Personality, Psychosocial Variables, and Life Satisfaction of Chinese Gay Men in Hong Kong

This study explored associations of life satisfaction with personality traits, life events, and social support among 187 Chinese gay men in Hong Kong. In general, participants were modestly satisfied with various aspects of their lives. Findings from a hierarchical regression analysis indicated that a high level of life satisfaction of Chinese gay men was related to weak borderline personality traits, disclosure of homosexual sexual orientation, and gay peer support. Results also showed that there was no interaction effect between personality and psychosocial variables in affecting life satisfaction. Limitations and implications of this study were also discussed.     

A Qualitative and Quantitative Review of Antecedents of Counterproductive Behavior in Organizations

This paper presents a qualitative and quantitative review of the antecedents of counterproductive behaviors (CPB). The qualitative review organizes antecedents identified in past research into four broad categories: personal, organizational, work, and contextual factors. The quantitative review includes metaanalyses of 40 published studies with a combined sample size of 42,359. The results indicate that employees who are young or dissatisfied engage in more CPBs. In addition, absenteeism is more prevalent among employees who are young, female, have lower income, have lower job satisfaction, and who perceive a stronger absence norm, or a stronger ability to be on time.     

Patriotism in Early China

This paper considers the difference between the values attached to love of country in early China and in today’s world, through exploration of a series of concept clusters centered on “loyalty,” “glory,” “honor,” and “identity.” Using a wide array of sources, including legends about exemplary figures in antiquity, it assesses the extent to which patriotism or something like patriotism was a normative value in the distant past. It also outlines the appropriate limits of patriotism which the early thinkers insisted upon, thinking them useful guidelines for today.     

How Latino American and European American adolescents discuss conflicts, sexuality, and AIDS with their mothers

The authors examined how the structure of mother-adolescent conversations differs by ethnic group, age, and dyadic and individual factors. Mother-adolescent dyads of European or Latino descent participated in conversations and reported on their relationship and AIDS knowledge. Latina American mothers dominated conversations more than European American mothers, independent of socioeconomic status. Mothers dominated conversations about sexuality and AIDS more than conversations about conflicts. Mothers of older adolescents reacted more negatively, and older adolescents reported less satisfaction, less openness, and more sexual discussions with persons other than their mothers. Latino American adolescents whose mothers dominated conversations more reported fewer sexual discussions. Latina American mothers who dominated conversations more reported more openness and satisfaction. When mothers dominated conversations more, adolescents had lower AIDS knowledge.     

Working with animals: Implications for employees’ compassion,awe, prosocial behavior,and task performance

Human-animal work represents a collaboration between humans and animals to achieve work goals, and is common in the domains of healthcare, therapy, entertainment, and education. Although the scope and types of human-animal work is diversifying and increasing, organizational scholars have yet to explore its impacts on employees. Drawing from the models of compassion and mind perception theories, we first develop a theoretical model pertaining to the development of compassion as a result of human-animal work. In a study with zookeepers (Study 1), we find that human-animal work evokes the emotion of compassion, which in turn is positively associated with employee prosocial behavior and task performance. These mediated effects are moderated by how employees perceive animals—employees are more likely to experience compassion, and in turn, become more prosocial and work better when they generally perceive animals to be able to experience emotions and bodily sensations. Furthermore, two follow-up studies (i.e., Studies 2 and 3) with employees who engage in human-animal work in Hong Kong and the United States reveal that working with animals evokes awe in addition to compassion, and provides insight into their resultant impact on prosocial behavior and task performance. We end by discussing the theoretical and practical implications of this work.     

The influence of event-time (vs. clock-time) scheduling style on satiation

Consumers often need to schedule different activities. While consumers who adopt a clock-time scheduling style decide when to transition from one activity to the next according to external temporal cues (e.g., clock), those who adopt an event-time scheduling style tend to perform each activity until they feel internally that it is completed. This research showed that consumers' scheduling style (clock-time vs. event-time) could influence their satiation with repeated consumption. Four studies involving actual consumption across various domains (e.g., music, artwork, food) demonstrated that an event-time scheduling style leads to more rapid satiation with repeated consumption than a clock-time scheduling style because event-timers (vs. clock-timers) have higher private self-focus. The results further revealed that the satiation effect of scheduling style is mitigated when consumers are distracted from their private self or informed of additional sensitization cues in the consumption stimuli.     

