Preschoolers’ Emotional Understanding and Psychosocial Adjustment in Korea: The Moderating Effect of Maternal Attitude towards Emotional Expressiveness

The purpose of the present study was to examine the role of maternal attitude towards children’s emotional expressiveness in Korean preschoolers’ emotional understanding and psychosocial adjustment. Preschoolers (N?=?70) participated in an emotional understanding task comprised of identifying cartoon character’s emotional reaction to particular emotion-eliciting situations. Maternal attitude towards children’s emotional expressiveness, as well as teachers’ rating of children’s behavior problems and social competence were measured. Children’s emotional understanding was negatively correlated with teacher-reported behavior problems and positively associated with social competence. In line with recent research on the socialization of emotional expressiveness, controlling maternal attitude towards children’s positive emotional expressiveness was negatively correlated with teacher-reported behavior problems. Conversely, mothers’ accepting attitude towards children’s negative emotional expressiveness was also negatively correlated with behavior problems. Finally, maternal attitude toward children’s positive emotional expressiveness moderated the relationship between emotional understanding ability and behavior problems and social competence. Such findings suggest that maternal attitude, particularly attitude regarding specific type of emotional expressiveness, is one of the key factors that may predict preschooler’s psychosocial outcomes.     

Group Well-Being: Morale from a Positive Psychology Perspective

What makes life most worth living? The simplest summary of findings from the new field of positive psychology is that other people matter. It is within groups that we live, work, love, and play, and groups should therefore be a primary focus of researchers interested in health and well-being. In the present article, we propose morale as an important indicator of group well-being. We survey what is known about overall morale across a variety of groups: its meaning, measurement, enabling factors, and putative consequences. We sketch a future research agenda that would examine morale in multidimensional terms at both the individual and group levels and would pay particular attention to the positive outcomes associated with morale.
Qu'est-ce qui fait que la vie vaut le plus la peine d'être vécue? Réduire à leur plus simple expression les résultats de ce nouveau domaine qu'est la psychologie positive revient à mentionner l'importance d'autrui. C'est dans des groupes que nous vivons, travaillons, aimons et jouons, et les groupes devraient donc être une préoccupation première pour les chercheurs concernés par la santé et le bien-être. Dans cet article, on avance l'idée que le moral est un indicateur majeur du bien-être des groupes. On recense ce qui est connu sur le moral en général dans divers types de groupes: sa signification, sa mesure, ses antécédents et ses conséquences supposées. On esquisse un futur programme de recherche qui appréhenderait le moral de façon multidimensionnelle aux niveaux à la fois individuel et groupal et accorderait une attention particulière aux retombées positives relevant du moral.     

Death without God: religious struggle, death concerns, and depression in the terminally ill

ABSTRACT— Religious worldviews often provide comfort near the end of life, but they can cause distress if life circumstances are perceived as evidence of God's disfavor. This study, the first to test terror management theory (TMT) with terminally ill participants, examined the hypothesis that concerns about death mediate the relationship between religious struggle (and religious comfort) and depression in the terminally ill. Ninety-eight patients with end-stage congestive heart failure (CHF) completed measures of religious comfort, religious struggle, belief in an afterlife, concerns about death, and depression. In separate hierarchical linear regression models that controlled for degree of belief in an afterlife, death concerns fully mediated the relationships between religious struggle and depression and between religious comfort and depression. These findings suggest that religious struggle is a breakdown in the terror management system that leaves the individual vulnerable to the terror of death, and that properly functioning religious worldviews offer comfort by buffering the individual against death concerns.     

Cultural differences in estimation of other people's self-construals: Comparison of Korea and USA

The current study examined cultural differences in the relationship between individuals' self-ratings and their estimation of others on independent and interdependent self-construals. With data from undergraduates in the USA and Korea, findings showed that, in both USA and Korea, participants rated themselves higher than others on independent self-construal. For interdependent self-construal, however, Korean participants rated themselves higher than others, whereas American participants rated themselves lower than others. The positive relationship between self-esteem and the extent to which self-ratings exceeded ratings of others on independent self-construal was stronger for Korean than for American participants.     

