Mother–Child Conversation and Children's Social Understanding During Middle Childhood

The authors investigated the relationship between mother–child conversation and children's social understanding during middle childhood. Thirty-eight mother–child pairs participated, including a younger group (5–7 years old) and an older group (8–10 years old). Children completed 2 measures of social understanding and mothers and children discussed 4 stories involving social dilemmas. Results indicated that compared to the younger group, the older group (a) performed better on both measures of social understanding and (b) produced more basic mental talk (i.e., talk about beliefs, emotions, personality traits, and desires), and more advanced mental talk (i.e., talk about contrasting perspectives, recursion and relationship between mental states, and advanced emotions). Mothers of older children also produced more basic and advanced mental talk. Mothers' advanced mental talk predicted both children's social understanding and children's advanced mental talk.     

The Effect of General Creative Personality and Freedom of Task Choice on Adolescents' Social Creativity

This study investigated the effect of general creative personality and freedom of task choice on the social creativity of adolescents. The results indicated, first, that senior high school students scored higher than junior high school students. Second, girls scored higher than boys on originality, fluency, flexibility, appropriateness, and utility with regard to creative social problem‐solving. Third, freedom of task choice and its interaction with creative personality had significant effects on the originality, appropriateness, utility, flexibility, and fluency of social creativity. Adolescents who completed the task voluntarily scored higher on these dimensions than adolescents who completed it reluctantly and, among the voluntary adolescents, those with high and medium creative personality scored higher than those with low creative personality, whereas no such difference was found among the reluctant adolescents. Adolescents were more likely to show social creativity, and their general creative personality was more likely to be brought into effect under the freedom of task choice condition.     

Examination of efficacious,efficient, and socially valid error‐correction procedures to teach sight words and prepositions to children with autism spectrum disorder

Prior research shows that learners have idiosyncratic responses to error‐correction procedures during instruction. Thus, assessments that identify error‐correction strategies to include in instruction can aid practitioners in selecting individualized, efficacious, and efficient interventions. The current investigation conducted an assessment to compare 5 error‐correction procedures that have been evaluated in the extant literature and are common in instructional practice for children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Results showed that the assessment identified efficacious and efficient error‐correction procedures for all participants, and 1 procedure was efficient for 4 of the 5 participants. To examine the social validity of error‐correction procedures, participants selected among efficacious and efficient interventions in a concurrent‐chains assessment. We discuss the results in relation to prior research on error‐correction procedures and current instructional practices for learners with ASD.     

Race,Religion, and Anti‐Poverty Policy Attitudes

Using the 2008 National Politics Study, the present study indicates that while African Americans are more likely than whites to hear sermons about poverty and other political issues, hearing such sermons more consistently associates with support for anti‐poverty government programs among non‐Hispanic whites than among both African Americans and Hispanics. The racially/ethnically marginalized status of blacks and Hispanics may contribute to these groups being more receptive than whites to religious messages emphasizing social inequality. The contrasting racial experiences of dominance and marginalization may also help explain why hearing politicized sermons is more meaningful to the progressive social welfare attitudes of whites than to African Americans and Hispanics. This expectation is rooted in the heightened variability of perspectives among whites and their religious organizations regarding the government's role in aiding the economically disadvantaged. Conversely, the vast majority of blacks and Hispanics support the government helping individuals who fallen upon hard times. The greater variability in opinion among whites may also allow for greater differences in opinion to emerge between whites who attend relative to those outside of religious congregations led by clergy emphasizing spiritual and political solidarity with the poor than is the case for African Americans and Hispanics.     

Jung in education: a review of historical and contemporary contributions from analytical psychology to the field of education

The available literature on the influence of Jungian thought on the theory and practice of education leaves the impression that although the work of Carl Jung and analytical psychology have much to offer the field of education, the Jungian influence has so far been slight. While this has certainly been true, the last decade or so has nevertheless witnessed an increased scholarly interest in exploring how analytical psychology may inform and inspire the field of education. As an explanation for this burgeoning interest in Jung, several of the contemporary contributors mention that analytical psychology has the potential of functioning as a counterbalance to the tendencies in Western societies to focus on measurable learning targets and increasingly standardized measures of teaching and assessment. It seems pertinent then to gain an overview of how analytical psychology has so far inspired the field of education and how it may fruitfully continue do so in the future. To this end this paper is structured chronologically, starting with the different phases of Jung's own engagement with the field of education and ending with later post‐Jungian applications of his concepts and ideas to education.     

