The impact of psychological distance on integrative internal dialogs

Negotiators more distanced from the negotiated goal more often exhibit integrative behavior, which maximizes both their individual and joint outcomes. Based on the assumption of an analogy between interpersonal negotiations and internal dialogs simulating social relationships, an experiment was carried out. It aimed to verify if psychological distance (proximal vs. distant perspective on the situation enacted in an internal dialog) affects the processes of integration and confrontation and, consequently, increases the frequency of integrative dialogs. Data from 115 participants (56 women) were analyzed. An increase in psychological distance was found to reduce the intensity of the confrontation process and to cause an increase in the number of integrative internal dialogs.     

Testing a model of codependency for college students in Taiwan based on Bowen's concept of differentiation

The purpose of this study was to test a model of codependency based on Bowen's concept of differentiation for college students in Taiwan. The relations between family‐of‐origin dysfunction, differentiation of self, codependency traits and related symptoms including low self‐esteem, relationship distress and psychological adjustment problems were examined. Data were collected from 567 college students from 2 large, urban universities in northern Taiwan. Results indicated a significantly negative relationship between levels of codependency and self‐differentiation and that self‐differentiation partially mediated the relationship between family‐of‐origin dysfunction and codependency. The implications of these findings for counselling Taiwanese college students who experience codependency traits and related symptoms as well as suggestions for future research are discussed.     

Rethinking the Great Commission: Incorporation of Akan Indigenous Symbols into Christian Worship

Symbols are communicative tools with performative functions in all cultures. Apart from their decorative functions, non‐Christian symbols adopted into Christianity have had a tremendous impact on Christian life since the early times, especially in liturgical practices. Through Western missionary activities, Ghana inherited Christian biblical‐liturgical art as has been developed in the home countries of the missionaries. However, since the 1960s Adinkra symbols have been incorporated into Christian worship and theology, receiving attention within secular and religious circles because of their communicative potential. On the religious level, some churches have adopted them as logos or incorporated them into architectural designs and liturgical art. This paper seeks to investigate what motivates various missions to choose particular Adinkra symbol(s) and what they hope to achieve with them. Furthermore, it attempts a theological reflection on the communicative potential of artefacts in Ghanaian Christianity as a response to the “Great Commission. “We approach the subject from a historical, contextual, and theological perspective, using selected Roman Catholic and Methodist churches in Ghana as case studies. The study employed unstructured in‐depth interviews and photo elicitations to trace the relationship between visual arts and religion, with particular emphasis on Christian visual arts and how they have informed Christianity in Ghana.     

Development and Validation of the Female Muscularity Scale

Socially promoted physical appearance ideals for women place increasing importance on muscularity, resulting in growing muscularity concerns among traditional college-age women. To date, however, instruments for assessing the type of muscularity concerns reported by women are lacking. The aim of the present study was therefore to develop such a scale and examine its psychometric properties among a sample of young women. Findings from an exploratory factor analysis (n = 235) and a confirmatory factor analysis (n = 130) revealed a two-factor structure, including a five-item Attitudes subscale (α = .89) and a five-item Behaviors subscale (α = .90), which were moderately correlated, r = .50. In addition, the scale demonstrated good 2-week test-retest reliability (r = .76), and the subscales revealed moderate-to-large associations with body image concerns, drive for thinness, and exercise engagement, indicating concurrent validity. Thus the new Female Muscularity Scale is a useful and promising tool for assessing muscularity concerns among young women, and it may help toward understanding the role of pressures to achieve a toned body in the development of body image, eating, and exercise disorders.     

The Emergence of Counseling in Sierra Leone

Sierra Leone has endured a turbulent history, including a decadelong civil war and the devastation of Ebola virus disease. Despite the psychological consequences of such events, only limited therapeutic services are available. The authors review mental health services in Sierra Leone and document the emergence of counseling as a profession in the face of challenges. They conclude by highlighting the multiple contributions that professional counselors can make to address critical mental health needs in Sierra Leone.     

