Are emotional intelligent workers also more empathic?

This paper analyzes whether emotional intelligence and self‐monitoring are related to empathy among a sample of workers in both the public and private employment sectors. Two hundred and forty‐two employees (42.5% men and 57.5% women) with a mean age of 35.21 years (SD = 10.07, range 18–61) completed a questionnaire that measured the variables of interest. The results showed that emotion regulation, a dimension of emotional intelligence, accounts for most of the variance of empathy, followed by the ability to understand emotions and the management of others' emotions. Furthermore, gender did not yield any moderator effect on the relations among emotional intelligence, self‐monitoring and empathy. We conclude that the intrapersonal aspects of emotional intelligence, in particular, emotion regulation, help explain the empathy of workers. The implications of these findings are discussed herein.     

Contribution of parents' adult attachment and separation attitudes to parent‐adolescent conflict resolution

This study examined the contribution to parent‐adolescent conflict resolution of parental adult attachment styles and attitudes toward adolescent separation. Questionnaires were completed by 295 couples with early to late adolescent children. Structural equation models were used to test self and partner influences on conflict resolution for three attachment orientations: confidence (model A), anxiety (model B) and avoidance (model C). Model A showed self influences between parents' confidence orientation and negotiation and also via positive attitudes towards separation. Also, the fathers' use of negotiation was facilitated by the mothers' confidence orientation and vice versa, indicating partner influences as well. Model B showed self influences between parents' anxiety orientation and the use of dominance and withdrawal and also via negative attitudes towards separation. Model C showed self influences between parents' avoidance orientation and dominance and withdrawal, and a partner influence between fathers' avoidance and mothers' use of dominance. The results indicated that the parents' adult attachment system and the parenting system were related in the area of conflict resolution, and that self influences were stronger than partner influences.     

Examining a negative halo effect to anabolic steroids users through perceived achievement goals,sportspersonship orientations,and aggressive tendencies

We investigated the social image of anabolic steroids (AS) users grounding our analysis on the achievement goal theory of Nicholls. Our main goal was to explore how an athlete’s acceptance of AS use would impact on the way that athlete will be perceived by others. Non‐AS‐using participants reacted to one of two scenarios portraying a male athlete either accepting or refusing to engage in drug use behavior. The results suggested that the acceptance of anabolic steroids yielded an unfavorable social image – perceivers inferred a predominant ego orientation to characterize the AS‐user’s motivation as well as weaker sportspersonship and a stronger proclivity for reactive aggression than instrumental aggression. Moreover, the analyses did not yield significant gender or interaction effects. Finally, those findings are commented in view of methodological shortcomings and of the perspectives that they may offer for future research concerning the motivational aspects of the social perceptions of drug use in sport.     

Bottled memories: On how alcohol affects eyewitness recall

This study investigated how different doses of alcohol affected eyewitness recall. Participants (N = 126) were randomly assigned to three groups with different blood alcohol concentration (BAC), either a control group (mean BAC 0.00%, N = 42), a lower alcohol dose group (mean BAC 0.04%, N = 40), or a higher alcohol dose group (mean BAC 0.06%, N = 44). After consumption, participants witnessed a movie of a mock crime and were interviewed one week later. The main results showed that witnesses with the higher intoxication level recalled fewer details compared to witnesses with the lower intoxication level. The amount of alcohol consumed did not have an impact on the accuracy rate. No sex differences were found. The results are discussed in the light of past research. We conclude that more studies are needed before recommendations can be made to an applied setting.     

Retribution and forgiveness: The healing effects of punishing for just deserts

Although punishment and forgiveness frequently are considered to be opposites, in the present paper we propose that victims who punish their offender are subsequently more likely to forgive. Notably, punishment means that victims get justice (i.e. just deserts), which facilitates forgiveness. Study 1 reveals that participants were more likely to forgive a friend's negligence after being primed with punishment than after being primed with inability to punish. In Study 2, participants were more forgiving towards a criminal offender if the offender was punished by a judge than if the offender escaped punishment, a finding that was mediated by the just deserts motive. Study 3 was in the context of actual recalled ongoing interpersonal relations and revealed that punishment predicted forgiveness indirectly via just deserts, not via victims' vengeful motivations. It is concluded that punishment facilitates forgiveness because of its capacity to restore a sense of justice. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Personal values and prosocial behaviour in strategic interactions: Distinguishing value‐expressive from value‐ambivalent behaviours

