The importance of including quality-of-life indices in international social and economic development activities

Psychology has not been a visible player in international social and economic development efforts. Through its demonstrated commitment to the concept of quality of life, psychology has an opportunity to help shape foreign policy and to improve the lives of countless people around the globe. Poverty has reached unacceptable limits of humanitarian tolerance and political consequence throughout the world. The United Nations estimates that 20% of the world's population now lives in conditions of absolute poverty in which there is an absence of even the bare essentials for living. Social and economic development efforts have often failed despite good intentions because they have often concentrated on improving peoples' material level of living but not their quality of life. This article addresses the need to include quality-of-life (QOL) indices in international social and economic development efforts. In addition, the article calls attention to the need to use valid cross-cultural measurement strategies (i.e., culturally equivalent) when assessing QOL across cultural and national boundaries. Current approaches to social and economic development rely heavily on interventions that do not reflect the actual peoples' perceptions of life satisfaction and subjective well-being. Self-serving political and economic national interests have kept new approaches to development from being implemented. New interventions must be holistic, decentralized, integrated, empowering, participatory, and human-resource directed, and must include culturally equivalent objective and subjective quality-of-life indices as the arbiters of success.     

大学生社交焦虑成因的研究

探讨大学生社交焦虑的形成原因 ,为临床治疗提供理论基础。方法 :采用社交焦虑量表(IAS) ,个人评价问卷 (PEI) ,自编社交技能和他信问卷对 194名大学生被试进行测试。用SPSS7.0作回归、相关等统计分析。结果 :以自我评价、他信、社交技能为自变量 ,社交焦虑为因变量进行逐步回归分析 ,进入方程的变量为自我评价和社交技能。贡献量分别为 0 .32 7和 0 .0 4 0。以自我评价的 5个子维度 (学业、外貌、爱情、社会交往、与人们谈话 )、社交技能为自变量 ,社交焦虑为因变量进行逐步回归 ,进入回归方程的变量为“与人们交谈”因子、“社会交往”因子和社交技能 ,贡献量分别为 0 .2 96 ,0 .0 71和 0 .0 30。结论 :自我评价和社交技能是造成社交焦虑的重要原因 ,自我评价中的“与人们交谈”和“社会交往”方面是成因中的重要一环     

Muscular fitness,motor competence,and processing speed in preschool children

ABSTRACT

The aim of this study was to examine the relationship between muscular fitness and motor competence and processing speed in preschool children. Eighty-four preschool-aged children were recruited and underwent assessments for muscular fitness (muscular endurance and power), motor competence, and then participated in an auditory oddball task. The findings showed that muscular fitness and motor competence were associated with shorter reaction times after controlling for confounding factors. These findings provide tentative support for a positive association between muscular fitness and motor competence and processing speed in preschool children.

abbreviations:

Reaction time (RT); Institutional Review Board (IRB); Basic Motor Ability Test-Revised (BMAT); Body mass index (BMI); Preschool Children Fitness Programme (PCFP); Intraclass correlation coefficients (ICC); Thinking Creatively in Action and Movement test (TCAM); Inter-stimulus interval (ISI); Insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1); Brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF)     

Do Internet‐Based Support Interventions Change Perceptions of Social Support?: An Experimental Trial of Approaches for Supporting Diabetes Self‐Management

Internet-based support groups are a rapidly growing segment of mutual aid programs for individuals with chronic illnesses and other challenges. Previous studies have informed us about the content of online exchanges between support group members, but we know little about the ability of these interventions to change participants' perceptions of support. A randomized trial of 160 adult Type 2 diabetes patients provided novice Internet users with computers and Internet access to 1 of 4 conditions: (a) diabetes information only, (b) a personal self-management coach, (c) a social support intervention, or (d) a personal self-management coach and the support intervention. After 3 months, individuals in the 2 support conditions reported significant increases in support on a diabetes-specific support measure and a general support scale. Participants' age was significantly related to change in social support, but intervention effects were still significant after accounting for this relationship. This report is a critical first step in evaluating the long-term effects of Internet-based support for diabetes self-management. The discussion identifies directions for future research.     

Factors contributing to the survival of self-help groups

Despite the growing utilization of self-help groups, there have been only a handful of studies that have examined the factors that contribute to their survival. The purpose of this study was to explore the factors that contribute to self-help group survival by examining their relationship with external sources (i.e., national and local self-help organizations, professionals) and group organizational characteristics (i.e., leadership diversification, recruitment, attendance at group meetings). Representatives from 245 active and 94 recently disbanded self-help groups were included in the analysis. Results indicated that the primary factors that discriminated between active and disbanded groups were the number of new people to attend a meeting, average group meeting attendance, length of existence, leadership diversification, outreach to potential group members, and support from national and local organizations. Results are discussed in terms of what national self-help organizations, self-help clearinghouses, and others who interact with self-help groups can do to empower and support them.     

