medically indicated, the figure of the “naturally” conceived (future) child is treated as a problem for parents who want to select the sex of their child. As unknown, that child is ambiguous in terms of sex—“it” is both and neither, and might be the “wrong” sex. Drawing on Beauvoirean thinking about ambiguity and desire, I cast part of the desire to select the sex of a child as bound to an ethic and epistemology of disambiguation, and urge that the space of being‐unknown is one to which each person is entitled.     

TIME MATTERS IN TEAM PERFORMANCE: EFFECTS OF MEMBER FAMILIARITY, ENTRAINMENT, AND TASK DISCONTINUITY ON SPEED AND QUALITY

We compared the speed and quality of performance for familiar , initially unfamiliar but continuing , and one-shot (single session) teams. We also proposed and observed entrainment effects for task time limits. Over the course of weekly sessions with changing tasks, continuing teams reached speed levels of the initially familiar teams, but the one-shot teams were consistently slower. Continuing teams also tended to have higher-quality output than the one-shot teams. There were no differences in how quickly each type of group entrained to time limits on the tasks. Entrainment was not robust to task discontinuity (Task A, then B). However, entrainment on repeated trials of a task persisted even when a different type of task "interrupted" those repeated trials (Task A, then B, then A again). Results compel a richer incorporation of time as a medium for complex task sequences, and time-based constructs as a feature of team membership in the study of group effectiveness.