Relationship Education for Military Couples: Recommendations for Best Practice

Military couples have a number of distinctive strengths and challenges that are likely to influence their relationship adjustment. Military couples' strengths include stable employment, financial security, and subsidized health and counseling services. At the same time, military couples often experience long periods of separation and associated difficulties with emotional disconnect, trauma symptoms, and reintegrating the family. This paper describes best practice recommendations for working with military couples, including: addressing the distinctive challenges of the military lifestyle, ensuring program delivery is seen as relevant by military couples, and providing relationship education in formats that enhance the accessibility of programs.     

Regulatory mode and willingness to increase retirement savings contributions

This study examined how two self‐regulatory modes, locomotion and assessment, relate to the willingness to increase retirement savings. Locomotion is concerned with making things happen (“just do it”). Assessment is concerned with critical evaluation (“do the right thing”). We hypothesized that individuals who score high (vs. low) in locomotion, but not those who score high (vs. low) in assessment, would be more willing to increase their savings for retirement. In addition, because high (vs. low) assessment can lead to doing the right thing in terms of seeking to maximize economic returns, we hypothesized that combining high locomotion with high assessment would especially motivate willingness to increase retirement savings. We found support for both hypotheses from a survey of university employees.     

Religious studies as a modern academic discipline in Korea

This article offers a historical and institutional overview of the discipline of religious studies in Korea. It first reviews four early sources of comparative studies: work by Christian missionaries; by Japanese scholars during the period of colonization by that nation; by nationalist Korean scholars who reacted against colonization; and by Korean Christian theologians. The founding of the Korean Association for the History of Religions (KAHR) in 1969 was a key point in the professionalization of the discipline. The field became more firmly established in the late 1980s and early 1990s and has diversified in recent years with a new generation of often foreign-trained scholars. The article ends with a brief discussion of potential contributions that the discipline could make to current debates of national significance.     

When sex doesn’t sell to men: mortality salience,disgust and the appeal of products and advertisements featuring sexualized women

Although men typically hold favorable views of advertisements featuring female sexuality, from a Terror Management Theory perspective, this should be less the case when thoughts of human mortality are salient. Two experiments conducted in South Korea supported this hypothesis across a variety of products (e.g., perfume and vodka). Men became more negative towards advertisements featuring female sexuality, and had reduced purchase intentions for those products, after thinking about their own mortality. Study 2 found that these effects were mediated by heightened disgust. Mortality thoughts did not impact women in either study. These findings uniquely demonstrate that thoughts of death interact with female sex-appeal to influence men’s consumer choices, and that disgust mediates these processes. Implications for the role of emotion, and cultural differences, in terror management, for attitudes toward female sexuality, and for marketing strategies are discussed.     

Cross-Level Theoretical Predictions of Marijuana,Methamphetamine, and Opium Use

Despite the large body of literature investigating drug use, limited research has explored both the individual and structural dimensions of drug use, and an even smaller number of studies have focused on drug use in the Asian context. The current study draws on self-reported survey data on marijuana, methamphetamine, and opium use among offenders in South Korea. We apply four major theoretical perspectives to understand predictors of drug use in this context. Results demonstrate the link between methamphetamine use and unemployment and find strong predictability of social learning variables. Limitations and implications of the current study are discussed.     

A First Step to a Conceptual Framework of Parent Empowerment: Exploring Relationships Between Parent Empowerment and Academic Performance in a National Sample

This study tested a parent empowerment framework using a national sample of 9,982 parents from the Parent and Family Involvement Survey (National Center for Education Statistics, 2007 ) to investigate relationships between parent empowerment and children's academic performance. A multinomial logistic regression demonstrated significant relationships between parents' competence, self‐determination, community belonging, community participation, and academic performance, which differentiate among parents based on racial/ethnic, language, and socioeconomic backgrounds. Findings highlight the importance of parent empowerment interventions that consider structural barriers in schools.     

The Effects of Decoys on Preference Shifts: The Role of Attractiveness and Providing Justification

The relative preference for a target product over a competitor can be increased by providing a third alternative (a “decoy”) that is clearly inferior to the target but is not necessarily inferior to the competitor. In 3 experiments, we examined the conditions in which these decoy effects occur. When participants reported their preferences immediately after being exposed to the information about them, the influence of decoys on preferences was attributable to the justification they provided for choosing the target over the competitor. (That is, a decoy had an impact if and only if the target was superior to the decoy but the competitor was not.) When participants evaluated each product individually before making their choices, however, they based their preferences on these evaluations. In this case, decoys exerted their influence through their impact on the values that participants assigned to the attributes on which the evaluations were based. This influence was evident even when the decoy was clearly inferior to both the target and competitor. Moreover, it occurred under conditions in which the target and competitor were in different product categories and also when the decoy was in a totally different product domain than the target and competitor.     

An Examination of the Individual‐Difference Approach to the Role of Norms in the Theory of Reasoned Action1

The relationship between subjective norm and behavioral intentions is the weakest link of the theory of reasoned action. Numerous approaches have addressed this issue, including the assertion that the weak contribution is a result of a small number of individuals who are under normative control. The present research examines this individual‐difference approach in the domain of health behaviors. Respondents were 287 students who rated their intentions, attitudes, and subjective norms in relation to 32 health behaviors and 5 substance‐use behaviors. Regression analyses, between subjects and within subjects, demonstrated that both behaviors and people can be under attitudinal or normative control. Support for an individual‐difference approach was less conclusive when findings were examined separately for specific health behaviors.     

Sadness as Pleasure-Seeking Prime and Anxiety as Attentiveness Prime: The “Different Affect–Different Effect” (DADE) Model

According to popular interpretations of both the mood repair and affect-as-information theories, affective states of the same valence should have equivalent influences on behavior. We propose, instead, the Different Affect–Different Effect (DADE) model. Building on cognitive and psychoevolutionary theories of affect, we predict that while sadness leads to seeking pleasurable stimuli (consistent with mood repair predictions), anxiety leads to becoming more attentive (consistent with affect-as-information predictions). These predictions are tested using consumption stimuli and, across two experiments, results were consistent with our hypotheses. This research helps resolve apparent discrepancies among our findings and those found in previous mood repair and affect-as-information literatures. Specifically, we suggest that in previous demonstrations of mood repair through seeking pleasurable stimuli, the mood-state in question was most closely related to that of sadness. Likewise, we argue that in previous demonstrations of sadness leading to greater attentiveness, the procedure used to evoke sadness is also likely to have evoked anxiety.