Perpetrators and Social Death: A Cautionary Tale

Understanding evil requires both addressing the grave wrongs done to the victim and addressing the perpetrator who does these wrongs. Claudia Card's concept of social vitality was developed to explain what génocidaires destroy in their victims. This essay brings that concept into conversation with perpetrator testimony, arguing that the génocidaires’ desire for their own social vitality, achieved through their destruction of the social world of their targets, in fact boomerangs to corrode the vitality of their own lives. This is true whether they succeed or fail in their genocidal project. Card's recent analysis of “being a badass” is brought to bear on the cultivation of evil, and the essay suggests four strategies for meeting Card's “moral challenge of avoiding evil responses to evil.”     

Claudia Card's Concept of Social Death: A New Way of Looking at Genocide

Scholarship in the multidisciplinary field of genocide studies often emphasizes body counts and the number of biological deaths as a way of measuring and comparing the severity and scope of individual genocides. The prevalence of this way of framing genocide is problematic insofar it risks marginalizing the voices and experiences of victims who may not succumb to biological death but nevertheless suffer the loss of family members and other loved ones, and suffer the destruction of relationships, as well as the foundational institutions that give rise to and sustain those relationships. The concept of social death, which Claudia Card offers as the central evil of genocide, marks a radical shift in conceptualizing genocide and provides space for recovering the marginalized voices of many who suffer the evils of genocide but do not suffer biological death. Here her concept of social death is explored, defended, and criticized.     

Analgesic effect of Facebook: Priming with online social networking may boost felt relatedness that buffers against physical pain

Social networking sites (SNSs) are extremely popular for providing users with a convenient platform for acquiring social connections and thereby feeling relatedness. Plenty of literature has shown that mental representations of social support can reduce the perception of physical pain. The current study tested whether thinking about SNS would interfere with users’ perceptions of experimentally induced pain. Ninety‐six undergraduate Facebook users were recruited to participate in a priming‐based experiment. They were randomly assigned to one of the three study conditions (SNS prime, neutral prime, or no prime) via rating the aesthetics of logos. The results showed that participants exposed to SNS primes reported less pain of immersion in hot water than did both control groups (neutral‐ and no‐prime). Felt relatedness mediated the link between SNS primes and diminished pain perceptions. This research provides the first demonstration that thinking about SNS can lower experienced physical pain among Facebook users. Online social networking may serve as an analgesic buffer against pain experience than previously thought. The SNS‐enabled analgesia has far reaching implications for pain relief applications and the enhancement of well‐being in human‐interaction techniques.     

The Irony of Social Trust: Individual‐level and Contextual‐level Links with Protest Intention and Radical Right Support in Switzerland

This research examines how social trust translates into dynamics of mobilisation for inclusion or exclusion in Swiss cantons by studying how social trust is linked to equality‐directed protest intention versus radical right support, comparing individual‐level and contextual‐level relationships. The study is based on data from the Swiss Household Panel collected between 2002 and 2008. The impact of individual‐level and contextual‐level social trust is analysed in three‐level regression models of repeated observations, nested in individuals who are nested in cantons. The results indicate complex patterns that depend on the level at which social trust is assessed and confirm the need for a contextualised view of social trust and social capital. For individuals, higher social trust is associated with higher protest intention and lower radical right support. However, in cantons characterised by higher rates of social trust, individuals are less likely to engage in protest actions and more likely to support the radical right. Further analyses show that canton‐level social trust is intertwined with other contextual factors, suggesting that in certain configurations, that is, combined with low levels of cultural and social diversity, climates of social trust may be linked to more restricted forms of solidarity and the persistence of inequality. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A Time-Lagged Study of the Relationship Between Big Five Personality and Ethical Ideology

Our objective is to examine the effects of Big Five personality traits on ethical ideologies using a time-lagged design of 406 employees of higher education institutions in Pakistan. Based on low/high idealism versus relativism, we investigate the conceptual linkage between each of the personality traits and moral philosophy. The results illustrate that extraversion and openness to experience believed on subjectivism moral philosophy, agreeableness believed on situationism, and neuroticism believed on absolutism moral philosophies. In addition, contentiousness believed on exceptionism moral philosophy. Furthermore, managerial implications and future research directions are suggested.