Prototypical Behaviour Patterns of Social Intelligence: An Intercultural Comparison between Chinese and German Subjects

By using the Act Frequency Approach (Buss & Craik, 1980), Chinese subjects (N = 31) generated a list of acts (specific behaviours) considered to represent social intelligence. These acts were rated by Chinese subjects (N = 39) and German subjects (N = 29) for prototypicality. A comparison of results showed that the construct of social intelligence is culture dependent. For the Chinese, social intelligent behaviours seem to reflect the classical traditions and ideals of Confucianism. Acts that received the highest scores were those that described conforming to and fulfilling expected roles, and acts in which the wellbeing of the entire society was described as being more important that the desires of an individual. This was especially true for older subjects and for women. Items controlling for socially desirable behaviour and social engagement showed clear differences between the two cultures; as expected, the German subjects rated these items lower, whereas the Chinese subjects found both items to be high prototypical of social intelligence.     

Studien über Psychotherapeutinnen und Psychotherapeuten

Zusammenfassung Psychotherapie ist in den industrialisierten L?ndern ein fester Bestandteil der modernen Heilkunst geworden. In diesen Gesellschaften übernehmen die Psychotherapeutinnen und Psychotherapeuten wichtige soziale und kulturelle Aufgaben. Zun?chst wird deshalb der Kontext dargestellt, in dem das Wissen über Psychotherapie als Methode akkumuliert wurde. Eine Betrachtung der impliziten, jedoch widersprüchlichen, Perspektiven, die offenbar die Forscher über Psychotherapeuten zu haben scheinen, ist zun?chst notwendig, um die Art und Weise der Fragestellungen in den Studien zu beleuchten. Nach einer Reflexion der gesellschaftspolitischen Aufgaben der Psychotherapie geht es dann in diesem übersichtsartikel darum, die unterschiedlichen Studien über die Psychotherapeutinnen und Psychotherapeuten und ihren Einflu? auf die Behandlung des Patienten zusammenzufassen. Der rote Faden ergibt sich aus der Fragestellung, welches forschungsbasierte Wissen über Psychotherapeuten auf welche Weise klinisch genutzt werden kann.      

The judgement of behaviour as aggressive and sanctionable

The influence of the factors norm deviation, intent, and injury, on the judgement of a critical act as aggressive and sanctionable was tested using a 2 × 2 × 2 factorial design. Scenarios depicting aggressive interactions represented the experimental conditions. 859 school children rated these scenarios on bipolar rating scales. The results show that norm deviation, intent, and injury, are important criteria for the interpretation of aggressive behaviour. Judging an action as sanctionable proved to be more sensitive for the variation of factors than the interpretation of behaviour as aggressive. In addition, an analysis of how the scenarios representing the experimental conditions were subjectively interpreted by the subjects was carried out. This showed that all combinations of the three definition criteria are psychologically meaningful. However, preferences were observed for specific interpretation patterns.     

Attribution theories of lay epistemology?

Different attribution theories differ from each other less by their relation to different epistemic problems than by their taking account of different goals to which causal attributions can be functional. The process of causal attribution is influenced by the goals to which causal attributions are functional. A second criteria for differentiating attributions theories is that they proceed from different information bases.     

Style in Philosophy: Parts II and III

The essential task of the philosophy of style is to uncover the irreducibility of the singular to any kind of universal, static structure or metalinguistic code. Style is not only a surplus element that exceeds propositional meaning, but also a clue of the ineradicable contingency of "intersubjective"-communicational relationships. The receiver must respect the unique individuality of the sender's style as what demonstrates the cognitive inexhaustibility of the world. Consequently, philosophy can no longer regard literature as foreign and incorrigible by asserting a radical difference of genre and thereby reserving truth exclusively for itself. Rather, I go on to argue, the difference is merely one of quantity . The picture of the world drawn by literature is simply fuller and richer than any comparatively monochromatic system of philosophical propositions. However, within the history of philosophy, there have been instances when the philosophical import of literature has been accorded its due. One example is the dialogical approach of early German Romanticism. The other example is a writer most frequently considered the purest thinker of philosophical sense and meaning – namely, Ludwig Wittgenstein. I conclude by reading Wittgenstein as a philosopher concerned, above all, with the ineffable that style reveals.     

Theodate Smith and Amy Tanner: child savers of Clark University.

This study is an examination of the contributions of Theodate Smith and Amy Tanner to the Children's Institute of Clark University. The institute, established in 1909 by Clark's president, G. Stanley Hall, failed to thrive as a liaison between child study and child welfare concerns for a number of reasons, including Hall's eventual disenchantment with the child welfare movement, financial difficulties, and the loss by the institute of Smith and Tanner. Both Smith and Tanner, unlike Hall, were sympathetic to child welfare concerns. Thus, Smith's death in 1914 and Tanner's departure from Clark in 1918 severed the links between the institute and child welfare interests.     

Measures of national stereotypes as predictors of the latencies of inductive versus deductive stereotypic judgements

According to Taifel's accentuation theory, national stereotypes can be thought of as the correlation between trait dimensions and national affiliations, This correlation is high when the trait shows high homogeneity within and high distinctiveness between the national groups. The present study tested the hypothesis that a trait's distinctiveness would facilitate inductive stereotypic judgements (inferences from trait to nationality) whereas homogeneity would facilitate deductive stereotypic judgements (inferences from nationality to trait). The latencies of inductive and deductive stereotypic judgements of 48 German subjects were assessed for 39 traits and three foreign nationalities (English, French, Italian). Multiple regression analyses using latencies for both types of judgements us criterion variables and both distinctiveness and homogeneity as predictor variables were conducted. The stereotype measures of Katz and Braly and McCauley and Stitt served as additional predictor variables. As expected from accentuation theory, distinctiveness predicted inductive but not deductive latencies, whereas homogeneity predicted deductive but not inductive latencies. For the latencies of deductive stereotypic judgements, the stereotype measure of Katz and Braly as well as that of McCauley and Stitt also proved to be significant predictors. The results are discussed and recommendations are given with respect to the assessment of national stereotypes.