Belief in a just world and wellbeing in Indian schools

This study investigates the meaning of belief in just world (BJW) for students' subjective justice experiences with their parents and teachers and for students' subjective well-being. The hypotheses tested were that the more strongly students endorse BJW, the less the distress at school and depressive symptoms they experience. Two dimensions of BJW were assessed: personal BJW, reflecting the belief that events in one's own life are generally just, and general BJW, reflecting the belief that the world is basically a just place. The participants were 278 Indian students attending ten 10th grade classes at two private English-medium schools. The results showed that only the personal BJW, not the general BJW, was important in explaining justice experiences and wellbeing. The more the students endorsed the belief in personal just world, the more they felt treated justly by their teachers and their parents alike, and the less distress at school and depressive symptoms they experienced. In addition, teacher justice, but not parent justice, explained distress at school. Finally, the effect of personal BJW on depressive symptoms was partly mediated by both teacher and parent justice. This pattern of results persisted when class effects were controlled. Overall, this pattern of results emphasizes the importance of the individual and subjective experience of justice of the teacher behavior for adolescent wellbeing. Implications for further studies on BJW and wellbeing at school are discussed.     

Social cohesion predicts COVID-19 vaccination intentions and uptake

COVID-19 vaccination is widely regarded as an individual decision, resting upon individual characteristics and demographic factors. In this research, we provide evidence that psychological group membership, and more precisely, social cohesion—a multidimensional concept that encompasses one's sense of connectedness to, and interrelations within, a group—can help us understand COVID-19 vaccination intentions (Study 1) and uptake (Study 2). Study 1 is a repeated-measures study with a representative sample of 3026 Australians. We found evidence that social cohesion can be conceptualised as a multidimensional structure; moreover, social cohesion at Wave 1 (early in the COVID-19) predicted greater vaccination intention and lower perceived risk of vaccination at Wave 2 (4 months later). In Study 2 (a cross-sectional study, N = 499), the multidimensional structure of social cohesion was associated with greater uptake of vaccine doses (in addition to willingness to receive further doses and perceived risk of the vaccine). These relations were found after controlling for a series of demographic (i.e., sex, age, income), health-related factors (i.e., subjective health; perceived risk; having been diagnosed with COVID-19), and individual differences (political orientation, social dominance orientation, individualism). These results demonstrate the need to go beyond individual factors when it comes to behaviours that protect groups, and particularly when examining COVID-19 vaccination—one of the most important ways of slowing the spread of the virus.     

南北朝象数易学发展特点述略

南朝郑、王易学并立,北朝象数易学占主导,但后期也呈现儒玄并融的趋势．《易传《》和汉代易学创造出来的象数成果得到南北朝易学家的继承,南朝易学家对象数易学中的形式主义学风给予了批判,并呈现出本体论思维与易学象数相结合的思想萌芽．象数易学受到佛教缘起性空理论的批判,但南北朝佛教仍利用易学象数来说明现象世界．在南北朝道教养生理论中,象数易学得到了丰富和发展．在南北朝的宗教风气下,象数易学占验派沦为方伎．     

Anger Can Help: A Transactional Model and Three Pathways of the Experience and Expression of Anger

Anger is a significant human emotion with far‐reaching implications for individuals and relationships. We propose a transactional model of anger that highlights its relational relevance and potentially positive function, in addition to problematic malformations. By evolutionary design, physical, self‐concept, or attachment threats all similarly trigger diffuse physiological arousal, psychologically experienced as anger‐emotion. Anger is first a signaling and motivational system. Anger is then formed to affirming, productive use or malformed to destructive ends. A functional, prosocial approach to anger organizes it for protective and corrective personal and relational adaptation. In our model, threat perception interacts with a person's view of self in relation to other to produce helpful or harmful anger. Inflated or collapsed views of self in relation to other produce distinct manifestations of destructive anger that are harmful to self, other, and relationship. Conversely, a balanced view of self in relation to other promotes constructive anger and catalyzes self, other, and relationship healing. Clinical use of the model to shape healing personal and relational contact with anger is explored.     

