Social and Personal Controls and Performance Enhancing Drug Use: Toward an Explanation of Doping Activity among Professional Athletes in Rasht,Iran

The use of performance-enhancing drugs (PED), also known as “doping,” is a common practice among professional athletes in Iran and this global phenomenon is a serious social problem. The main purpose of this research is to test the efficacy of Gottfredson and Hirschi’s conceptualization of low self-control in conjunction with their ideas of effective parenting and rational choice, in explaining why athletes engage in doping activity. Using self-report data from a random sample of 606 professional athletes from Rasht, Iran, the current study indicates that there are significant associations between ineffective parenting, self-control, perceived costs, and doping activity.     

Highlighting the Way Forward: A Review of Community Mental Health Research and Practice Published in AJCP and JCP

Articles published in the two most prominent journals of community psychology in North America, the American Journal of Community Psychology (AJCP) and Journal of Community Psychology (JCP), provide a clear indicator of trends in community research and practice. An examination of community psychology's history and scholarship suggests that the field has reduced its emphasis on promoting mental health, well‐being, and liberation of individuals with serious mental illnesses over the past several decades. To further investigate this claim, the current review presents an analysis of articles relevant to community mental health (N = 307) published in the American Journal of Community Psychology (AJCP) and Journal of Community Psychology (JCP) from 1973 to 2015. The review focuses on article characteristics (e.g., type of article and methods employed), author characteristics, topic areas, and theoretical frameworks. Results document a downward trend in published articles from the mid‐1980s to mid‐2000s, with a substantial increase in published work between 2006 and 2015. A majority of articles were empirical and employed quantitative methods. The most frequent topic area was community mental health centers and services (n = 49), but the past three decades demonstrate a clear shift away from mental health service provision to address pressing social issues that impact community mental health, particularly homelessness (n = 42) and community integration of adults with serious mental illnesses (n = 40). Findings reflect both the past and present state of community psychology and suggest promising directions for re‐engaging with community mental health and fostering well‐being, inclusion, and liberation of adults experiencing serious mental health challenges.     

Happy thoughts: Enhancing well-being in the classroom with a positive events diary

Positive psychology interventions (PPIs) are effective in increasing well-being across the population. Whilst educators are recognising the importance of well-being in the classroom and of its long-term impact on life trajectory, the transformative potential of PPIs in educational settings is yet to be fully realised. This study investigates, for the first time, the effects of a PPI in school children by means of a daily dairy. Self-report questionnaires were used to measure well-being in school children aged 8–11 years. Across two studies, children kept a positive events diary, recording three experiences every day for a week. The intervention led to an increase in happiness and a decrease in depressive symptoms immediately following the intervention and at a three-month follow-up. Children who had unhappier baseline scores benefitted more from the intervention. This study demonstrates significant scope, in school settings, for targeted light-touch interventions to promote well-being in those with the greatest need.     

Evidence for a relationship between trait gratitude and prosocial behaviour

Prosocial behaviour towards unrelated others is communally beneficial but can be individually costly. The emotion of gratitude mitigates this cost by encouraging direct as well as “upstream” reciprocity, thereby facilitating cooperation. A widely used method for measuring trait gratitude is the Gratitude Questionnaire (GQ6) [McCullough, M., Emmons, R., &; Tsang, J. (2002). The grateful disposition: A conceptual and empirical topography. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 82, 112–127. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.82.1.112]. Here we undertake an assessment of the external validity of the GQ6 by examining its relationship with two incentivized economic games that serve as face valid indices of generosity and reciprocity. In two studies (total N?=?501) we find that trait gratitude as measured by the GQ6 predicts greater donations in a charity donation task as well as greater transfers and returns in an incentivized trust game. These results support the hypothesis that individuals with higher trait gratitude are more generous and trusting on average, and provide initial evidence as to the predictive validity of the GQ6.     

Motivated or Demotivated to Be Creative: The Role of Self‐Regulatory Focus in Transformational and Transactional Leadership Processes

Numerous studies have recognised the importance of transformational leadership style for encouraging employees’ creativity. Self‐regulation studies have highlighted the influence of a promotion focus on employees’ creative behaviours. Yet both leadership and self‐regulation theories have paid less attention to the role transactional leadership style and situational prevention regulatory focus may play in affecting employees’ creativity. In this article we present a theoretical model which examines transformational and transactional leadership styles and both promotion and prevention situational self‐regulatory focus (SRF). The model suggests that while transformational leadership promotes creativity, at least partially by enhancing follower's situational promotion SRF, transactional leadership style (transactional active) is aligned with followers’ prevention situational SRF, which is associated with leaders’ hindering of followers’ creativity. Findings from two studies, an experimental study (N = 189) and a field study (N = 343 employees and 75 managers), support this model, showing that the relationship between different types of leadership and creativity are more complex than previously regarded. The theoretical and practical implications are discussed.     

Can Emotions Have Abstract Objects? The Example of Awe

Can we feel emotions about abstract objects, assuming that abstract objects exist? I argue that at least some emotions can have abstract objects as their intentional objects and discuss why this conclusion is not just trivially true. Through critical engagement with the work of Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt, I devote special attention to awe, an emotion that is particularly well suited to show that some emotions can be about either concrete or abstract objects. In responding to a possible objection, according to which we can only feel emotions about things that we take to matter to our flourishing, and thus cannot feel emotions about causally inefficacious abstract objects, I explore how abstract objects can be relevant to human flourishing and discuss some emotions other than awe that can be about abstract objects. I finish by explaining some reasons why my conclusion matters, including the fact that it presents a challenge to perceptual theories of emotion and causal theories of intentionality.     

Motivated attention to fear-related stimuli: Evidence for the enhanced processing of fear in the late positive potential

Differences in the processing of emotions like fear and sadness have important implications for our understanding of many psychological phenomena (e.g., attentional biases, psychopathology). The late positive potential (LPP) is an established event-related potential that reflects motivated attention to emotional stimuli at the neural level with excellent temporal resolution, but has been infrequently used to study differences across emotions. Drawing on functional theories of emotion suggesting that the quick processing of fear-inducing stimuli increases chances of survival, we hypothesized that fear-inducing pictures would produce larger LPP amplitudes compared to other emotions (happy and sad) in the early time windows of the LPP (e.g., 400–700, 700–1000 ms). The results supported our hypothesis, offering new, albeit preliminary, evidence of the differential processing of threat-related stimuli on the LPP.     

Leslie on generics

This paper offers three objections to Leslie’s recent and already influential theory of generics (Leslie in Philos Perspect 21(1):375–403, 2007a, Philos Rev 117(1):1–47, 2008): (i) her proposed metaphysical truth-conditions are subject to systematic counter-examples, (ii) the proposed disquotational semantics fails, and (iii) there is evidence that generics do not express cognitively primitive generalisations.