An Ecological View of School Counselor Ratios and Student Academic Outcomes: A National Investigation

The effect of student‐to‐school‐counselor ratios on academic outcomes has been widely studied, yet few researchers have taken a multilevel approach. Using the nationally representative High School Longitudinal Study: 2009 dataset, the authors found ratios were significantly associated with student grade point average (GPA) and graduation. Attending a Title I school also was associated with students’ GPA, advanced placement/international baccalaureate credits earned, and postsecondary course taking. The authors discuss implications for advocacy and practice, contextualizing their findings within an ecological framework.     

Peer Toy Play as a Gateway to Children’s Gender Flexibility: The Effect of (Counter)Stereotypic Portrayals of Peers in Children’s Magazines

Extensive evidence has documented the gender stereotypic content of children’s media, and media is recognized as an important socializing agent for young children. Yet, the precise impact of children’s media on the endorsement of gender-typed attitudes and behaviors has received less scholarly attention. We investigated the impact of stereotypic and counter-stereotypic peers pictured in children’s magazines on children’s gender flexibility around toy play and preferences, playmate choice, and social exclusion behavior (n?=?82, age 4–7 years-old). British children were randomly assigned to view a picture of a peer-age boy and girl in a magazine playing with either a gender stereotypic or counter-stereotypic toy. In the stereotypic condition, the pictured girl was shown with a toy pony and the pictured boy was shown with a toy car; these toys were reversed in the counter-stereotypic condition. Results revealed significantly greater gender flexibility around toy play and playmate choices among children in the counter-stereotypic condition compared to the stereotypic condition, and boys in the stereotypic condition were more accepting of gender-based exclusion than were girls. However, there was no difference in children’s own toy preferences between the stereotypic and counter-stereotypic condition, with children preferring more gender-typed toys overall. Implications of the findings for media, education, and parenting practices are discussed, and the potential for counter-stereotypic media portrayals of toy play to shape the gender socialization of young children is explored.     

Compensating for an Inattentive Audience

The common ground that conversational partners share is thought to form the basic context for language use. According to the classic view, inferences about common ground, or mutual knowledge, are guided by beliefs about the physical, cognitive, and attentional states of one's communicative partners. Here, we provide a first test of the attention assumption for common ground, the proposal that common ground for a co‐present entity—such as an object or an utterance—can only be formed if a person has evidence that his or her partner has also attended to it. In three experiments, a participant speaker and two partners learned names for novel monster pictures as a group. The speaker was then asked to describe the monsters to each partner separately in a referential communication task. The critical manipulation was the (in)attentiveness of one partner at different points in the study. Analysis of the speaker's referring expressions revealed that speakers assumed their partner shared common ground for the monster names only when that partner exhibited engaged attention as the names were learned. These findings provide key and novel support for the classic proposal that formation of common ground critically depends on assumptions about the attentional state of one's conversational partner.     

Cultural Effects Rather Than a Bilingual Advantage in Cognition: A Review and an Empirical Study

The bilingual advantage hypothesis contends that the management of two languages in the brain is carried out through domain‐general mechanisms, and that bilinguals possess a performance advantage over monolinguals on (nonlinguistic) tasks that tap these processes. Presently, there is evidence both for and against such an advantage. Interestingly, the evidence in favor has been thought strongest in children and older adults, leading some researchers to argue that young adults might be at peak performance levels, and therefore bilingualism is unable to confer an improvement. We conducted a large‐scale review of the extant literature and found that the weight of research pointed to an absence of positive evidence for a bilingual advantage at any age. We next gave a large number of young adult participants a task designed to test the bilingual advantage hypothesis. Reasoning from the literature that young adults from an East Asian (Korean) culture would likely outperform those from a Western (British) culture, we also compared participants on this factor. We found no evidence for a bilingual advantage but did find evidence for enhanced performance in the Korean group. We interpret these results as further evidence against the bilingual advantage hypotheses.