Improving Personal Happiness Through Couple Intervention: A Randomized Controlled Trial of a Self-directed Couple Enhancement Program

Although personal happiness is highly associated with social relationships, basic questions remain regarding the causal effect of improved social relationships on happiness. The main aim of this study was to test whether emotional and cognitive dimensions of personal happiness can be increased by means of a self-directed relationship enhancement program, which aims to increase relationship-relevant skills such as dyadic coping, communication, and conflict resolution. N = 220 couples were randomly assigned either to an intervention or to a waiting list control group (survey: pre-, post-, 3- and 6-month follow-ups). Multi-group latent change score models reveal that (1) personal happiness can be increased through a couple intervention; (2) change in personal happiness was predicted by an increase in skills and relationship satisfaction through the intervention; (3) the least happy participants benefited most from the intervention. Improving spousal interactions may help people become and stay happier. Participants in this study did not relapse to their set point of personal happiness as could be expected by adaptation theory. Thus, not treating individuals directly, but rather the dynamic system of spousal interactions as a whole, offers a potentially very powerful area for happiness research.     

Anthropocentric Rhetorical Discourse in Popular Science Writing about Human Evolution

Discourse describing evolution in contemporary popular science writing often posits that humans evolved not from an ape, but from a merely ape-like or generalized primate. Contemporary fossil and genetic evidence, though, have revealed what can accurately be described as an extinct ape species as ancestral to the human lineage. The persistence of ambiguous terms in popular science writing may be interpreted as a form of anthropocentric rhetorical discourse. Nonetheless, while such discourse is often justified in terms of increasing the public understanding of science, it may also mitigate (whether consciously intended or not) religion-based resistance to evolutionary theory.     

Scientism and atheism then and now: the role of science in the Monist and New Atheist writings

We examine how the authors who represent ‘New Atheism’ refer to science, and we compare these references to how science was viewed in earlier Continental forms of atheism, namely in Ernst Haeckel’s writings and his Monist movement. We analyse and compare these references in five key areas: the general reference to science, the use of science as an argument against religion, reference to a scientific mode of knowledge, scientific theories about religion and science as a means of giving meaning to life. While there are many similarities that clearly position New Atheism within the history of scientism, we find that the form of scientism the New Atheists employ owes at least as much to the current state of religious field as to their scientistic predecessors.     

Power,Conflict, and Community: How Gendered Views of Political Power Influence Women's Political Ambition

We provide a novel approach to understanding the political ambition gap between men and women by examining perceptions of the role of politician. Across three studies, we find that political careers are viewed as fulfilling power‐related goals, such as self‐promotion and competition. We connect these goals to a tolerance for interpersonal conflict and both of these factors to political ambition. Women's lack of interest in conflict and power‐related activities mediates the relationship between gender and political ambition. In an experiment, we show that framing a political career as fulfilling communal goals—and not power‐related goals—reduces the ambition gap.     

KAGAWA TOYOHIKO (1888–1960): WITNESS TO THE COSMIC DRAMA

At home and abroad, Kagawa Toyohiko was probably the best‐known Japanese Christian evangelist, social reformer, writer, and public intellectual of the twentieth century, nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature twice (1947, 1948) and the Nobel Peace Prize three times (1954, 1955, 1956). Appealing to the masses with little knowledge of Christian faith, Kagawa believed that a positive, religio‐aesthetic interpretation of nature and science was a key missiological concern in Japan. He reasoned that a faith rooted in the kenotic movement of incarnation and self‐giving must strongly support the scientific quest. A voracious reader of science and especially biology, he argues for “directionality,” or what he calls “initial purpose” in the long, painful, cosmic journey from matter to life to mind (or consciousness). Through an antireductionistic, a posteriori methodological pluralism that sought to “see all things whole,” this “scientific mystic” employed Christian, Buddhist, Neo‐Confucian, personalist, and vitalist ideas to envision complementary roles for science and religion in modern society.     

Cross‐cultural Generalizability of the Alternative Five‐factor Model Using the Zuckerman–Kuhlman–Aluja Personality Questionnaire

Several personality models are known for being replicable across cultures, such as the Five‐Factor Model (FFM) or Eysenck's Psychoticism–Extraversion–Neuroticism (PEN) model, and are for this reason considered universal. The aim of the current study was to evaluate the cross‐cultural replicability of the recently revised Alternative FFM (AFFM). A total of 15 048 participants from 23 cultures completed the Zuckerman–Kuhlman–Aluja Personality Questionnaire (ZKA‐PQ) aimed at assessing personality according to this revised AFFM. Internal consistencies, gender differences and correlations with age were similar across cultures for all five factors and facet scales. The AFFM structure was very similar across samples and can be considered as highly replicable with total congruence coefficients ranging from .94 to .99. Measurement invariance across cultures was assessed using multi‐group confirmatory factor analyses, and each higher‐order personality factor did reach configural and metric invariance. Scalar invariance was never reached, which implies that culture‐specific norms should be considered. The underlying structure of the ZKA‐PQ replicates well across cultures, suggesting that this questionnaire can be used in a large diversity of cultures and that the AFFM might be as universal as the FFM or the PEN model. This suggests that more research is needed to identify and define an integrative framework underlying these personality models. Copyright © 2016 European Association of Personality Psychology