Terror management among Taiwanese: Worldview defence or resigning to fate?

Terror management theory (TMT) proposes that people who are reminded of their mortality should be motivated to defend their cultural worldview. Studies 1 and 2 examined whether the TMT worldview defence‐buffering effect found in Western cultures could be generalized to Asians in Taiwan. No such effect was found in the present studies. This non‐significant result was robust when either a stronger distraction task was used (study 1) or when a subliminal manipulation of mortality salience was utilized (study 2). A meta‐analysis, including 24 TMT experiments in East Asia, was also conducted (study 3). The average effect size (d = 0.11, r = 0.055) of worldview defence among these experiments was not significantly different from zero. Study 4 found that mortality salience manipulation also did not change Taiwanese participants' view of reincarnation; however, it did make them more inclined to resign to fate, suggesting that they might be using this symbolic means to defend their anxiety of death. The issue of the generality of TMT to Asians was discussed.     

Three Reviews of For Life Abundant: Practical Theology,Theological Education,and Christian Ministry,edited by Dorothy C. Bass and Craig Dykstra, 2008

For Life Abundant, the fruit of sustained reflection among systematic theologians, practical theologians, and pastors, is an important new work that deserves attention. The volume provokes creative and critical thinking about practical theology. Its contributors conceptualize the field as a disciplined practice of imagination and skill residing at the confluence of Christian tradition and living ecclesial communities, and ask what such a construal of practical theology might mean for theological education. Given the significance of For Life Abundant, Teaching Theology and Religion asked three theological educators who are located in different regions, types of institutions, and fields, to review and respond to it. Rebecca Slough describes the volume's central questions and organization, and considers how it might contribute to the deliberations of a seminary faculty regarding a school's curriculum. Martha Stortz shows how the process and structure of For Life Abundant are in themselves illustrative of the conceptualization of practical theology for which it argues. Kwok Pui‐lan notes the volumes strengths and goes on to probe its lacunae, particularly with regard to global, gender, and multi‐cultural considerations relevant to a robust construal of pastoral theology in our time. While the authors of these three reviews and responses to the volume did not interact as they wrote them, together they comprise a conversation that should be on‐going. TTR invites further responses to the volume.     

Using Technology to Enhance Adult Learning in the Counselor Education Classroom

The authors present a study that used a conceptual framework of adult learning and differentiated learning styles with graduate students in a counselor education classroom. Students in a hybrid course had higher midterm, group proposal, and posttest scores than did students in a face‐to‐face course taught by the same professor.     

Impulsive choice and altruistic punishment are correlated and increase in tandem with serotonin depletion

Human cooperation may partly depend on the presence of individuals willing to incur personal costs to punish noncooperators. The psychological factors that motivate such 'altruistic punishment' are not fully understood; some have argued that altruistic punishment is a deliberate act of norm enforcement that requires self-control, while others claim that it is an impulsive act driven primarily by emotion. In the current study, we addressed this question by examining the relationship between impulsive choice and altruistic punishment in the ultimatum game. As the neurotransmitter serotonin has been implicated in both impulsive choice and altruistic punishment, we investigated the effects of manipulating serotonin on both measures. Across individuals, impulsive choice and altruistic punishment were correlated and increased following serotonin depletion. These findings imply that altruistic punishment reflects the absence rather than the presence of self control, and suggest that impulsive choice and altruistic punishment share common neural mechanisms.     

Striatal sensitivity to personal responsibility in a regret-based decision-making task

Regret and relief are complex emotional states associated with the counterfactual processing of nonobtained outcomes in a decision-making situation. In the “actor effect,” a sense of agency and personal responsibility is thought to heighten these emotions. Using fMRI, we scanned volunteers (n = 22) as they played a task involving choices between two wheel-of-fortune gambles. We examined how neural responses to counterfactual outcomes were modulated by giving subjects the opportunity to change their minds, as a manipulation of personal responsibility. Satisfaction ratings to the outcomes were highly sensitive to the difference between the obtained and nonobtained outcome, and ratings following losses were lower on trials with the opportunity to change one’s mind. Outcome-related activity in the striatum and orbitofrontal cortex was positively related to the satisfaction ratings. The striatal response was modulated by the agency manipulation: Following losses, the striatal signal was significantly lower when the subject had the opportunity to change his/her mind. These results support the involvement of frontostriatal mechanisms in counterfactual thinking and highlight the sensitivity of the striatum to the effects of personal responsibility.     

