Dimensionality of rosenberg’s self-esteem scale among normal-technical stream students in Singapore

Dimensionality of the widely used Rosenberg’s Self-Esteem Scale (RSES) was investigated in a sample of 153 seventh-grade Asian students from Singapore. Confirmatory factor analyses performed on the scores of the RSES revealed two factors (positive and negative self-esteem) as hypothesized. Both factors were empirically related to different external variables. Results from multiple regression analyses indicated that positive self-esteem significantly predicted students’ mastery goal orientation and academic self-efficacy scores while negative self-esteem significantly predicted students’ disruptive behavior. These findings provide some preliminary support that the two factors could possibly be measuring substantively distinct dimensions, thus calling into question the unidimensionalty of the RSES in an Asian school-based sample. This study was supported by a grant from Center for Research in Pedagogy and Practice, National Institute of Education (CRP 26/04 RA) to Rebecca P. Ang.     

Gender and opinions about mental illness as predictors of attitudes toward seeking professional psychological help

Help-seeking attitudes have been an important part of research into the kinds of college students who do and do not seek psychotherapy. The current study investigated the relationship between students' opinions about mental illness and their attitudes toward seeking professional help. By also using gender as a predictor of help-seeking attitudes, the researchers examined the effects of opinions about mental illness on help-seeking attitudes above and beyond well-known gender effects. This is important because opinions about mental illness are the kind of attitudinal variables that should be more modifiable than gender identity. The results indicate that females had more positive attitudes toward seeking help than males, and that people's opinions about mental illness, especially more benevolent, less authoritarian, less socially restrictive and higher mental hygiene ideology perspectives, accounted for a significant percentage of positive help-seeking attitudes beyond the percentage accounted for by gender.     

Integrating cross-cultural psychology research methods into ethnic minority psychology

Multicultural psychology has 2 related but often disconnected streams, namely cross-cultural psychology and racial and ethnic minority psychology (Hall & Maramba, 2001). We propose that advances in both fields will be facilitated if there is greater cross-fertilization, especially in methodological approaches given that proponents in both fields are interested in studying and understanding the role and impact of culture on human behavior. To facilitate this cross-fertilization, we present 3 methodological approaches that would be of value in racial and ethnic minority psychology. First, we present an overview of the importance of and the approaches to evaluating and establishing measurement equivalence. Second, we discuss recent advances in the understanding of conceptual equivalence in light of indigenous approaches, cultural manipulation, and multilevel analysis. Third, we present a combined etic-emic approach to cross-cultural personality research as illustrated by the Cross-Cultural Personality Assessment Inventory developed by Fanny Cheung and her colleagues.     

Neural correlates of conventional and harm/welfare-based moral decision-making

The degree to which social norms are processed by a unitary system or dissociable systems remains debated. Much research on children’s social-cognitive judgments has supported the distinction between “moral” (harm/welfare-based) and “conventional” norms. However, the extent to which these norms are processed by dissociable neural systems remains unclear. To address this issue, 23 healthy participants were scanned with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while they rated the wrongness of harm/welfare-based and conventional transgressions and neutral vignettes. Activation significantly greater than the neutral vignette baseline was observed in regions implicated in decision-making regions including rostral/ventral medial frontal, anterior insula and dorsomedial frontal cortices when evaluating both harm/welfare-based and social-conventional transgressions. Greater activation when rating harm/welfare-based relative to social-conventional transgressions was seen through much of ACC and bilateral inferior frontal gyrus. Greater activation was observed in superior temporal gyrus, bilateral middle temporal gyrus, left PCC, and temporal-parietal junction when rating social-conventional transgressions relative to harm/welfare-based transgressions. These data suggest that decisions regarding the wrongness of actions, irrespective of whether they involve care/harm-based or conventional transgressions, recruit regions generally implicated in affect-based decision-making. However, there is neural differentiation between harm/welfare-based and conventional transgressions. This may reflect the particular importance of processing the intent of transgressors of conventional norms and perhaps the greater emotional content or salience of harm/welfare-based transgressions.     

Recognizing Anxiety Disorders in the Aftermath of the World Trade Center Crisis

This article seeks to educate the reader on how to recognize the presence of anxiety disorders as they occur in the church community. The author uses medical information, Scriptural wisdom and a case illustration to help concerned Christians to assist sufferers in getting appropriate care. Anxiety disorders in the aftermath of the World Trade Center trajedy will be on the rise and the paper addresses this matter particularly for clergy, caregivers and professional counselors.     

Source recall enhances children's discrimination of seen and heard events

The effects of rehearsing actions by source (slideshow vs. story) and of test modality (picture vs. verbal) on source monitoring were examined. Seven- to 8-year-old children (N = 30) saw a slideshow event and heard a story about a similar event. One to 2 days later, they recalled the events by source (source recall), recalled the events without reference to source (no-source-cue recall), or engaged in no recall. Seven to 8 days later, all children received verbal and picture source-monitoring tests. Children in the source recall group were less likely than children in the other groups to claim they saw actions merely heard in the story. No-source-cue recall impaired source identification of story actions. The picture test enhanced recognition, but not source monitoring, of slide actions. Increasing the distinctiveness of the target events (Experiment 2) allowed the picture test to facilitate slideshow action discrimination by children in the no-recall group.     

Guest editors' introduction to the special issue

The background and focus of this special issue are described in this Introduction.     

Academic entitlement: its relationship with academic behaviors and attitudes

Social Psychology of Education - The current study examined the relationship of academic entitlement with student attitudes (e.g., locus of control, motivation) and academic behavior. Participants...