Personal Spiritual Values and Quality of Life: Evidence from Chinese College Students

Values are guiding principles in our life. While some studies found spiritual values to be “healthier,” Sagiv and Schwartz (Eur J Soc Psychol 30:177–198, 2000) showed that people holding non-spiritual values were higher on affective well-being. We examined the predictive power of these two types of values with a longitudinal data set collected from Chinese students mainly in Hong Kong. Structural equation modeling revealed that spiritual values (as well as family income) positively predicted quality of life a year later. Non-spiritual, self-enhancement values, did not show any association. Results suggest that developing spiritual values may promote well-being through enabling individuals to find meaning and purpose in life.     

The meaning of work for South African women: A phenomenological study

This study sought to gain an in-depth understanding of the meaning that women attribute to their work in the South African context. The six women informants were 27–32 years old, all with tertiary education, in senior positions, without children. Data on the meaning of work for South African women were collected using semi-structured interviews. Findings indicate that the meaning of work for South African women changes when they experience work autonomy. Working women also report having a sense of identity and self-worth, meeting instrumental needs, achieving social relatedness, and being of service to others. The meaning of work also comes from intrinsic satisfaction, a sense of power and authority.     

Resisting self-compassion: Why are some people opposed to being kind to themselves?

Although self-compassion is associated with positive emotions, resilience, and well-being, some people resist recommendations to treat themselves with kindness and compassion. This study investigated how people’s personal values and evaluations of self-compassionate behaviors relate to their level of self-compassion. After completing measures of trait self-compassion and values, participants rated how they would view themselves after behaving in a self-compassionate and self-critical way. Overall, participants associated self-compassion with positive attributes that connote emotional well-being, yet only those who were low in trait self-compassion associated self-compassionate responding with negative attributes that involve low motivation, self-indulgence, low conscientiousness, and poor performance. Participants’ endorsement of basic values was not meaningfully related to their evaluations of self-compassionate vs. self-critical behaviors or to self-compassion scores. We propose that self-compassion might operate as an instrumental value insofar as those high vs. low in self-compassion differ in their beliefs about whether self-compassion affects performance-related outcomes positively or negatively.     

The effect of perceived control on self-reported cardiovascular disease incidence across adulthood and old age

Objective: To examine whether rates of change in perceived control are predictive of cardiovascular disease (CVD) incidence across adulthood and old age.

Design: We used the PATH Through Life Project (n = 7103, M = 40, SD = 16; 52% women), a longitudinal panel survey that encompasses three cohorts at Time 1, ages 20–24, 40–44 and 60–64, who have been assessed three times at four-year intervals.

Method: We examined whether rates of change in perceived control were associated with CVD incidence over 8 years of time, over and above that of baseline levels of perceived control and known risk factors for CVD.

Main Outcome Measures: Self-reported CVD incidence.

Results: Increases in perceived control over time were associated with decreased likelihood of 8-year incidence of CVD and these effects were independent of socio-demographics, covariates and baseline levels of perceived control. The effects were consistent across young adulthood, midlife and old age and for men and women.

Conclusions: Findings demonstrate the importance of changes in perceived control as a predictor of CVD incidence across adulthood and old age. We suggest future research using mediation analysis to test reverse causality and mechanisms underlying the effects of perceived control on CVD incidence.     

A dot that went for a walk: People prefer lines drawn with human-like kinematics

A dominant theory of embodied aesthetic experience (Freedberg & Gallese, 2007, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 11, 197) posits that the appreciation of visual art is linked to the artist’s movements when creating the artwork, yet a direct link between the kinematics of drawing actions and the aesthetics of drawing outcomes has not been experimentally demonstrated. Across four experiments, we measured aesthetic responses of students from arts and non-arts backgrounds to drawing movements generated from computational models of human writing. Experiment 1 demonstrated that human-like drawing movements with bell-shaped velocity profiles (Sigma Lognormal [SL] and Minimum Jerk [MJ]) are perceived as more natural and pleasant than movements with a uniform profile, and in both Experiments 1 and 2 movements that were perceived as more natural were also preferred. Experiment 3 showed that this effect persists if lower-level dynamic stimulus features are fully matched across experimental and control conditions. Furthermore, aesthetic preference for human-like movements were associated with greater perceptual fluency in Experiment 3, evidenced by unbiased estimations of the duration of natural movements. In Experiment 4, line drawings with visual features consistent with the dynamics of natural, human-like movements were preferred, but only by art students. Our findings directly link the aesthetics of human action to the visual aesthetics of drawings, but highlight the importance of incorporating artistic expertise into embodied accounts of aesthetic experience.     

Getting Started on the Road to Applying the Science of Learning

This article describes how Richard Mayer's academic career started on the road to applying the science of learning to education. It suggests four recommendations for getting started: (1) develop intellectual curiosity and core values—which for Mayer occurred because he grew up surrounded by supportive people; (2) find your question—which for Mayer concerns how to help people learn so they can apply what they have learned to new situations; (3) develop your professional skills—which for Mayer occurred because of his educational opportunities in public education culminating in graduate school at the University of Michigan; and (4) find an environment in which you can flourish—which for Mayer is the academic world culminating in landing at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Empathic-like responding by domestic dogs (Canis familiaris) to distress in humans: an exploratory study

Empathy covers a range of phenomena from cognitive empathy involving metarepresentation to emotional contagion stemming from automatically triggered reflexes. An experimental protocol first used with human infants was adapted to investigate empathy in domestic dogs. Dogs oriented toward their owner or a stranger more often when the person was pretending to cry than when they were talking or humming. Observers, unaware of experimental hypotheses and the condition under which dogs were responding, more often categorized dogs' approaches as submissive as opposed to alert, playful or calm during the crying condition. When the stranger pretended to cry, rather than approaching their usual source of comfort, their owner, dogs sniffed, nuzzled and licked the stranger instead. The dogs' pattern of response was behaviorally consistent with an expression of empathic concern, but is most parsimoniously interpreted as emotional contagion coupled with a previous learning history in which they have been rewarded for approaching distressed human companions.