Double Reference Points: the Effects of Social and Financial Reference Points on Decisions Under Risk

The existing literature is inconsistent about how social comparison affects risk attitudes. We propose a framework where the total utility is composed of the social and financial utilities. The financial utility is consistent with prospect theory (i.e., an S‐shaped utility function with a financial reference point), whereas the social utility is affected by both social and financial reference points. Therefore, social risk attitudes are determined by interaction between gains/losses in both social and financial contexts. On the basis of safety‐first principle, we propose that when experiencing financial gains, individuals tend to seek upside potential and take social risks (i.e., a convex social utility function). In contrast, when facing financial losses, people would be more risk seeking in social gains but more risk averse in social losses to maximize security (i.e., an inverse S‐shaped utility function). We also propose that the relative importance of financial and social utilities depends on the saliency of the reference points and size of stakes. Studies 1 and 2 showed that individuals were risk seeking in both social gains and losses with social reference points alone. Studies 3 and 4 demonstrated that when both financial and social reference points were salient, participants were risk averse in both social gains and losses when facing financial gains, but risk seeking in social gains and risk averse in social losses when facing financial losses. The hypotheses derived from the theoretical framework were in general supported by our experiments. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Predictors of Mental Health Among College Students in Guam: Implications for Counseling

The authors investigated sociodemographic predictors of the mental health status of college students (N = 308) in Guam. Results indicated prevalence rates of 17.8%, 40.2%, and 25.6% for moderate or more severe levels of depression, anxiety, and stress, respectively. Psychological distress was found to be predicted by gender, ethnicity, living arrangement, and academic level. Comparisons with college students in the U.S. mainland and Hong Kong were also examined. Implications for counseling services and strategies are discussed.     

Does content matter? The effect of remorseful tone on length of prison sentence

The expression of remorse by offenders has been found to affect jurors' determination of length of prison sentences. This study explores this phenomenon by contrasting the impact of exercising remorse solely in words or through emotional tone. Remorse consists of guilt, shame and sorrow. This study examines the contribution of each of these emotions to judgements about prison sentences, which is an area seldom explored in the literature. It is shown that regardless of the gender of the offender, participants censured a significantly more severe punishment for the offender who expressed a sense of remorse using words rather than tone. In addition, only shame was a significant predictor of the severity of punishment. These findings are consistent with previous studies and further differentiate the influence of displaying remorse at the content and tonal levels.     

Male vocal competition is dynamic and strongly affected by social contexts in music frogs

Male–male vocal competition in anuran species is critical for mating success; however, it is also highly time-consuming, energetically demanding and likely to increase predation risks. Thus, we hypothesized that changes in the social context would cause male vocal competition to change in real time in order to minimize the costs and maximize the benefits of competition. To test this hypothesis, we assessed the effect of repeating playbacks of either white noise (WN) or male advertisement calls on male call production in the Emei music frog (Babina daunchina), a species in which males build mud-retuse burrows and call from within these nests. Previous studies have shown that calls produced from inside burrows are highly sexually attractive (HSA) to females while those produced outside nests are of low sexual attractiveness (LSA). Results showed that most subjects called responsively after the end of WN playbacks but before the onset of conspecific call stimuli although call numbers were similar, indicating that while males adjusted competitive patterns according to the biological significance of signals, their competitive motivation did not change. Furthermore, these data indicate that the frogs had evolved the ability of interval timing. Moreover, when the inter-stimulus interval (ISI) between playbacks was varied, the subjects preferentially competed with HSA calls when the ISI was short (<4 s) but responded equally to HSA and LSA calls if the ISI was long (≥4 s), suggesting that males allocate competitive efforts depending on both the perceived sexual attractiveness of rivals and the time available for calling. Notably, approximately two-thirds of male calls occurred in response to HSA calls, a preference rate comparable to that previously found for females in phonotaxis experiments and consistent with the idea that the mechanisms underlying both the male’s competitive responses to rivals and the female’s preferences toward potential mates coevolved under the same selective pressure.