Integrating personality,context, relationship,and emotion type into a model of display rules

This research sets out to examine individual variations in perceptions of display rules. Based upon Mischel and Shoda’s [Mischel, W., & Shoda, Y. (1995). A cognitive-affective system theory of personality: Reconceptualizing situations, dispositions, dynamics, and invariance in personality structure. Psychological Review, 102, 246–268.] model of the Cognitive-Affective Personality System (CAPS), we proposed that extraversion and neuroticism would serve to explain within-cultural individual differences and within-individual differences in endorsement of display rules. To test this hypothesis, participants reported the expressivity level of the display rule they endorsed by responding to the revised version of the Display Rule Assessment Inventory. Multi-level analyses showed that compared to those of introverts, the display rules of extraverts tended to be more suppressive when the relationship was distant rather than close. Extraversion also enhanced a neurotic’s degree of suppression in public compared to private situations. Processes describing how personality interacts with situations in personalizing display rules were offered in light of the CAPS model to account for these interactions between personality and situation in the operation of display rules for emotional expression.     

Specific emotions as mediators of the effect of intergroup contact on prejudice: findings across multiple participant and target groups

Emotions are increasingly being recognised as important aspects of prejudice and intergroup behaviour. Specifically, emotional mediators play a key role in the process by which intergroup contact reduces prejudice towards outgroups. However, which particular emotions are most important for prejudice reduction, as well as the consistency and generality of emotion–prejudice relations across different in-group–out-group relations, remain uncertain. To address these issues, in Study 1 we examined six distinct positive and negative emotions as mediators of the contact–prejudice relations using representative samples of U.S. White, Black, and Asian American respondents (N?=?639). Admiration and anger (but not other emotions) were significant mediators of the effects of previous contact on prejudice, consistently across different perceiver and target ethnic groups. Study 2 examined the same relations with student participants and gay men as the out-group. Admiration and disgust mediated the effect of past contact on attitude. The findings confirm that not only negative emotions (anger or disgust, based on the specific types of threat perceived to be posed by an out-group), but also positive, status- and esteem-related emotions (admiration) mediate effects of contact on prejudice, robustly across several different respondent and target groups.     

Positive Approaches to Coping with the Challenges of Ageing: Research Priorities

This article identifies research priorities in respect of the social dimension of ageing. Three areas are explored; ageing in one's own community; ageing in another community as a consequence of migration and ageing in a residential community. Exemplar research studies, conducted by the authors (singly) are presented briefly and contextualised in the literature to reveal key research priorities. The determination of research priorities should take account of those aspects of social functioning that are associated with factors amenable to change. Key research priorities identified include the development of a better understanding of the importance of social networks; how these are created, maintained to promote the successful social ageing of individuals.     

Social exclusion and donation behaviour: What conditions motivate the socially excluded to donate?

Previous research has indicated that social exclusion can result in people becoming more focused on themselves than on others, and this may reduce their likelihood of engaging in prosocial behaviour. However, the question of how to promote prosocial behaviour in people who have experienced social exclusion remains. This study comprised two experiments that address this question in the context of donation advertising. Experiment 1 examined participants’ donation intentions after experiencing social exclusion in a ball‐passing game. Experiment 2 followed the same design as Experiment 1, except that real‐life donation behaviour was measured. Consistent with prior findings, our results indicated that those who experienced social exclusion displayed lower donation intentions (Experiment 1) and donated less (Experiment 2) than did those who did not experience social exclusion. However, when those who experienced social exclusion watched advertisements that only portrayed alienated people, they showed as much donation intent as those who did not experience social exclusion (Experiment 1) and ultimately donated more (Experiment 2). These findings indicate that social exclusion may increase an individual's tendency to help others who also are alienated.     

A Case Study of the Decline of the Buddhist Funeral Ritual,the Guangdong Yuqie Yankou

This article contextualizes the decline of the Buddhist death ritual, the Guangdong Yuqie Yankou (廣東瑜伽焰口), through an examination of external and internal factors that might have affected its development in contemporary Hong Kong. During the last two decades, its popularity has dramatically declined, so much so that it now occupies an insignificant place among the pool of local funeral rituals. Its waning is not only a result of changing socioeconomic factors, such as contemporary lifestyles, commercialization of the funeral industry, ‘fast-food’ mortuary practices, and diminished religiosity of the Hong Kong laity, but is also caused by the scarcity of presiding Buddhist masters and competition from Buddhist rituals imported from other provinces of China. These intertwining factors have worked together to foster the decline of the ritual. The data for this ethnographic study were mainly collected in interviews and through the observation of participants.     

Learning Problem‐Solving Rules as Search Through a Hypothesis Space

Learning to solve a class of problems can be characterized as a search through a space of hypotheses about the rules for solving these problems. A series of four experiments studied how different learning conditions affected the search among hypotheses about the solution rule for a simple computational problem. Experiment 1 showed that a problem property such as computational difficulty of the rules biased the search process and so affected learning. Experiment 2 examined the impact of examples as instructional tools and found that their effectiveness was determined by whether they uniquely pointed to the correct rule. Experiment 3 compared verbal directions with examples and found that both could guide search. The final experiment tried to improve learning by using more explicit verbal directions or by adding scaffolding to the example. While both manipulations improved learning, learning still took the form of a search through a hypothesis space of possible rules. We describe a model that embodies two assumptions: (1) the instruction can bias the rules participants hypothesize rather than directly be encoded into a rule; (2) participants do not have memory for past wrong hypotheses and are likely to retry them. These assumptions are realized in a Markov model that fits all the data by estimating two sets of probabilities. First, the learning condition induced one set of Start probabilities of trying various rules. Second, should this first hypothesis prove wrong, the learning condition induced a second set of Choice probabilities of considering various rules. These findings broaden our understanding of effective instruction and provide implications for instructional design.     

Self-Interest, Economic Beliefs, and Political Party Preference in New Zealand

This study explored the associations among income level, economic beliefs, and political party preference in terms of self-interest and ideological theories of party preference. Results from a survey of 487 New Zealand voters showed that the income levels and economic beliefs of supporters of the four major parties were organized along a single dimension: ACT supporters had the highest income and strongest neoliberal economic beliefs, followed closely by National supporters, whereas Alliance supporters had the lowest income and strongest welfare-state economic beliefs, followed by Labour supporters. However, the prediction of party preference from income and economic beliefs showed a different pattern: Income significantly predicted support for ACT, National, and Alliance; economic beliefs had the strongest influence on National and Labour support; and economic beliefs interacted with income to influence ACT and National support, but not Labour and Alliance support. The results suggest that voters who have gained or lost the most from the implementation of neoliberal policies—in this case, those with the highest and lowest incomes (i.e., ACT and Alliance supporters), respectively—form political party preference mainly from economic self-interest, whereas middle-income voters (i.e., National and Labour supporters) form party preference from ideological congruence. Moreover, higher status individuals may be more likely to use ideology to express self-interested motivation.