Clinical Guidelines for Working With Stepfamilies: What Family,Couple, Individual,and Child Therapists Need to Know

This article draws on four decades of research and clinical practice to delineate guidelines for evidence‐informed, clinically sound work with stepfamilies for couple, family, individual adult, and child therapists. Few clinicians receive adequate training in working with the intense and often complex dynamics created by stepfamily structure and history. This is despite the fact that stepfamilies are a fundamentally different family form that occurs world‐wide. As a result many clinicians rely on their training in first‐time family models. This is not only often unhelpful, but all too often inadvertently destructive. The article integrates a large body of increasingly sophisticated research about stepfamilies with the author's four decades of clinical practice with stepfamily relationships. It describes the ways in which stepfamilies are different from first‐time families. It delineates the dynamics of five major challenges stepfamily structure creates: (1) Insider/outsider positions are intense and they are fixed. (2) Children struggle with losses, loyalty binds, and change. (3) Issues of parenting, stepparenting, and discipline often divide the couple. (4) Stepcouples must build a new family culture while navigating previously established family cultures. (5) Ex‐spouses (other parents outside the household) are part of the family. Some available data are shared on the impact of cultural and legal differences on these challenges. A three‐level model of clinical intervention is presented: Psychoeducational, Interpersonal, and Intrapsychic/Intergenerational Family‐of‐Origin. The article describes some “easy wrong turns” for well‐meaning therapists and lists some general clinical guidelines for working with stepfamily relationships.     

Evaluating the Factor Structure of the MIDI Personality Scale Using Exploratory Structural Equation Modeling

This study investigated the factor structure of the 26‐item Midlife Development Inventory (MIDI) Personality Scale in a sample of 2,720 Americans. It was found that whereas confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) did not provide an acceptable fit to the data, exploratory structural equation modeling (ESEM) provided an acceptable fit. The results of ESEM revealed that the a priori five‐factor structure of personality was generally consistent with the data, and all items had salient loadings on their target factors. ESEM also revealed that some of the items contributed significantly to more than one personality factor. The results are in line with previous research, and indicate that ESEM is more suitable than CFA for the study of personality traits.     

The Mental Representation of Human Action

Various theories of moral cognition posit that moral intuitions can be understood as the output of a computational process performed over structured mental representations of human action. We propose that action plan diagrams—“act trees”—can be a useful tool for theorists to succinctly and clearly present their hypotheses about the information contained in these representations. We then develop a methodology for using a series of linguistic probes to test the theories embodied in the act trees. In Study 1, we validate the method by testing a specific hypothesis (diagrammed by act trees) about how subjects are representing two classic moral dilemmas and finding that the data support the hypothesis. In Studies 2–4, we explore possible explanations for discrete and surprising findings that our hypothesis did not predict. In Study 5, we apply the method to a less well‐studied case and show how new experiments generated by our method can be used to settle debates about how actions are mentally represented. In Study 6, we argue that our method captures the mental representation of human action better than an alternative approach. A brief conclusion suggests that act trees can be profitably used in various fields interested in complex representations of human action, including law, philosophy, psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, computer science, robotics, and artificial intelligence.     

“In‐Group Love” and “Out‐Group Hate” in Repeated Interaction Between Groups

Costly individual participation in intergroup conflict can be motivated by “in‐group love”—a cooperative motivation to help the in‐group, by “out‐group hate”—an aggressive or competitive motivation to hurt the out‐group, or both. This study employed a recently developed game paradigm (Halevy, Bornstein, & Sagiv, 2008) designed specifically to distinguish between these two motives. The game was played repeatedly between two groups with three players in each group. In addition, we manipulated the payoff structure of the interaction that preceded the game such that half of the groups experienced peaceful coexistence and the other half experienced heightened conflict prior to the game. Enabling group members to express in‐group love independently of out‐group hate significantly reduced intergroup conflict. Group members strongly preferred to cooperate within their group, rather than to compete against the out‐group for relative standing, even in the condition in which the repeated game was preceded by conflict. Although both “in‐group love” and “out‐group hate” somewhat diminished as the game continued (as players became more selfish), choices indicative of the former motivation were significantly more frequent than choices indicative of the latter throughout the interaction. We discuss the implications of these findings for conflict resolution. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Role of Atomic Repertoires in Complex Behavior

Evolution and reinforcement shape adaptive forms and adaptive behavior through many cycles of blind variation and selection, and therein lie their parsimony and power. Human behavior is distinctive in that this shaping process is commonly "short circuited": Critical variations are induced in a single trial. The processes by which this economy is accomplished have a common feature: They all exploit one or more atomic repertoires, elementary units of behavior each under control of a distinctive stimulus. By appropriate arrangements of these discriminative stimuli, an indefinite number of permutations of atomic units can be evoked. When such a permutation satisfies a second contingency, it can come under control of the relevant context, and the explicit arrangement of discriminative stimuli will no longer be required. Consequently, innovations in adaptive behavior can spread rapidly through the population. A consideration of atomic repertoires informs our interpretation of generalized operants and other phenomena that are otherwise difficult to explain. Observational learning is discussed as a case in point.