The institutionalization of community interventions in Chile: characteristics and contradictions

A critical analysis of the consequences of successive institutionalization of community intervention in Chile is presented. This analysis is based on research of current community interventions in Chile, whose results are compared with Chilean community practice from previous historical periods. Chilean community intervention was formerly practiced out of governmental institutions and universities and was sustained primarily by foreign agencies and ecclesiastical institutions. Nowadays, with the return to democracy, the vast majority of community intervention programs are financed, partially or totally, by means of governmental resources. This institutionalization of community interventions has had consequences worthy of critical analysis: an increase in the number and stability of intervention programs; and also negative consequences for intervention goals, definition of target groups, and intervention practices. Dilemmas, such as assistance vs. promotion or adaptation vs. social change, have arisen. These dilemmas show the contradictions of a Community Psychology, which has left behind the position of institutional marginality to form part of Chilean society's normal psychosocial care. They also show the need for a paradigm shift from a critical view of the social world to a constructionist one.     

Thinking about the Needy, Justice, and International Organizations

This article has three main parts, Section 2 considers the nature and extent to which individuals who are well-off have a moral obligation to aid the worlds needy. Drawing on a pluralistic approach to morality, which includes consequentialist, virtue-based, and deontological elements, it is contended that most who are well-off should do much more than they do to aid the needy, and that they are open to serious moral criticism if they simply ignore the needy. Part one also focuses on the United States, and illustrates both how incredibly wealthy the U.S. is and some of the spending habits of its citizens; however, its considerations apply to the well-off generally. Section 3 considers whether justice provides reasons for helping the needy. Noting that justice in an extremely complex notion, it discusses numerous considerations relevant to justices scope and implications, including an extended Rawlsian conception of justice, an absolute conception, a comparative conception, the distinction between natural and social justice, and various elements of common-sense morality. Section 2 also distinguishes between agent-relative justice-based reasons, which are relevant to whether we act justly, and agent-neutral justice-based reasons, which are relevant to whether we have reasons of justicefor acting. Correspondingly, it argues that even if one can ignore the needy without acting unjustly, as philosophers like Robert Nozick and Jan Narveson contend, there may be powerful reasons of justicefor addressing their plight. Section 4 briefly address the responsibilities of international organizations like the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and World Trade Organization (WTO). Drawing on Section 2, it is suggested that in addition to standard reasons to act justlytowards needy members of the worlds community, there will be reasons of justicefor such organizations to aid the needy in both present, and future, generations. The article concludes by contending that the well-off in countries like the U.S. have reason to view international organizations like the World Bank, IMF, and WTO as their agents, and to seek to insure that they alleviate misfortunes amongst the worlds needy.     

Seeing by Feeling: Virtues,Skills, and Moral Perception

Champions of virtue ethics frequently appeal to moral perception: the notion that virtuous people can “see” what to do. According to a traditional account of virtue, the cultivation of proper feeling through imitation and habituation issues in a sensitivity to reasons to act. Thus, we learn to see what to do by coming to feel the demands of courage, kindness, and the like. But virtue ethics also claims superiority over other theories that adopt a perceptual moral epistemology, such as intuitionism – which John McDowell criticizes for illicitly “borrow[ing] the epistemological credentials” of perception. In this paper, I suggest that the most promising way for virtue ethics to use perceptual metaphors innocuously is by adopting a skill model of virtue, on which the virtues are modeled on forms of practical know-how. Yet I contend that this model is double-edged for virtue ethics. The skill model belies some central ambitions and dogmas of the traditional view, especially its most idealized claims about virtue and the virtuous. While this may be a cost that its champions are unprepared to pay, I suggest that virtue ethics would do well to embrace a more realistic moral psychology and a correspondingly less sublime conception of virtue.     

Novice construction of chess memory

Novice acquisition of skilled recall of chess positions was studied in an experiment in which two novices studied a series of five hundred chess positions during a period of several months. They spent fifteen minutes to half an hour a day teaching themselves these positions. As a result their skill in recalling chess positions rose from sixteen percent to somewhere between forty to fifty percent. The learning curve proved to have a shape which indicates that in the beginning learning is very fast but after some 100-150 studied positions the speed of learning decreases substantially. A computer simulation was used to model the results and analyse alternative explanations. Two alternative ways of thinking were tested. In the first, chunk construction was assumed to be based on the neighbourhood of associated pieces. The second model assumed a frequency-based correlative association process. Although the learning curves of the two models are very similar in shape to those of the subjects, the frequency-based associative model gave a better explanation for the data. This is why it is natural to suggest that common co-occurrence in addition to easily recognizable chess-specific characteristics, like colour and type of pieces, guide associative processes during chess players' learning of chess-specific chunks.