The Relationships of Type A Behavior and Optimism with Job Performance and Blood Pressure

Type A behavior and optimism were examined as predictors of blood pressure and job performance in a hospital setting. Results indicate that the achievement striving dimension of Type A behavior was negatively related to blood pressure. The impatient/irritable dimension of Type A behavior was unrelated to either performance or blood pressure. The interaction of achievement striving Type A behavior and optimism was related to blood pressure and technical job performance. Specifically, achievement striving predicted blood pressure and technical performance when optimism was high but not when it was low. Implications for future research are discussed.     

Frequency of occurrence and rankings for touch-related adjectives

A three-phased study was conducted in order to develop a standardized list of touch-related adjectives. The final list consisted of 306 words that were categorized in 440 instances according to the Lederman and Klatzky (1987, 1990) dimensions of haptic properties (some words were classified in more than one dimension). The Kučera and Francis (1967) frequency of occurrence in written English for all words in the final list was also determined. A correlation was found between frequency of occurrence on the list and Kučera and Francis frequency. An analysis of the word dimensions and future applications are discussed.     

Honesty as the sixth factor of personality: correlations with machiavellianism,primary psychopathy,and social adroitness

Psycholexical studies of personality structure in several languages have recovered, in addition to variants of the Big Five factors, a sixth factor that has been given names suggesting honesty, such as ‘Integrity’, ‘Trustworthiness’, ‘Truthfulness’, and ‘Values’. Using a sample of Korean respondents (N = 610), we correlated lexical markers of the Big Five and the Honesty factor with several questionnaire variables that are relevant to the exploitation of others, including Machiavellianism, Psychopathy, and Social Adroitness. Results indicated that those measures were much more strongly related to the Honesty factor than to any of the Big Five. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Taming Uncivil Discourse

In an era of seemingly intense populist politics, a variety of issues of intergroup prejudice, discrimination, and conflict have moved center stage in much of the industrialized world. Among these is “political correctness” and, in particular, what constitutes a legitimate discourse of political and social conflict and opposition. Yet the meaning of legitimate discourse is being turned on its head as some disparaged groups seek to reclaim, or reappropriate, slurs directed against them. Using as a context a U.S. Supreme Court case about whether “The Slants”—a band named after a traditional slur against Asians—can trademark its name, we test several hypotheses about reappropriation processes based on a nationally representative sample with an oversample of East Asian Americans and several survey experiments. We find that motives attributions influence how people understand and evaluate potentially disparaging words. In particular, when reappropriation motives are perceived, insulting words are judged to be less insulting. In this sense, uncivil discourse can to some degree be tamed.     

Parent engagement in an original and culturally adapted evidence-based parenting program,Legacy for Children™

Legacy for Children™ (Legacy) is an evidence-based program focused on promoting sensitive, responsive parenting for socioeconomically disadvantaged families. Legacy has recently been culturally and linguistically adapted for Spanish-monolingual Latino families and is being piloted in partnership with an early childhood education program. We conducted a mixed methods study to identify barriers and facilitators to engagement, using program monitoring data sources from both participant and group leader perspectives. We conducted qualitative analyses of open-ended data to identify distinct barriers (e.g., employment challenges, health-related challenges and appointments) and facilitators (e.g., other mothers in group, interest in program topics) to engagement that emerged across English and Spanish language curriculum versions; curriculum-specific barriers and facilitators were also documented. We interpret these findings in light of quantitative data on measures of engagement, showing that participants in the Spanish curriculum evidenced comparable levels of parent–group leader relationship quality relative to the English group, and higher levels of parent's group support/connectedness and overall satisfaction. These results offer promising considerations for optimizing families’ engagement in parenting programs in the context of early care and education settings.     

Bonding and bridging social capital and their associations with self‐evaluated community resilience: A comparative study of East Asia

The purpose of this study is to test key social capital indicators in a disaster context by considering the bonding and bridging types of social capital. Using the East Asian Social Survey, this study chooses three behavioural/cognitive elements of social capital—social trust, voluntary association membership, and personal networks—and divides them into bonding and bridging social capital, in‐group and out‐group trust, homogeneous and heterogeneous membership, and strong and weak ties to test their effects on self‐evaluated community resilience to natural hazards. The results showed that social trust and personal networks had strong positive effects, but the effect of voluntary association membership was positive in societies with high rates of membership (Japan and South Korea) and negative in a society with a low rate of membership (Taiwan). Furthermore, while bonding social capital generally showed a stronger effect than bridging social capital in East Asia, a society with more frequent and intense disasters (Japan) showed a strong effect of heterogenous membership on self‐evaluated community resilience. This study connects two aspects of social capital studies—the elements and the types of social capital—and the findings imply that the relationship between social capital and community resilience may have some mediator variables.     

A Reflective Account of a Research Ethics Course for an Interdisciplinary Cohort of Graduate Students

Science and Engineering Ethics - The graduate course in research ethics in the Graduate School for Integrative Sciences and Engineering at the National University of Singapore consists of a...     

Young children are more likely to cheat after overhearing that a classmate is smart

Research on moral socialization has largely focused on the role of direct communication and has almost completely ignored a potentially rich source of social influence: evaluative comments that children overhear. We examined for the first time whether overheard comments can shape children's moral behavior. Three‐ and 5‐year‐old children (N = 200) participated in a guessing game in which they were instructed not to cheat by peeking. We randomly assigned children to a condition in which they overheard an experimenter tell another adult that a classmate who was no longer present is smart, or to a control condition in which the overheard conversation consisted of non‐social information. We found that 5‐year‐olds, but not 3‐year‐olds, cheated significantly more often if they overheard the classmate praised for being smart. These findings show that the effects of ability praise can spread far beyond the intended recipient to influence the behavior of children who are mere observers, and they suggest that overheard evaluative comments can be an important force in shaping moral development.     

Children's understanding of habitual behaviour

Research into the development of Theory of Mind (ToM) has shown how children from a very early age infer other people's goals. However, human behaviour is sometimes driven not by plans to achieve goals, but by habits, which are formed over long periods of reinforcement. Habitual and goal‐directed behaviours are often aligned with one another but can diverge when the optimal behavioural policy changes without being directly reinforced (thus specifically hobbling the habitual learning strategy). Unlike the flexibility of goal‐directed behaviour, rigid habits can cause agents to persist in behaviour that is no longer adaptive. In the current study, all children predict agents will tend to behave consistently with their goals, but between the ages of 5 and 10, children showed an increasing understanding of how habits can cause agents to persistently take suboptimal actions. These findings stand out from the typical way the development of social reasoning is examined, which instead focuses on children's increasing appreciation of how others' beliefs or expectations affect how they will act in service of their goals. The current findings show that children also learn that under certain circumstances, people's actions are suboptimal despite potentially ‘knowing better.’     

Eternity and the Future: A Critique of the Plotinian Myth in Pannenberg’s Theology

For Pannenberg, the eschatological future is considered as the locus where the ultimate causation lies. Such an idea shapes Pannenberg’s doctrinal accounts of Christ and the Trinity in an idiosyncratic way. However, as this article will indicate, the idea is derived from the Plotinian myth that time can become a whole and so a vessel of divine infinity when it reaches the End. Dispensing with the faulty assumption but retaining the concept of the priority of the future, this article will argue that divine eternity as the totality can engage with history directly at any point of time, without a detour via the eschaton.