Children's Anger Attribution Bias: Relations to Family Environment and Social Adjustment

We examined the relations of caregiver depression and family instability to preschool children's anger attribution bias and emotion attribution accuracy on a test of emotion situation knowledge. After controlling for age, gender, and verbal ability, caregiver depression and family instability predicted children's anger attribution bias but not the overall accuracy of their emotion attributions. We also divided children into groups low and high on teacher reports of aggression and groups low and high on teacher reports of peer rejection and examined the anger attribution bias of these groups. For boys but not girls, greater anger attribution bias predicted higher levels of aggression. For all children, greater anger attribution bias predicted higher levels of peer rejection. Results suggest that the misattribution of anger to others may be an important component of some children's early emotional and social difficulties.     

The Impact of Developing Social Perspective‐taking Skills on Emotionality in Middle and Late Childhood

A sample of 209 children was followed longitudinally to examine the impact of growing perspective‐taking skills on positive and negative emotionality in middle and late childhood. Perspective‐taking skills were assessed through interviews. Teachers rated children's emotional reactivity and capacity to regain a neutral state following emotional arousal. Analyses of contemporaneous data revealed that more developed perspective‐taking skills were associated with moderate levels of emotional reactivity. In addition, in children with high emotional reactivity, good perspective‐taking skills were associated with good capacity to regain a neutral affective state following emotional arousal. Longitudinal analyses revealed that children who made gains in perspective‐taking skills over a two‐year‐period became more moderate in negative emotional reactivity and improved their ability to down‐regulate strong positive emotions. The overall findings support the notion that children use perspective‐taking skills as a tool for optimal regulation of emotional responses.     

Nonverbal Communication Between Patients and Medical Practitioners

Proper health care necessitates face-to-face interaction between health providers and their patients. This direct contact is important for two sets of reasons: the provider must assess the special quality and intensity of the patient's symptoms, emotions and pain; and the provider must create positive expectations, provide emotional support, and enlist the patient's cooperation with treatment. Regarding medical diagnosis, patients are often unable or unwilling to describe precisely and completely what is wrong with them. Regarding medical treatment, a number of factors make kind words and verbal prognoses from practitioners insufficient to communicate the expectations essential to "placebo" effects and the sense of commitment known to be therapeutic to a distraught patient. Effective nonverbal communication—through touch, facial expression, voice tone, etc.—is essential for successful patient-practitioner interaction. Major aspects of nonverbal communication that are of direct relevance to health care have been studied scientifically but have not yet been systematically utilized. Promising areas of application are reviewed in this paper.     

Eyetracking measures of social attention in young children: How gaze patterns translate to real‐life social behaviors

The aim of this study was to evaluate to what degree eyetracking paradigms of social attention, in combination with synchronous measurements of affective arousal, were associated with real‐life social behavior of children aged 3–7 years. Several eyetracking paradigms were used, involving social interactions, single/multiple faces, and emotional faces. Arousal was measured using electrocardiography. Real‐life social behavior was measured using structured behavior observations, parent questionnaires, and developmental interviews. Time spent looking at social stimuli was significantly associated with real‐life social behaviors, and independent of age, IQ, or gender. Paradigms involving social interactions and looking time to the eyes showed the most consistent relations with social behaviors. Stronger affective arousal responses were associated with shorter looking times toward eyes, which in turn were associated with less social awareness in real life. Eyetracking and arousal measures allow for sensitive and objective assessment of social abilities that have great relevance for real‐life social behaviors, with the potential to use in a broad and diverse population. These measures may help gain insight into the underpinnings of social behavior and may serve as a valuable marker or outcome measure in understanding, monitoring, and stimulating social‐emotional development early in life.     

Early socialization of hostile attribution bias: The roles of parental attributions,parental discipline,and child attributes

The goal of this study was to examine child and parent predictors of children's hostile attribution bias (HAB) with a particular focus on exploring the associations between parents’ early attribution of child misbehavior and children's HAB in the transition to school age. Participants were 241 children (118 girls) of middle‐income families who were at risk for school‐age conduct problems. Multi‐method, multi‐informant data were collected on maternal attributions of child misbehavior, parental use of corporal punishment, and child attributes (i.e., verbal IQ, effortful control, theory of mind, and emotional understanding) at 3 years, and child HAB in ambiguous situations at 6 years. Results indicated that mothers’ internal explanations for children's misconduct may either reduce or increase children's later HAB depending on the specific content of attributions, such that mothers’ belief that children misbehave because of their internal state (i.e., emotional state or temperament) was associated with lower levels of child HAB, whereas attributing power‐based motives (i.e., manipulative, controlling intentions) in children was associated with higher levels of HAB. The findings are discussed with respect to appreciating the complexity of parents’ explanations for children's behavior, and considering parental cognition as a potential target for early identification and prevention of child HAB and related problems.     