Relying on the framework provided by Schwartz's theory of personal values, we investigated whether values can help explain prosocial behaviour. We first distinguished value‐expressive behaviours from value‐ambivalent behaviours. The former are compatible with primarily one value or with congruent values, the latter with mutually conflicting values. In Study 1, an analysis over all 41 (39 unpublished) samples in which we measured personal values and prosocial behaviour in monetarily incentivized strategic interactions (N = 1289; data collected between 2007 and 2010 in China, Finland, Germany, Israel, and the West Bank) supported our idea that personal values, universalism in particular, predict value‐expressive (prisoner's dilemma cooperation and trust game back‐transfers) but not value‐ambivalent behaviours (trust game transfers and ultimatum game proposals and responses). Study 2 (N = 56) focused on dictator game behaviours, which we expected and found to be strongly value‐expressive. The findings contribute to the ongoing discussion on whether and under which circumstances values shape behaviour. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Pragmatic encroachment in accounts of epistemic excellence

Recently a number of philosophers have argued for a kind of encroachment of the practical into the epistemic. Fantl and McGrath, for example, argue that if a subject knows that p, then she is rational to act as if p (Fantl and McGrath, Phil Phenomenol Res LXXV(3):558–589 , 2007). In this paper I make a preliminary case for what we might call encroachment in, not knowledge or justification, but epistemic excellence, recent accounts of which include those of Roberts and Wood (Intellectual virtues: an essay in regulative epistemology, 2007), Bishop and Trout (Epistemology and the psychology of human judgment, 2005), and Baehr (The inquiring mind, 2011). I believe that practical considerations bear on whether a disposition is an epistemic excellence, and I propose a practical condition on epistemic excellence that is roughly analogous to the practical condition on knowledge proposed by Fantl and McGrath. Since the view is also an epistemic analogue to a kind of moral rationalism in ethics, we might also call it a variety of ‘epistemic rationalism’.     

Types of sexual transference and countertransference in psychotherapeutic work with children and adolescents

The question of normal sexuality begins to arise in the treatment of severely sexually abused or sexually offending patients. The author suggests that it is an interesting and delicate moment during the process of recovery when less perverse, more normal sexuality appears mixed with, or even disguised by, the more habitual perverse fantasies. Writers in the adult field have drawn distinctions between perverse, eroticized and normal erotic transferences, and between Oedipal and post-Oedipal sexuality. Some have also distinguished between countertransferences in the analyst of an erotised versus a normal erotic nature. The paper discusses whether these distinctions could have any relevance for child patients. Freud and Klein have taught us much about the child's sexuality in relation to his interest in and attraction to his parents as sexual beings. But can we also detect some origins in earlier experiences in infancy of the child's later capacity to feel himself a sexual being capable of being wanted by an other? How might such a feeling of sexual self-worth differ from narcissism and from sexualised exhibitionism? The paper asks how therapists might deal with such problems and such possibly healthy developments.     

Book reviews

D. E. M. Gardner: Susan Isaacs: A First Biography. Methuen Educational Ltd., 1972. Price £1.50.

Marion Milner: On Not Being Able to Paint. Heinemann Educational Books Ltd., London, 1971. Price 90p

Paul Nordoff and Clive Robbins: Therapy in Music for Handicapped Children, with a foreword by Benjamin Britten. Victor Gollancz, London, 1971. Price £1.80.

The Mental Health Book Review Index: an Annual Bibliography of Books and Book Reviews in the Behavioural Sciences, Vol. 17, 1972, XXVI. Price $10.00. Published by the Council on Research in Bibliography, Inc., c/o Research Center for Mental Health, New York University, New York, N.Y. 10003. (Address orders to: Mental Health Book Review Index, c/o Paul Klapper Library, Queens College of the City University of New York, Flushing, New York 11367, U.S.A.)