The Values of Chinese Students: At Home and Abroad

The Rokeach Value Survey was administered to two groups of Chinese students: Those residing in the People's Republic of China (P.R.C.) and those who had emigrated to the United States (U.S.A.). Results indicated that the two groups have very different value hierarchies. The traditional stereotypes, which depict the Chinese as dependent and collectivistic in nature, in contrast to the independent and individualistic Americans, were not confirmed; instead the converse appeared. P.R.C. students assigned greater importance to individualistic values, whereas the U.S.A. group deemed collectivistic values more salient. The dimension of class as a meaningful variable was discussed as a tentative explanation of the results.     

Public Confession and Forgiveness

ABSTRACT In this article, we report investigations of four role-playing experiments and one laboratory manipulation that examine the effects of confession on forgiveness and other related judgments. The basic paradigm in the simulation studies was to reveal that a political figure or student in a class confessed either following or not following an accusation, or denied personal responsibility for the act. Among the variables manipulated were the attributions for the wrongdoing and the spontaneity of the confession. The dependent variables in one or more investigations included the perceived personal character of the trangressor, attributions of responsibility for the act, affective reactions of sympathy and anger, forgiveness, and behavioral judgments such as sanctioning and voting likelihood. In the laboratory manipulation study, a mixed-motive game setting was used in which a confederate confessed to having prior knowledge that resulted in his winning the game. We then examined whether this admission influenced subsequent cooperation and competition, as well as the other players' perceptions of the confederate's personality and character. Confession was found to have strong beneficial effects, particularly when given without a prior accusation and in ambiguous causal situations.     

Testing for sex differences in the relationship between attributional style and depression

Two potential limitations of research on the attributional model of depression lie in relatively untested assumptions concerning the lack of sex differences in the attributional style-depression relationship and the linearity of the relationship across levels of depression. We tested these assumptions, finding no sex differences and an essentially linear relationship. Implications of these results for research on the attributional model of depression are discussed.     

Munchausen syndrome by proxy: Clinical review and legal issues

Well-established policies and procedures govern the identification, management, and treatment of most variations of child abuse. For many therapists, such cases have become “routine”. Munchausen syndrome by proxy is an under-recognized form of child abuse in which a parent feigns or creates illness in a child specifically to have the child subjected to unnecessary diagnostic tests and treatments by medical practitioners. Variations range from false reports of fevers or allergies, to life-threatening abuse, such as surreptitious poisonings or injections with toxic substances. This article reports a case example of Munchausen syndrome by proxy, provides a review of historical, diagnostic and management issues, and discusses legal issues relevant to detection of the perpetrator and protection of the child victim.     

The Widening Gulf: Group Therapy Training and Traditional Training Models

The decline of training programs using traditional methods in group psychotherapy training may correspond to a static growth in membership and certifications in the two recognized national group associations. In addition, the increasing distance of group therapy from family therapy, two modalities that utilize group principles, may further illustrate the isolation of group training from the reality of today's practice. New ideas are needed for training programs to combine the varieties of group practice and settings, and the various practitioners, with standards of competency. A three-tiered training model may serve as an example of a training model that moves in a much needed, new direction.     

Social cognition is not reducible to theory of mind: When children use deontic rules to predict the behaviour of others

The objective of this paper is to discuss whether children have a capacity for deontic reasoning that is irreducible to mentalizing. The results of two experiments point to the existence of such non‐mentalistic understanding and prediction of the behaviour of others. In Study 1, young children (3‐ and 4‐year‐olds) were told different versions of classic false‐belief tasks, some of which were modified by the introduction of a rule or a regularity. When the task (a standard change of location task) included a rule, the performance of 3‐year‐olds, who fail traditional false‐belief tasks, significantly improved. In Study 2, 3‐year‐olds proved to be able to infer a rule from a social situation and to use it in order to predict the behaviour of a character involved in a modified version of the false‐belief task. These studies suggest that rules play a central role in the social cognition of young children and that deontic reasoning might not necessarily involve mind reading.