Relationship of negative self-schemas and attachment styles with appearance schemas

The purpose was to test, among women, the relationship between negative self-schemas and styles of attachment with men and women and two types of appearance investment (Self-evaluative and Motivational Salience). Predominantly Caucasian undergraduate women (N = 194) completed a modified version of the Relationship Questionnaire, the Young Schema Questionnaire-Short Form, and the Appearance Schemas Inventory-Revised. Linear multiple regression analyses were conducted with Motivational Salience and Self-evaluative Salience of appearance serving as dependent variables and relevant demographic variables, negative self-schemas, and styles of attachment to men serving as independent variables. Styles of attachment to women were not entered into these regression models because Pearson correlations indicated they were not related to either dependent variable. Self-evaluative Salience of appearance was related to impaired autonomy and performance negative self-schema and the preoccupation style of attachment with men, while Motivational Salience of appearance was related only to the preoccupation style of attachment with men.     

What makes a meaningful life? Examining the effects of interpersonal harmony,dialectical coping,and nonattachment

Past cross‐cultural research on well‐being has tended to base Eastern construction of well‐being on the interdependent self‐construal, mainly as an offshoot of Confucius relationalism. However, other influential philosophical traditions in East Asian societies (i.e., Taoism and Buddhism) that portray a different picture of well‐being have received scant scholarly attention. We aim to foreground the distinctiveness of three well‐being constructs salient to Chinese culture, namely, interpersonal harmony, dialectical coping, and nonattachment, by providing experimental evidence on their differential effects on perceived meaning in life. Participants were 173 Taiwanese college students. Using priming procedures, participants primed with interpersonal harmony and dialectical coping reported higher levels of meaning in life as compared to those in the nonattachment and neutral control conditions. In addition, comparisons among the three well‐being constructs revealed that although the effects of interpersonal harmony and dialectical coping on meaning in life were similar in strength, they were both significantly stronger than that of nonattachment. The findings attest to the importance of recognizing within‐culture differences when conducting research on well‐being. Results were considered in terms of their methodological and theoretical implications.     

Attitudinal ambivalence and message-based persuasion: motivated processing of proattitudinal information and avoidance of counterattitudinal information

Attitudinal ambivalence has been found to increase processing of attitude-relevant information. In this research, the authors suggest that ambivalence can also create the opposite effect: avoidance of thinking about persuasive messages. If processing is intended to reduce experienced ambivalence, then ambivalent people should increase processing of information perceived as proattitudinal (agreeable) and able to decrease ambivalence. However, ambivalence should also lead people to avoid processing of counterattitudinal (disagreeable) information that threatens to increase ambivalence. Three studies provide evidence consistent with this proposal. When participants were relatively ambivalent, they processed messages to a greater extent when the messages were proattitudinal rather than counterattitudinal. However, when participants were relatively unambivalent, they processed messages more when the messages were counterattitudinal rather than proattitudinal. In addition, ambivalent participants perceived proattitudinal messages as more likely than counterattitudinal messages to reduce ambivalence, and these perceptions accounted for message position effects on amount of processing.     

Age-related changes in multi-finger interactions in adults during maximum voluntary finger force production tasks

This study aimed to continue our characterization of finger strength and multi-finger interactions across the lifespan to include those in their 60s and older. Building on our previous study of children, we examined young and elderly adults during isometric finger flexion and extension tasks. Sixteen young and 16 elderly, gender-matched participants produced maximum force using either a single finger or all four fingers in flexion and extension. The maximum voluntary finger force (MVF), the percentage contributions of individual finger forces to the sum of individual finger forces during four-finger MVF task (force sharing), and the non-task finger forces during a task finger MVF task (force enslaving), were computed as dependent variables. Force enslaving during finger extension was greater than during flexion in both young and elderly groups. The flexion-extension difference was greater in the elderly than the young adult group. The greater independency in flexion may result from more frequent use of finger flexion in everyday manipulation tasks. The non-task fingers closer to a task finger produced greater enslaving force than non-task fingers farther from the task finger. The force sharing pattern was not different between age groups. Our findings suggest that finger strength decreases over the aging process, finger independency for flexion increases throughout development, and force sharing pattern remains constant across the lifespan.