Benefits of Accounts of Well-Being— For Societies and for Psychological Science

The decisions of business leaders and government officials are currently guided by economic and social indicators. It is proposed that accounts of well-being be collected on an ongoing basis to complement the existing indicators. Accounts of subjective well-being would track the societal groups where happiness, life satisfaction, engagement, and positive feelings are high versus low, would indicate the activities that people find enjoyable versus unpleasant, and would monitor changing levels of well-being over time. The accounts would serve decision-makers by making important information on well-being and ill-being available to them. They would also greatly help applied psychology by drawing more attention and interest to important outcomes that are likely to result from psychological interventions.
Les décisions des chefs d'entreprise et des responsables gouvernementaux se fondent actuellement sur des indicateurs sociaux et économiques. On propose de recueillir des données relatives au bien-être de façon continue en complément des indicateurs existants. Les mesures du bien-être subjectif détecteraient les groupes sociaux où le bonheur, la satisfaction de vivre, le sens des responsabilités et les sentiments positifs sont élevés ou bas, indiqueraient les activités que les gens trouvent agréables ou non et suivraient avec le temps les changements dans le niveau du bien-être. Ces mesures seraient utiles aux décisionnaires en mettant à leur disposition des informations importantes sur le bien-être et son contraire. Elles seraient aussi d'un grand secours pour la psychologie appliquée en accordant davantage d'attention et d'intérêt aux conséquences importantes susceptibles de résulter des interventions psychologiques.     

Rehearsal in immediate serial recall

We report for the first time overt rehearsal data in immediate serial recall (ISR) undertaken at three presentation rates (1, 2.5, and 5 sec/word). Two groups of participants saw lists of six words for ISR and were required either to engage in overt rehearsal or to remain silent after reading aloud the word list during its presentation. Typical ISR serial position effects were obtained for both groups, and recall increased with slower rates. When participants rehearsed, they tended to do so in a cumulative forward order up to Serial Position 4, after which the amount of rehearsal decreased substantially. There were similarities between rehearsal and recall data: Both broke down toward the end of longer sequences, and there were strong positive correlations between the maximum sequence of participants' rehearsals and their ISR performance. We interpret these data as suggesting that similar mechanisms underpin both rehearsal and recall in ISR.     

Impact of Conflict on Mental Health in Northern Ireland: The Mediating Role of Intergroup Forgiveness and Collective Guilt

The aim of the present research was to investigate the mediating role of group-level forgiveness and guilt in the relationship between victimhood (the extent to which the conflict affected an individual's life), exposure to violence (the level of violence in their area of residence), and group identity on the one hand, and mild psychiatric morbidity on the other. Specifically the study focused on the psychological impact of the ethnopolitical conflict in Northern Ireland, utilizing people's identification with either the Catholic or Protestant community. Our results revealed that intergroup forgiveness mediated the relationship between both victimhood and group identification, as predictors, and mild psychiatric morbidity. Collective guilt, on the other hand, mediated the relationship between both exposure to violence and group identification, as predictors, and intergroup forgiveness. Overall this study shows that forgiveness and collective guilt can act as mediators in the relationship between impact of ethnopolitical conflict and mental health, at the group level, and thus demonstrates their centrality to the reconciliation process. Implications for intergroup reconciliation initiatives in Northern Ireland are discussed.     

表象对成语记忆影响的实验研究

通过混合实验设计探讨表象对成语记忆的影响.实验结果表明,据成语形成图厕形式的表象能提高图画命名中外显记忆的成绩,显著提高内隐记忆的成绩,尤其是低透明度成语的内隐记忆成绩;但在成语补全中,对两种记忆均没有显著影响.可见.表象同时具有概念加工和知觉加工的性质,表象作用对所形成的表象的形式与测试任务的一致性程度敏感.     

