Chinese are more loss averse than British

This research investigates how culture might influence loss aversion. Chinese were expected to be more loss averse than British because of cultural differences in regulatory focus. Study 1 reveals that compared with British participants, Chinese participants were less likely to give up gifts they had received in exchange for new gifts. In Study 2, Chinese and British participants imagined buying a computer which either had a high specification and a high price tag (high reference), or a basic specification and a low price tag (low reference). Participants were informed that the (reference) computer was unavailable, and they had to choose between two available computers, which were both cheaper and less powerful than the high reference computer, and more expensive and more powerful than the low reference computer. The results reveal that the difference in price tag between the two available computers had a bigger impact on Chinese buying decisions than on British buying decisions when it was viewed as a loss. Furthermore, both promotion focus and prevention focus mediated the influence of culture on buying decisions in the low reference condition. No cross‐cultural difference was found in the high reference condition.     

‘It’s silly these doors don’t open’: a six-year-old girl emerges from a chronic state of emotional withdrawal

This clinical paper explores the way in which the first two years of a long-term psychotherapy helped six-year-old Anna to lessen her retreat into a chronic withdrawn emotional state. Over the course of the first year she would occasionally pick up the fridge from the doll’s house and try to open the doors, but because the fridge was actually a block of wood the doors could not open. In treatment, this inquiry came to represent the difficulties of engaging and making contact with a baby who found it very hard to feed. The author describes how, as Anna entered into a therapeutic relationship, it slowly became clear that there was an inner world jam-packed with persecutory anxieties and a family history of unmourned loss and trauma. Through fear Anna slammed the doors to her mind – to knowing herself – and by not feeding, Anna starved herself of opportunities for mental growth. It took some time for her to state, “it’s silly these doors don’t open, they should”. In the discussion of this clinical material the author draws on the work of Francis Tustin, Alessandra Piontelli and Marguerite Reid to consider the link between intergenerational and prenatal trauma and subsequent emotional disturbance in the child.     

Postwar Recovery to Stress Symptoms Ratio as a Measure of Resilience,Individual Characteristics,Sense of Danger,and Age

This study maintains that postwar resilience should be defined by the proportion of recovery from war adversity and level of postwar symptoms. We hypothesize first that four resilience-promoting factors will predict this measure of resilience. Second, these associations will be mediated by sense of postwar danger. Third, war-afflicted older people will be comparable to younger people on these variables. The sample included 829 Israeli adults who experienced the 2006 second Lebanon war. Results that have generally supported these hypotheses have been discussed in terms of the definition of resilience, the role of sense of danger in postwar adjustment, and the resilience of older people to war.     

Childhood Interrupted: A Story of Loss,Separation, and Reconciliation

This essay presents a story of personal loss and childhood trauma experienced by the author in 1968. Written in autoethnographic form, the author narrates a particular time in his life when he lost his hearing and subsequently experienced “disrupted attachment”(Becker, 1997 Becker, G. (1997). Disrupted lives: How people create meaning in a chaotic world. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. [Google Scholar]) caused by forced separation from family on the day he began life at a residential school for deaf children. Forty-six years later, the author weaves together a narrative of loss and trauma followed by his own reflections, showing how he used writing conversation as a source of healing that allowed him reconcile with his past.     

The Role of Avoidance in Complicated Grief: A Detailed Examination of the Grief-Related Avoidance Questionnaire (GRAQ) in a Large Sample of Individuals with Complicated Grief

Grief-related avoidance is a significant component of complicated grief, yet has rarely been formally measured in a validated fashion. Further, more work is needed to understand the impact of grief-related avoidance on symptom severity and functional impairment among individuals with complicated grief (CG). The Grief-Related Avoidance Questionnaire (GRAQ; Shear, Monk et al. 2007) was created to assess grief-related avoidance and the present analysis aimed to further develop this measure and construct by confirming the GRAQ’s psychometric properties and examining loss-related predictors of avoidance. In a sample of 393 adults with CG, we found the GRAQ had high internal consistency, with a Cronbach’s alpha of 0.89 and good convergent validity. While the EFA results suggest that the GRAQ may be unidimensional, a 3-factor model generally corresponded with the findings by (Shear, Monk et al. 2007), which suggested the presence of 3 subscales. Loss-related variables age, relationship to the deceased, and cause of death were all significant predictors of GRAQ scores. Our findings support that among individuals with complicated grief, avoidance is common, measurable and an important contributor to impairment.     

Psychiatric Disorders and Childhood Parental Loss in Obesity: Relationship with the Mode of Weight Gain

We assessed the association between psychiatric disorders, childhood parental loss, and weight gain mode in 150 obese patients seeking bariatric surgery and with a history of sudden or gradual weight gain mode. Subjects with sudden weight gain mode (47%) showed significantly higher bipolar II disorder (p < .001), childhood parental death (p < .01), and separation (p < .01), but lower pure hypomania (p < .001) prevalence than subjects with gradual weight gain mode. We found preliminary evidence that lifetime bipolar spectrum disorders and childhood parental loss may influence weight gain mode in obese subjects. These findings may contribute to predict patients’ weight trajectories and implement preventive interventions.     

Search/ing for missing people: Families living with ambiguous absence

Families of missing people are often understood as inhabiting a particular space of ambiguity, captured in the phrase ‘living in limbo’ (Holmes, 2008). To explore this uncertain ground, we interviewed 25 family members to consider how human absence is acted upon and not just felt within this space ‘in between’ grief and loss (Wayland, 2007). In the paper, we represent families as active agents in spatial stories of ‘living in limbo’, and we provide insights into the diverse strategies of search/ing (technical, physical and emotional) in which they engage to locate either their missing member or news of them. Responses to absence are shown to be intimately bound up with unstable spatial knowledges of the missing person and emotional actions that are subject to change over time. We suggest that practices of search are not just locative actions, but act as transformative processes providing insights into how families inhabit emotional dynamism and transition in response to the on-going ‘missing situation’ and ambiguous loss (Boss, 1999, 2013).     

5·12汶川地震后灾区教师主观幸福感的变化趋势及中介效应分析

·12汶川地震发生两个月后,对508名灾区的幼儿园、中小学教师进行测量,结合他们对地震前状况的回忆,考察其地震后主观幸福感的变化情况及其影响因素。结果表明：（1）与回忆得到的地震前感受相比,地震后灾区教师体验到主观幸福感水平显著降低。（2）极重灾区教师体验到的主观幸福感降低程度大于重灾区和轻灾区教师。（3）教师遭受的客观损失严重程度能显著预测其体验到的主观幸福感降低;而创伤后身心症状在其中起完全中介的作用,即创伤事件引发教师创伤后身心症状,而这些症状日趋严重,使其体验到的消极情感增加、主观幸福感降低。