"I" Value Freedom, But "We" Value Relationships: Self-Construal Priming Mirrors Cultural Differences in Judgment

The distinction between relatively independent versus interdependent self-construals has been strongly associated with several important cultural differences in social behavior. The current studies examined the causal role of self-construal by investigating whether priming independent or interdependent self-construals within a culture could result in differences in psychological worldview that mirror those traditionally found between cultures. In Experiment 1, European-American participants primed with interdependence displayed shifts toward more collectivist social values and judgments that were mediated by corresponding shifts in self-construal. In Experiment 2, this effect was extended by priming students from the United States and Hong Kong with primes that were consistent and inconsistent with their predominant cultural worldview. Students who received the inconsistent primes were more strongly affected than those who received the consistent primes, and thus shifted self-construal, and corresponding values, to a greater degree.     

The Impact of Necessity and Sufficiency in The Wason Four-Card Selection Task

Performance in the Wason card selection task is often improved given thematic content. Such content effects have been considered evidence against human rationality. We propose that the role of content lies in specifying premises underlying "if P, then Q" rules. Unlike thematic rules, abstract conditional rules do not explicitly provide material interpretation (P is a sufficient but not necessarily a necessary condition for Q), resulting in nonnormative responses. When necessity–sufficiency relations were explicated, normative responses were elicited and effects of other logically irrelevant components disappeared. The results suggest that content effects are compatible with human rationality.     

Reinventing the University: From Institutions to Communities of Higher Education

This article responds to three questions: What if the primary mission of the university is to (i) nourish the intellect, (ii) commit to the sacredness of all life, and (iii) foster spirituality? Responses examine multiple forms of literacy, instruction that is ecologically valid and thus oriented toward the unity of knowledge, and teaching as a moral activity. The suggestion here is that meaningful reform will emphasize education of the whole person in relation to the physical, symbolic, and social environments. Curricula focused on forms of representation, modes of treatment, and syntactic structure, adaptive understandings, constructed meanings, critical thinking, real problems, connected knowing, creativity, inspiration, service learning, and the development of declarative procedural and poetic knowledge are discussed.     

What’s in a name? Lexical knowledge drives infants’ visual preferences in the absence of referential input

Seventeen-month-old infants were presented with pairs of images, in silence or with the non-directive auditory stimulus ‘look!’. The images had been chosen so that one image depicted an item whose name was known to the infant, and the other image depicted an image whose name was not known to the infant. Infants looked longer at images for which they had names than at images for which they did not have names, despite the absence of any referential input. The experiment controlled for the familiarity of the objects depicted: in each trial, image pairs presented to infants had previously been judged by caregivers to be of roughly equal familiarity. From a theoretical perspective, the results indicate that objects with names are of intrinsic interest to the infant. The possible causal direction for this linkage is discussed and it is concluded that the results are consistent with Whorfian linguistic determinism, although other construals are possible. From a methodological perspective, the results have implications for the use of preferential looking as an index of early word comprehension.     

Verbal Strategies for Seeking Help in Organizations1

The verbal strategies used to frame requests for help are integral to the help-seeking process. Drawing on politeness theory, it was predicted that gender, power, and norms affect usage of verbal strategies in seeking help, and verbal strategies predict interpersonal outcomes. Two studies showed that: (a) individuals used more strategies under collectivistic than individualistic norms; (b) under individualistic norms, men used more strategies when seeking help upward, and women used more strategies when seeking help laterally; and (c) those who used more strategies provided higher quality information, and were perceived more favorably by others. These results suggest that verbal strategies not only reflect important relational and contextual factors, but also serve multiple social functions.     

Maternal and adolescent depressive symptoms and family conflict: An autoregressive cross-lagged examination of competing models in multi-stressed mothers and adolescents

Maternal and adolescent depression are challenges that often co-occur. Many studies have drawn bivariate associations between maternal depressive symptoms, adolescent depressive symptoms, and family conflict, but few have examined reciprocal effects. Even among extant studies, there is a lack of clarity related to directionality of influence. Three competing theoretical models may explain the relationship between maternal depressive symptoms, adolescent depressive symptoms, and family conflict, and these processes may differ by adolescents’ sex. Using three time points of data from 187 diverse mother-adolescent dyads, we fit a taxonomy of autoregressive cross-lagged structural equation models to simultaneously evaluate the competing theoretical models and also examine differences by sex using multiple-group analyses. Results indicate a symptom-driven model whereby adolescent depressive symptoms predicted increases in family conflict. Sex differences were also found. For males, but not females, greater adolescent depressive symptoms predicted subsequent increases in maternal depressive symptoms, which then predicted lower family conflict—possibly indicating maternal disengagement/withdrawal. Our findings suggest addressing adolescent depressive symptoms in order to prevent family conflict and that distinctive targets for the prevention/intervention of family conflict should account for differences by adolescents’ sex.     

Dreams of Life and Death

This article examines the personal and archetypal aspects of images from six dreams that occurred during the illness and after the death of the dreamer's sister. It connects the dream images to the unresolved issues in the relationship between siblings and to the dreamer's own reflections on typology. It also explores the larger questions concerning the psychological process of grief, the common occurrence of synchronistic events related to death and loss, and includes Jung's comments on life and death. Finally, the article suggests solutions to our very human fears of death and encourages the development of our capacity to discover a personal mythology, a working sacred story, of “the beyond” or “life” after death.     

The learning benefits of teaching: A retrieval practice hypothesis

Teaching educational materials to others enhances the teacher's own learning of those to‐be‐taught materials, although the underlying mechanisms remain largely unknown. Here, we show that the learning‐by‐teaching benefit is possibly a retrieval benefit. Learners (a) solved arithmetic problems (i.e., they neither taught nor retrieved; control group), (b) taught without relying on teaching notes (i.e., they had to retrieve the materials while teaching; teaching group), (c) taught with teaching notes (i.e., they did not retrieve the materials while teaching; teaching without retrieval practice [TnRP] group), or (d) retrieved (i.e., they did not teach but only practised retrieving; retrieval practice group). In a final comprehension test 1 week later, learners in the teaching group, as did those in the retrieval practice group, outperformed learners in the TnRP and control groups. Retrieval practice possibly causes the learning benefits of teaching.