Archetypes of the pandemic

This paper attempts to read the psychological and emotional impact of the COVID-19 pandemic through the archetypal images contained in patients’ dreams. In these dreams, symbols related to the power of nature and to extreme danger are paired with feelings of detachment that seem to point to a traumatic dissociation, due to the archetypal experience that erupts in familiar surroundings. Through the humanization of the ineffable experience, dissociation, which in the beginning of the pandemic showed in high levels of anxiety, panic attacks and depersonalization, can be transformed into the overview needed for the search for meaning. The container for this process of transformation is the analyst, the real, virtual or imagined one, and his or her ability to relate and feel.     

Testing contesting theory: Conceptual metaphors and prosocial behavior

ObjectivesThis investigation was conducted to determine whether contesting orientations add predictive utility for prosocial behavior, both in and out of sports, beyond other variables related to the component processes of moral action.DesignCross-sectional.MethodsIntercollegiate US athletes (n = 2380; 56.4% male), from both individual and team sports, completed measures of contesting orientation, three moral variables (moral attentiveness, moral identity, integrity), three sport-specific variables (athletic identity, goal orientation, and fear of failure), and three outcome variables (sportspersonship, academic honesty, and prosocial helping). Data was analyzed using both correlational and regression analyses.ResultsRegression analyses demonstrated that contesting orientations were the best predictors of sportspersonship, but were insignificant predictors of nonsport forms of prosocial behavior.ConclusionsConsistent with contesting theory, contesting orientation are salient and potent predictors of sportspersonship, but do not predict behavior outside of contest situations.     

青少年责任感缺失的认知维度分析——学校责任感教育合理性追问

目前对青少年社会责任感缺失原因的分析多从社会、家庭、时代等方面着手,对学校范围内进行责任感教育并无多大帮助。本文从认知维度分析了青少年责任感缺失的三种情形及其原因,并以此为基础阐明了学校范围内责任感教育的合理性,提出在学校范围内开展的应是以责任知识、责任思维和责任实践为主要内容的责任感教育。     

Educating moral emotions: a praxiological analysis

This paper presents a praxiological analysis of three everyday educational practices or strategies that can be considered as being directed at the moral formation of the emotions. The first consists in requests to imagine other's emotional reactions. The second comprises requests to imitate normative emotional reactions and the third to re-appraise the features of a situation that are relevant to an emotional response. The interest of these categories is not just that they help to organize and recognize the significance of what might otherwise appear to be a disparate set of ordinary moral-educational interactions between children and educators. We suggest, further, that this analysis provides some new insight into what distinguishes the broad and recurrent conceptions of moral education from one another. Rather than being straightforwardly reducible to intractable differences over core normative or meta-ethical questions they can also be seen as correlating with different suppositions about the central role of the emotions in moral life and, correspondingly, different but to a large degree compatible interpretations of what the "education of the moral emotions" primarily means.

Externalism and the Content of Moral Motivation

In his fetishist argument, Michael Smith raises an important question: What is the content of the motivational states that constitute moral motivation? Although the argument has been widely discussed, this question has not received the attention it deserves. In the present paper, I use Smith’s argument as a point of departure for a discussion of how advocates of externalism as regards moral judgements can account for moral motivation. More precisely, I explore various explanations of moral motivation that externalists can employ to answer the question Smith poses.     

Post-conventional moral reasoning and reputation

Kohlberg’s theory of moral development conceives conventional and post-conventional moral reasoning as consecutive levels in a developmental sequence. This claim was examined in terms of the relationship between preference for these two styles of reasoning on the one hand and moral identity as perceived by others (reputation) and as self-perceived and on the other. Participants (n = 172), in groups of four mutual acquaintances, provided ratings of one another’s standing, and estimates of their own standing and reputation, on four trait dimensions (moral responsibility, consideration for others, respect for authority, and political orientation). Post-conventional moral reasoning, assessed using the Defining Issues Test, was not significantly related either to reputation or to self-rating on any dimension except political orientation. Conventional reasoning was related to politics though in the opposite direction, but additionally to both self- and other-ratings of moral responsibility and to the corresponding ratings of respect for authority. Findings do not support the view that the conventional/post-conventional distinction in moral reasoning is a developmental difference. An alternative proposed is that these are independent domains of moral thought, related to quite different aspects of social behaviour and political attitudes.     