Acute predator stress impairs the consolidation and retrieval of hippocampus-dependent memory in male and female rats

We have studied the effects of an acute predator stress experience on spatial learning and memory in adult male and female Sprague-Dawley rats. All rats were trained to learn the location of a hidden escape platform in the radial-arm water maze (RAWM), a hippocampus-dependent spatial memory task. In the control (non-stress) condition, female rats were superior to the males in the accuracy and consistency of their spatial memory performance tested over multiple days of training. In the stress condition, rats were exposed to the cat for 30 min immediately before or after learning, or before the 24-h memory test. Predator stress dramatically increased corticosterone levels in males and females, with females exhibiting greater baseline and stress-evoked responses than males. Despite these sex differences in the overall magnitudes of corticosterone levels, there were significant sex-independent correlations involving basal and stress-evoked corticosterone levels, and memory performance. Most importantly, predator stress impaired short-term memory, as well as processes involved in memory consolidation and retrieval, in male and female rats. Overall, we have found that an intense, ethologically relevant stressor produced a largely equivalent impairment of memory in male and female rats, and sex-independent corticosterone-memory correlations. These findings may provide insight into commonalities in how traumatic stress affects the brain and memory in men and women.     

Effects of study task on the neural correlates of source encoding

The present study investigated whether the neural correlates of source memory vary according to study task. Subjects studied visually presented words in one of two background contexts. In each test, subjects made old/new recognition and source memory judgments. In one study test cycle, study words were subjected to animacy judgments, whereas in another cycle the study task required syllable judgments. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was employed to contrast the neural activity elicited by study words that attracted accurate source judgments on the later memory test, as opposed to words for which source judgments were incorrect or for which source information was unavailable. In both tasks, relative to words for which source memory failed, study words that were later assigned to the correct source elicited enhanced activity in ventral extrastriate cortex. In addition to these common effects of subsequent source memory, additional effects were observed that were selective for each study task. The present findings add weight to the proposal that neural activity supporting successful episodic memory encoding is a reflection of both the online processing engaged by an episode as it is experienced, and the demands imposed by the later retrieval task.     

Asian cultural values gap, cognitive flexibility, coping strategies, and parent-child conflicts among Korean Americans

The study examined Korean American college students' perceived Asian cultural values gap between themselves and their parents, cognitive flexibility, and coping strategies. The relationships between these factors were studied with the intensities and types of parent-child conflicts. The results indicated that the participants adhered less strongly to Asian values than their parents. When faced with conflicts, the participants reported using problem solving coping strategy to the greatest extent, followed by social support coping strategy, and then avoidance coping strategy. Simultaneous regression analyses revealed a positive relationship between the participant-perceived parent-child values gap and the intensity of conflicts, particularly in the area of dating and marriage. There were inverse relationships between cognitive flexibility and the intensity of conflicts, specifically in the area of dating and marriage. A positive relationship was observed between the use of social support coping strategy and intensity of conflicts. Hierarchical regression analyses revealed a significant interaction effect in which participant-perceived parent-child values gap and cognitive flexibility were related to increased frequency of dating and marriage conflicts.     

Working memory impairments in schizophrenia: a meta-analysis

Working memory (WM) deficit is a cardinal cognitive symptom of schizophrenia, but the differences among the tasks and measures used to assess WM make it difficult to compare across studies. The authors conducted a meta-analytic review to address 3 major questions: (a) Do patients with schizophrenia show WM deficits across diverse methodology; (b) Is WM deficit supramodal; and (c) Does the WM deficit worsen with longer delays? The results indicate that significant WM deficit was present in schizophrenia patients in all modalities examined. Increasing delay beyond 1 s did not influence the performance difference between schizophrenia patients and healthy control participants in WM. These results suggest that WM deficit in schizophrenia is modality independent and that encoding and/or early part of maintenance may be problematic.