Values and helping behavior: A study in four cultures

Values are important factors in determining individuals' behaviours. Previous studies have examined the relations between values and helping behaviour, but usually in the context of a single culture. The current study examines the relations between personal value types and helping behaviour among university students (N = 722) in four cultures (Germany, Scotland‐UK, Israel and Turkey). Across cultures, the value types of self‐transcendence versus self‐enhancement and conservation versus openness to change were positively related to helping. Specifically, self‐transcendence values were positively related, and self‐enhancement and openness to change values negatively related, to helping behaviour. The correlations pattern did not differ significantly between cultures.     

Terror management and religion: evidence that intrinsic religiousness mitigates worldview defense following mortality salience

Terror management theory suggests that people cope with awareness of death by investing in some kind of literal or symbolic immortality. Given the centrality of death transcendence beliefs in most religions, the authors hypothesized that religious beliefs play a protective role in managing terror of death. The authors report three studies suggesting that affirming intrinsic religiousness reduces both death-thought accessibility following mortality salience and the use of terror management defenses with regard to a secular belief system. Study 1 showed that after a naturally occurring reminder of mortality, people who scored high on intrinsic religiousness did not react with worldview defense, whereas people low on intrinsic religiousness did. Study 2 specified that intrinsic religious belief mitigated worldview defense only if participants had the opportunity to affirm their religious beliefs. Study 3 illustrated that affirmation of religious belief decreased death-thought accessibility following mortality salience only for those participants who scored high on the intrinsic religiousness scale. Taken as a whole, these results suggest that only those people who are intrinsically vested in their religion derive terror management benefits from religious beliefs.     

A new model of sportive cooperation and its evaluation by means a questionnaire

We present in this paper the sportive cooperation as a theoretical framework for the teams' dynamics, and as an alternative to others theories, specially the sportive cohesion. This theory has a double basis: 1) The rational and utilitarist decision taking upon the personal cooperation or not, with the team's goal, based on the internal teammates interaction, and the environmental stimuli; and 2) A personal, and more stable, disposition to cooperate, despite the possibility of obtain any counterparts for this behavior. From this framework, we have build--in a three phase process--a questionnaire addressed to evaluate the sportive cooperation. The final version--composed of 15 items with standard psychometric propierties--shows two kinds of factors. First, we have two dispositional, traitlike, factors: The Conditional cooperation, and the Unconditional cooperation. Second, we have three situational factors: the Cooperation with the Coach, with the teammates, and the Cooperation outside the game and the training. Lastly, we discuss the maining of this theory respect to the sportive team's dynamics, and its relevance for the applied psychology, both for the evaluation and the interventions on the teams.     

Coping with terrorism: the impact of increased salience of terrorism on mood and self-efficacy of intrinsically religious and nonreligious people

It was hypothesized that intrinsic religiousness helps to cope with increased salience of terrorism. Intrinsically religious and non-religious participants were told that it is highly probable or highly improbable, respectively, that terrorist attacks will occur in Germany. High probability of terrorism only negatively affected the mood of non-religious participants but not of intrinsically religious participants (Study 1). Using as a realistic context of investigation the terrorist suicide bombings in Istanbul, the authors replicated this finding and shed some light on the underlying psychological processes (Study 2): On the day of the terrorist attacks (high salience of terrorism), non-religious participants experienced less positive emotions and less self-efficacy than did intrinsically religious participants. Two months later (low salience of terrorism), no differences were found between non-religious and intrinsically religious participants with regard to mood and self-efficacy. Mediational analyses suggested that the mood effects were associated with differences in the reported sense of self-efficacy.     

Psychopathy, aggression, and the processing of emotional stimuli in non-referred girls and boys

Research shows that individuals with psychopathic traits differ in how they process negative emotional stimuli. However, it is unclear whether these differences are specific to certain types of negative emotional stimulus and whether they are more strongly associated with psychopathic traits or aggression. Further, it is not clear whether or not deficits in emotional processing generalize to females and ethnic minority individuals with psychopathic traits. In this study, we examined the emotional processing of visual stimuli using a dot-probe task in 50 non-referred girls and boys (mean age of 9.30; SD = 2.00). Overall, there was a significant association between proactive aggression and reduced responsiveness to distressing stimuli. In addition, the predicted association between psychopathic traits and reduced responsiveness to distressing stimuli was only found for children high on aggression. Also, the associations among aggression, psychopathic traits, and responsiveness to distressing stimuli did not differ for boys and girls.     

Detecting intra- and inter-categorical structure in semantic concepts using HICLAS

In this paper, we investigate the hypothesis that people use feature correlations to detect inter- and intra-categorical structure. More specifically, we study whether it is plausible that people strategically look for a particular type of feature co-occurrence that can be represented in terms of rectangular patterns of 1s and 0s in a binary feature by exemplar matrix. Analyzing data from the Animal and Artifact domains, we show that the HICLAS model, which looks for such rectangular structure and which therefore models a cognitive capacity of detecting feature co-occurence in large data bases of features characterizing exemplars, succeeds rather well in predicting inter- and intra-categorical structure.     

True or false: do 5-year-olds understand belief?

In 3 studies (N = 188) we tested the hypothesis that children use a perceptual access approach to reason about mental states before they understand beliefs. The perceptual access hypothesis predicts a U-shaped developmental pattern of performance in true belief tasks, in which 3-year-olds who reason about reality should succeed, 4- to 5-year-olds who use perceptual access reasoning should fail, and older children who use belief reasoning should succeed. The results of Study 1 revealed the predicted pattern in 2 different true belief tasks. The results of Study 2 disconfirmed several alternate explanations based on possible pragmatic and inhibitory demands of the true belief tasks. In Study 3, we compared 2 methods of classifying individuals according to which 1 of the 3 reasoning strategies (reality reasoning, perceptual access reasoning, belief reasoning) they used. The 2 methods gave converging results. Both methods indicated that the majority of children used the same approach across tasks and that it was not until after 6 years of age that most children reasoned about beliefs. We conclude that because most prior studies have failed to detect young children's use of perceptual access reasoning, they have overestimated their understanding of false beliefs. We outline several theoretical implications that follow from the perceptual access hypothesis.     

Selective exposure: The impact of framing information search instructions as gains and losses

Previous research has found that people prefer information that supports rather than conflicts with their decisions (selective exposure). In the present paper, we investigated whether selective exposure was influenced by the method of information collection. Based on Prospect Theory we hypothesized that the method of selection (MOS), where simply selected pieces of information are considered, would lead to a higher selective exposure compared to the method of elimination (MOE), where pieces of information are rejected and the remaining pieces of information are considered. In fact, we found that participants collected information more selectively when they were instructed to use the MOS compared to the MOE. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.