Enrolling the Citizen in Sustainability: Membership Categorization,Morality and Civic Participation

This article examines the common-sense and methodical ways in which “the citizen” is produced and enrolled as an active participant in “sustainable” regional planning. Using Membership Categorization Analysis, we explicate how the categorization procedures in the Foreword of a draft regional planning policy interactionally produce the identity of “the citizen” and “civic values and obligations” in relation to geographic place and institutional categories. Furthermore, we show how positioning practices establish a relationship between authors (government) and readers (citizens) where both are ascribed with the same moral values and obligations toward the region. Hence, “the citizen” as an active participant in “sustainable” regional planning is viewed as a practical accomplishment that is underpinned by a normative morality associated with the task of producing orderliness in “text-in-interaction.”

Integrating moral and achievement variables to predict doping likelihood in football: A cross-cultural investigation

ObjectivesIn our study, we had two objectives. Our first objective was to test a social-cognitive model of doping in sport. In this model, we examined moral variables (i.e., moral disengagement, moral identity, anticipated guilt) and performance motivational climate as predictors of doping likelihood and whether performance motivational climate moderates the relationship between moral disengagement and doping likelihood. The second objective was to determine whether this model is invariant across sex and country.DesignWe used a cross-sectional design.MethodParticipants were 1495 (729 females) elite football players (mean age 20.4 ± 4.4) recruited from 97 teams in the UK, Denmark and Greece. They completed questionnaires measuring the aforementioned variables.ResultsMoral disengagement positively predicted doping likelihood both directly and indirectly via anticipated guilt. The direct relationship was significant only when performance climate was perceived as average or high. Moral identity negatively predicted doping likelihood via both moral disengagement and anticipated guilt; and performance climate positively predicted doping likelihood. The model was largely invariant across sex and country.ConclusionsOur findings suggest that young elite football players in the UK, Denmark and Greece are less likely to use banned substances to enhance their performance, if they consider being moral an important part of who they are, and if they perceive a low performance climate in their team. Moral identity is likely to trigger feelings of guilt associated with the use of banned substances and to mobilize moral disengagement mechanisms. Our findings highlight the importance of moral variables in deterring the use of banned substances in sport.     

Children’s judgements of the obligation to help: The role of relationships

ABSTRACT

Children at ages 7 (N = 24, M _age = 6.96, SD _age =.20), 9 (N = 29, M _age = 8.76, SD _age =.44), and 11 (N = 25, M _age = 10.76, SD _age =.66), and adults (N = 30) made judgements about the obligation to help when it conflicts with a personal desire. Across ages, the obligation to help was judged to be strongest when there were positive or neutral past interactions with the person in need of help, compared to mean past interactions. Expectation of a future friendship predicted the obligation to help, even after controlling for age and sex. However, we found no effect of children helping gender in-group members more. Evidence for altruism was not found: expected positive emotions did not predict the obligation to help. We conclude that an expectation of future relationship is the strongest predictor of helping obligation.     

Religious and secular roads to justify wrongdoing: How values interact with culture in explaining moral disengagement attitudes

Using a person-culture interaction perspective, we explored how socialization through a secular versus a religiously orthodox educational system in Israel moderated the associations between personal values and moral disengagement attitudes. In Study 1 (N = 333), we found that among orthodox (but not secular) participants, conservation values were negatively and openness-to-change values were positively associated with moral disengagement. Self-transcendence values were negatively associated with moral disengagement in the whole sample. In Study 2 (N = 251), we focused on the dehumanization subscale of disengagement attitudes to examine the impact of values accessibility among secular and orthodox participants. Findings showed that among secular participants, universalism values inhibited dehumanization more than conservation values did. Conversely, among orthodox participants, conservation values inhibited dehumanization more than openness-to-change values.