Sexual Consent in Heterosexual Relationships: Development of a New Measure

The extensive research on date rape attitudes and experiences has left sexual consent itself largely unexamined. The objective of this study was to develop a measure to assess women’s and men’s attitudes and behaviors regarding sexual consent. Using both focus groups (N = 18) and a mail survey (N = 514) of undergraduate students at a Canadian university, two scales of sexual consent were developed: (1) a Sexual Consent Attitudes Scale, and (2) a Sexual Consent Behaviors Scale. Preliminary psychometric evidence suggested good reliability and validity. As hypothesized, women, more than men, preferred a more cautious approach to sexual consent by stressing the need to obtain consent more explicitly. Multiple regression analyses supported a reciprocal relationship between sexual consent attitudes and sexual consent behaviors.     

Mainland Chinese and Canadian adolescents’ judgments and reasoning about the fairness of democratic and other forms of government

This study examined the judgments and reasoning of adolescents (ages 12–19 years) from three sites in urban and rural China (n = 270) and in an urban Canadian comparison sample (n = 72), about the fairness of various forms of democratic and non-democratic government. Adolescents from both China and Canada preferred democratic forms of government, such as representative or direct democracy, to non-democratic systems, such as a meritocracy and an oligarchy of the wealthy, at all ages. Adolescents appealed to fundamental democratic principles, such as representation, voice, and majority rule, to justify their judgments. Similar age-related patterns in judgments and reasoning were found across cultures and across diverse settings within China.     

Confucian Democracy as Pragmatic Experiment: Uniting Love of Learning and Love of Antiquity

This paper argues for the pragmatic construction of Confucian democracy by showing that Chinese philosophers who wish to see Confucianism flourish again as a positive dimension of Chinese civilization need to approach it pragmatically and democratically, otherwise their love of the past is at the expense of something else Confucius held in equal esteem, love of learning. Chinese philosophers who desire democracy for China would do well to learn from the earlier failures of the iconoclastic Westernizers, and realize that a Chinese democracy cannot come about by ignoring or dismissing such an important part of China's history, its Confucian tradition. The best chances for democracy in China lie in transforming that tradition without destroying it. Eagerness to learn from others must be united with a proper appreciation of one's own past to nurture democracy as a way of life.     

Visual object affordances: object orientation

Five experiments systematically investigated whether orientation is a visual object property that affords action. The primary aim was to establish the existence of a pure physical affordance (PPA) of object orientation, independent of any semantic object-action associations or visually salient areas towards which visual attention might be biased. Taken together, the data from these experiments suggest that firstly PPAs of object orientation do exist, and secondly, the behavioural effects that reveal them are larger and more robust when the object appears to be graspable, and is oriented in depth (rather than just frontally) such that its leading edge appears to point outwards in space towards a particular hand of the viewer.     

The dynamics of daily events and well-being across cultures: when less is more

The authors examined cultural and individual differences in the relation between daily events and daily satisfaction. In a preliminary study, they established cross-cultural equivalence of 50 daily events. In the main study, participants in the United States, Korea, and Japan completed daily surveys on the 50 events and daily satisfaction for 21 days. The multilevel random coefficient model analyses showed that (a) the within-person association between positive events and daily satisfaction was significantly stronger among Asian American, Korean, and Japanese participants than among European American participants and (b) the within-person association between positive events and daily satisfaction was significantly weaker among individuals high in global life satisfaction than among those low in global life satisfaction. The findings demonstrate a weaker effect of positive events on daily well-being among individuals and cultures high in global well-being.     

Autonomy,culture, and well-being: The benefits of inclusive autonomy

In an attempt to understand cultural variation in motivation, we distinguished between the type of motivation (ranging from controlled to autonomous, as conventionally measured) and the subject of motivation (“I” vs. “my family and I”), creating measures of individual and inclusive academic motivation. Support was found for three hypotheses. First, Chinese Canadian and Singaporean students felt less relative autonomy than European Canadian students, on both the inclusive and individual measures. Second, individual relative autonomy was associated with psychological well-being (WB) for European Canadians and Chinese Canadians (Study 1), and Singaporeans (Study 2). Third, inclusive relative autonomy was associated with psychological well-being for Chinese Canadians and Singaporeans, but not European Canadians. Exploratory analyses are also presented, and implications for the theory and measurement of autonomy are discussed.