Affective isolation as a coping strategy for persons with low and high amounts of life stress

Previous research has investigated two diverse operational definitions of stress, experimentally induced, short-term stress and long-term, life stress. The purpose of this study was to intersect these two research methodologies and determine the effect of a laboratory-induced stress (failure feedback) on persons with differing levels of life stress. Women with high or low amounts of life stress were given failure feedback, no failure feedback, or a cognitive coping strategy (affective isolation) in addition to failure feedback. Failure feedback increased self-reported anger and anxiety immediately following feedback and also after a follow-up test and decreased expectations about performance for the second test. Affective isolation significantly reduced anger and anxiety but failed to affect expectations. Women with high amounts of life stress reported significantly less anxiety than women with low amounts of life stress in response to failure feedback. These results were interpreted within C. D. Spielberger's (in C. D. Spielberger & R. Diaz-Guerrero (Eds.), Cross-cultural anxiety, New York: Wiley, 1976) cognitive model. It was proposed that differing levels of previous life stress cause people to make varying judgments about the degree of threat in a short-term stressful situation. Persons with high amounts of life stress may not be aroused in response to short-term stress because they perceive the short-term stress as only a “drop in the bucket” compared to the other events which they have experienced.     

Moral judgments and self-presentations

Meehan, Woll, and Abbott (Journal of Research in Personality, 1979, 13, 25–38) have shown that scores on Hogan's Survey of Ethical Attitudes (SEA) are affected by instructions to simulate politically liberal or conservative attitudes. They also found that scores are affected by instructions to present one's self in a socially desirable or undesirable light, and that group ratings of the social desirability of the items could account for as much as 78% of the item response variance. Meehan et al. argue from these data that the SEA is a measure of political attitudes rather that moral judgments, and that the SEA is susceptible to dissimulation in the form of role playing and impression management. The present paper argues that test-taking is a form of self-presentation, identical to what goes on in everyday social interaction; this renders the Meehan et al. findings meaningful rather than problematic. The paper concludes with a discussion of the relationship between personality testing, self-presentation, moral judgments, and political attitudes.     

Self-monitoring in communicative interactions: Social cognitive consequences of goal-directed message modification

The hypothesis was examined that previously demonstrated message modification and its subsequent social cognitive effects would be more characteristic of high than low self-monitors. Subjects first read an essay describing a stimulus person and were then requested to communicate a referential message concerning him to a listener who supposedly either liked (positive audience condition) or disliked (negative audience condition) the stimulus person. Subjects were subsequently given, after both a brief and long delay interval, a reproduction, impression, and attitude measure. The results indicated that high self-monitors were more likely to modify their message in a manner that was evaluatively consistent with their listener's attitude. In addition, this message modification had the predicted social cognitive consequences in that it affected the high self-monitor's subsequent impressions of (but not necessarily attitude toward) the target person. The results suggested that the responses obtained from high self-monitors in many experimental contexts may themselves be the results of a self-monitoring strategy. The implications of these results for research examining the effects of “self-monitoring” are discussed.     

警惕啊!基因决定论

基因已经成为２０世纪遗传学中的一个关键词基因决定论也正在走近我们的生活本文从遗传学的角度阐述了基因决定论的种种不当之处,并且指出基因的作用与人类的生活方式密切相关,而人类的全部文明史就在于克服单纯的基因决定论所带来的局限。     

The Laicism and Its Religious Limits

Public school as a constitutional condition of modern democracy can not deal with absolutistic and fundamentalistic claims of public morality in a neutral way. The problems resulting from this for a laicistic school are discussed in the context of liberal tradition in France and the école laïque as it originated in the 19th century.     

管子的民本思想和民生问题

在推进我国当代政治文明建设的进程中,古代齐文化中的民本思想有许多科学的合理的成分值得我们积极借鉴和吸收,党的十七大进一步升华了这种民本思想,创新地全面部署民生问题。     

New Testament studies in the 20th century

Considered diachronically, NT studies in the twentieth century is a story of vigorous scholarship. Especially after World War II, there is increasing diversification in approach and in the makeup of scholars, with a noticeable shift of centre to English-speaking settings (especially North America), and greater involvement of Roman Catholic, Evangelical, and Jewish scholars, a growing prominence of women, and a proliferation of approaches.     

推进新时代中国社区心理学新形态建设

建设中国特色的社区心理学是时代的呼唤和要求。在党的二十大精神指引下,新时代中国社区心理学需要坚持中国化时代化的马克思主义为指导以推进理论建设;以新时代社区心理建设为场域,助力社会主义核心价值观培育;构建新时代中国社区心理学服务路径,助推人民共同富裕。总体而言,中国特色社区心理学的理论建设与实践探索需要关注新时代社区发展中涌现出的新问题,提出解决中国社区发展问题的中国办法和中国方案,努力推进中国社区心理学新形态的建设。     

Self-Healing Forces and Concepts of Health and Disease. A Historical Discourse

The phenomenon of self-healing forces has again and again challenged doctors in the different historical periods of medical science. They relied on effects of self-healing forces in diagnosis and therapy. They also tried to explain these effects based on the current model of organism. The understanding of this phenomenon has always influenced the understanding of therapy and played a role in defining the concept of health and disease. In the 17th and 18th century the idea of self-healing force was interpreted as a phenomenon related to the organic forces, whereas in the 19th century the explanation was reduced to a materialistic mechanism. Nowadays the knowledge of heath-shock-proteins open the way of a new understanding of the organic defense mechanisms. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.