Global Collaborative Team Performance for the Revision of the International Classification of Diseases: A Case Study of the World Health Organization Field Studies Coordination Group

Background/Objective: Collaborative teamwork in global mental health presents unique challenges, including the formation and management of international teams composed of multicultural and multilingual professionals with different backgrounds in terms of their training, scientific expertise, and life experience. The purpose of the study was to analyze the performance of the World Health Organization (WHO) Field Studies Coordination Group (FSCG) using an input-processes-output (IPO) team science model to better understand the team's challenges, limitations, and successes in developing the eleventh revision of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD). Method: We thematically analyzed a collection of written texts, including FSCG documents and open-ended qualitative questionnaires, according to the conceptualization of the input-processes-output model of team performance. Results: The FSCG leadership and its members experienced and overcame numerous barriers to become an effective international team and to successfully achieve the goals set forth by WHO. Conclusions: Research is necessary regarding global mental health collaboration to understand and facilitate international collaborations with the goal of contributing to a deeper understanding of mental health and to reduce the global burden of mental disorders around the world.     

Corporate social responsibility and work engagement: testing a moderated mediation model

The purpose of this study is to examine the mediating role of collective self-esteem in the relationship between employees’ perceived corporate social responsibility (CSR) and their work engagement. We also explore the moderating role of employees’ concern for face in the linkage between their perceived CSR and collective self-esteem. A two-wave panel data from a final sample of 217 employees in six companies in Wuhan, China, completed the questionnaire survey. Employees’ perceived CSR has a direct and positive effect on their work engagement, which is partially mediated by their collective self-esteem. Furthermore, employees’ concern for face moderates the relationship between their perceived CSR and collective self-esteem. CSR has a stronger effect on collective self-esteem for employees who concern more for face than for those who concern less for face. Understanding the outcomes, the mediating mechanisms, as well as the boundary conditions of perceived CSR on work engagement, help firms to better formulate their CSR strategy. First, we introduce collective self-esteem as an important mediating mechanism in the relationship between CSR and employees’ work engagement. Second, we identify concern for face as an important limiting condition in the linkage between CSR and employees’ collective self-esteem. Finally, previous research investigating employees’ reactions to CSR has predominantly been conducted in the West. We conduct our study in the Chinese or Confucian context to provide some new and complementary insights.     

医学为什么会愈加凸现人文意义

从医学的特殊性所包含的丰富的人文价值。弘扬人文精神对医学科技正确发展的作用,论述了注重医学发展中凸现人文意义的原因。     

The Silence of Psychologists

Unlike certain Israeli historians or sociologists who have developed a critical "post-Zionist" approach, Israeli psychologists display few signs of this critical trend. This is especially disquieting in light of the latest back and forth movement between warfare to the peace process—a movement that created many new social and individual dilemmas that would benefit from an open debate within social and clinical psychology. This paper tries to account for this deficiency by looking at its possible historical, political, and cultural roots. The historical aspects relate to the influence of European and American psychological traditions. Two political aspects are presented: (1) Israeli psychologists, through their involvement in the military and their acceptance of the Zionist claim for security, tend to belong to the political mainstream (Gergen, 1973, 1989); and (2) a hyper-political atmosphere scared Israeli psychologists into neutrality and objectivism. This provided a convenient rationale for apoliticism, especially when Israeli political polarization in the 1980s and 1990s was perceived as threatening psychologists' professional authority. Culturally, the psychologists, like the European social strata from which most of them originated, tended to adopt the American tradition of individualism as a reaction to the strong collectivist trend that dominated Israeli society during its early years. This may account for their weak and delayed social response of humanism, feminism, and constructivism. Exceptions to this general trend are highlighted, and the question of how Israeli psychology might become more politically sensitive and critical is explored. This discussion may have relevance for the development of political psychology in other societies, especially those going through transition of values or suffering from long, violent conflicts.     

The Contingencies of Interpersonal Acceptance: When Romantic Relationships Function as a Self-Affirmational Resource

Existing research suggests that people with high, but not low, self-esteem use their dating partners' love and acceptance as a resource for self-affirmation when faced with personal shortcomings. The present research examines the role that perceived contingencies of acceptance play in mediating these effects. In Experiment 1, we activated either conditional or unconditional working models and then gave experimental participants failure feedback on an intelligence test. In Experiment 2, we activated thoughts of rejection (or control thoughts) and then gave experimental participants feedback suggesting that their romantic partners would discover their secret sides. Experiment 1 revealed that low and high self-esteem women both embellished their partners' love and acceptance to compensate for self-doubt when the unconditional audience was primed. When rejection was primed in Experiment 2, however, high self-esteem men reacted to the self-threat by doubting their partners' love. These findings suggest that people with low self-esteem may not typically use their relationships to self-affirm because contingencies linking failure to rejection and acceptance to success are chronically accessible in their interpersonal schemas.     

Physical cues of ovulatory status: A failure to replicate enhanced facial attractiveness and reduced waist-to-hip ratio at high fertility

We investigated women's facial attractiveness and body shape as a function of menstrual cycle phase, with the expectation from previous research that both would be enhanced during the high fertile phase. To control for the effects of women's daily behaviors on their appearance and waistline, we visited 37 normally cycling women twice in their dorm, where we photographed and measured them at low and high fertile days of their cycle immediately upon their waking. Seventy-four judges from a separate institution chose, for each woman, the picture they thought was more attractive. We analyzed a subset of 20 women who, by forward counting, had a High Fertility visit between Days 10-13 and a Low Fertility visit between Days 20-23; and we also analyzed a subsample of 17 women who, by reverse counting, had a High Fertility visit on the days leading to ovulation and a Low Fertility visit one week after ovulation. In neither set of analyses were women's waist- to-hip ratios lower nearer ovulation, and in neither set were women's high fertile pictures chosen at an above-chance rate by either male or female judges. We did not find evidence that facial attractiveness and waist-to-hip ratio are reliable physical cues of ovulatory status.     

The Warring States Concept of Xing

This essay defends a novel interpretation of the term “xìng 性” as it occurs in Chinese texts of the late Warring States period (roughly 320–221 BCE). The term played an important role both in the famous controversy over the goodness or badness of people’s xìng and elsewhere in the intellectual discourse of the period. Extending especially the work of A.C. Graham, the essay stresses the importance for understanding xìng of early Chinese assumptions about spontaneity, continuity, health, and (in the human case) motivation. These assumptions make xìng fundamentally different from the contemporary nature concepts with which it is often equated. In particular, people’s xìng is not a near-equivalent of human nature or (in modern Chinese) of rénxìng 人性.