Gender-Role Attitudes in University Students in the United States, Slovenia, and Croatia

Determinants of gender-role attitudes were examined in samples of university students from Pittsburgh in the United States, Ljubljana in Slovenia, and Osijek in Croatia. Surveys including items from the Attitudes Toward Women Scale and the Neosexism Scale were administered to a total of 1,544 U.S. students, 912 Slovene students, and 996 Croatian students between the years of 1991 and 2000. As predicted, men held less egalitarian or more sexist attitudes about the appropriate roles for women and men, and those with more frequent attendance at religious services held more sexist attitudes. No changes in attitudes were found for women over time, but Slovene males were found to become more traditional over time.     

A study on the resistance of observation systems of observers' expectancies

Different sets of expectations were induced in groups of observers before asking them to observe a film. Four aspects of Hall's notation system for the observation of proxemic behavior (1963) were adopted for the purposes of this study and another observation aspect was added. All Ss observed the same scenes of the film. They only differed in the kind of information on experimenters' beliefs and the hypotheses of the observation study. Results indicate that induced expectancies influenced the recordings of the observers. Implications of these outcomes are discussed.     

“And Yet It Moves”: Dream and Reality of the Ecumenical Movement

This article offers an overview of the 11th Assembly of the World Council of Churches, which met in Karlsruhe, Germany, in August–September 2022. It sets out the context in which the assembly took place, the main issues discussed, and perspectives for the future. The article argues that the assembly in Karlsruhe demonstrated that the ecumenical movement still is alive and can offer enormous potential in a world at the brink of a new East–West divide, facing a significant weakening of multilateral structures of cooperation, and even the threat of nuclear war. Moreover, the Karlsruhe assembly demonstrated that on subjects such as the Middle East, peace ethics, and nationalism, and in the deep commitment and spiritual life of its participants, the ecumenical movement is vital and vibrant and represents a countercultural force against rigid nationalisms.     

Online implementation of an event history calendar with formr: A tutorial

Event history calendars (EHCs) are popular tools for retrospective data collection. Originally conceptualized as face‐to‐face interviews, EHCs contain various questions about the respondents' autobiography in order to use their experiences as cues to facilitate remembering. For relationship researchers, EHCs are particularly valuable when trying to reconstruct the relational past of individuals. However, although many studies are conducted online nowadays, no freely available online adaptation of the EHC is available yet. In this tutorial, detailed instructions are provided on how to implement an online EHC for the reconstruction of romantic relationship histories within the open‐source framework formr. Ways to customize the online EHC and provide a template for researchers to adapt the tool for their own purposes are showcased.     

When a grandiose self-image is threatened: narcissism and self-concept clarity as predictors of negative emotions and aggression following ego-threat

Two studies examined the relation between narcissism, self-concept clarity, negative emotions, and aggression based on theoretical assumptions proposed by Baumeister, Smart, and Boden (1996). Narcissism and self-concept clarity were examined as predictors for anger, depression, and verbal aggression following ego-threat, which was operationalized by a bogus performance feedback on an intelligence test. The second study also examined the mediating effects of participants' negative emotions to provide an additional explanation for the aggressive reactions after failure. As expected, narcissism and self-concept clarity were significant predictors of negative emotions and aggression after failure. In accordance with our hypothesis, high narcissists with low self-concept clarity reacted with anger and aggression after failure, whereas less narcissistic individuals with high self-concept clarity showed feelings of depression and no aggression. The results also indicated that aggression was always directed toward the source of the ego-threatening feedback. Additionally, anger and depression could predict the aggressive response after failure but they did not mediate the relation between narcissism, self-concept clarity, performance feedback, and aggression.     

Causal Responsibility and Rationing in Medicine

The article addresses the issue of rationing health care services, a topic currently being hotly debated in many countries. The author argues that the aspect of causal responsibility ought to play a decisive role in the allocation of limited medical resources. Starting out from Ronald Dworkin's distinction between option luck and brute luck, the appropriate and meaningful uses of the term causal responsibility are clarified first. A discussion of the conditions which might justify giving lower priority to patients whose illnesses are the result of unhealthy behavior, like e.g. alcohol abuse, follows. Causal responsibility is then viewed in the context of private health insurance and the club model of organ donation. It is argued that individuals themselves are basically responsible for their decisions regarding insurance coverage and membership in organ donors' clubs. Causal responsibility is shown to be a more suitable criterion for rationing scarce medical resources than other criteria which might alternatively be considered, such as patients' age.     

Stress and mood: the moderating role of activity inhibition

The present research tested the hypothesis that activity inhibition (as measured by the picture story exercise) moderates the relationship between stress and mood. Based on prior research that shows that (a) individuals high in activity inhibition restrain emotional and motivational impulses and (b) inhibiting negative emotion may lead to further emotional impairments, we assumed that individuals high in activity inhibition show evidence of increased negative mood when they are confronted with stressful events. Study 1 found evidence of increased negative mood-relevant thought among individuals high in activity inhibition who were confronted with the threat of social rejection. Study 2 found high negative mood among individuals high in activity inhibition who experienced many daily hassles. Also, participants high in activity inhibition reported a disproportionally higher amount of daily hassles in the middle (but not at the beginning) of a university semester. We suggest that this pattern of results can be accounted for by Wegner's (1994) theory of ironic effects of the suppression of thought and emotion.     

Paralinguistic processing in children with callosal agenesis: emergence of neurolinguistic deficits

Recent research revealed impaired processing of both nonliteral meaning and affective prosody in adults with agenesis of the corpus callosum (ACC) and normal intelligence. Since normal children have incomplete myelination of the corpus callosum, it was hypothesized that paralanguage deficits in children with ACC would be less apparent relative to their peers. The Familiar and Novel Language Comprehension Test (FANL-C) and Prosody Test were given to 18 children with ACC and normal intelligence and 17 controls matched for age (7-13 years), education, and IQ (83-122). When controlling for age, children with ACC were significantly poorer in comprehension of the precise meaning of both literal and nonliteral items on the FANL-C. Adults with ACC had previously been shown to have difficulty only on nonliteral items. The effect size for nonliteral comprehension in children with ACC was smaller than that seen in adults. There was only a trend for the child ACC group to perform worse on the recognition of affective prosody. Thus, while deficits in paralinguistic processing were apparent, children with ACC were not as clearly different from age peers as adults, and were equally deficient at comprehending literal and nonliteral expressions. The differences in results between adults and children with ACC are thought to reflect incomplete callosal development in normal children, and the importance of the corpus callosum in the early stages of the development of the ability to process literal language.