性别操演理论的经验解释与女性主义方法论反思——以高层两性人才访谈为例

本文运用对高层两性人才的访谈资料，尝试将巴特勒的性别操演理论做经验研究和现实解释，观察两性在性别操演时展现的灵动性和真诚性，并将该理论与女性主义方法论作对比，反思后者潜在的“受害人假定”和“对性别的过度归因”等问题，进而讨论女性主义方法论对研究对象的遴选标准、对研究内容的界定标准和建立于性别差异基础上的研究预设等所遭遇的合法性危机。最后，本文尝试将性别操演理论与女性主义方法论对接，以探讨性别操演理论对性别研究的意义。     

School Bullying and Restorative Justice: Toward a Theoretical Understanding of the Role of Respect, Pride, and Shame

The adverse effects of school bullying and victimization have been well documented; yet, there has been little theoretical development in understanding these heterogeneous behavior patterns. This study integrates three theories that support the practice of restorative justice in responding to school bullying: Scheff's theory of unacknowledged shame, Braithwaite's reintegrative shaming theory; and Tyler's procedural justice theory. Specifically, the aim is to test the constructs of shame management (shame acknowledgment and shame displacement) and group value (pride, respect, and emotional group value) in explaining differences across four bullying status groups: nonbully/nonvictim, victim, bully, bully/victim. The results reveal different, but predictable, patterns of social and emotional disconnection from school across these groups. The importance of being emotionally intelligent when addressing bullying behaviors is discussed.     

Flipping the Equation: The Need for Context-Focused Group Work Education

For many students of social work, traditional group work curriculum promotes the development of mutual aid as the criterion for success in a group. However, a dichotomy exists between a reduction in agency-sanctioned mutual aid–focused groups and the expanded use of groups to deliver services. The contrast between MSW students' expectations and the practice realities they face is particularly challenging for classroom instruction. This article proposes a context-focused approach to teaching an elective in social group work, which links theories and skills to organizationally specific practice contexts. This approach encourages students to engage in critical reflection of practice through consistent interaction between foundational concepts and practice realities.     

Arousal transmission and attenuation in mother–daughter dyads during adolescence

Load sharing is the process through which the emotional burdens associated with challenging situations are distributed among members within close relationships. One indicator of load sharing is efficient emotion regulation, and load sharing is related to high physical and relationship closeness between partners. The purpose of the current study was to examine load sharing in mother–daughter dyads across different emotion contexts during adolescence. We examined load sharing via mothers' and daughters' electrodermal activity, which indicates sympathetic nervous system arousal. Sixty‐six adolescent girls (M _age = 15.15 years) and their mothers participated in two 4‐min discussions, about negative and positive emotional experiences. Mothers and daughters self‐reported relationship closeness, and physical closeness was experimentally manipulated by randomly assigning mothers to either touch or not touch their daughter's hand during the discussions. Evidence of load sharing was observed for both mothers and daughters in terms of lower arousal levels and greater arousal transmission (i.e., picking up on partners' arousal) at greater physical and relationship closeness, although the specific pattern of results differed for mothers and daughters and across emotion contexts. Taken together, the results of this study demonstrate that load sharing is an important interpersonal dynamic in mother–daughter dyads during adolescence.     

Social process theory of emotion: A dynamic systems approach

In this paper we apply a dynamic systems perspective to infant emotional development. We propose that emotions are not states but self-organizing dynamic processes intimately tied to the flow of an individual's activity in a context. We review data on the relationship between emotional actions and the social context, in particular the development of smiling and laughter. These data are more adequately explained by our perspective than by other theories of emotional development. We provide a model for how emotional processes in early infancy become embedded into sociocultural systems, and suggest new avenues of research on emotional development.     

Emotion Socialization as a Framework for Understanding the Development of Disorganized Attachment

Recent years have seen the emergence of accounts of the origins of the Disorganized attachment relationship in early mother–infant interaction, each building on the pioneering work of Main and Hesse—dysfunctional emotional processes figure prominently in all these accounts. This paper applies a framework based on two complementary theories of emotion socialization, Gianino and Tronick's (1992 ) Mutual Regulation Model and Gergely and Watson's (1996 ) Social Biofeedback Theory, to suggest an emotion‐based mechanism consistent with recently proposed models of the development of Disorganized attachment. The framework is used to generate hypothetical accounts of the role of dysfunctional emotional processes and maladaptive emotion socialization in early mother–infant interaction in the development of Disorganized attachment along two distinct pathways, one associated with actual abuse of the infant and the other associated with maternal unresolved trauma.     

Associations between parent emotional arousal and regulation and adolescents' affective brain response

Parents' emotional functioning represents a central mechanism in the caregiving environment's influence on adolescent affective brain function. However, a paucity of research has examined links between parental emotional arousal and regulation and adolescents' affective brain function. Thus, the present study examined associations between parents' self‐rated negative emotion, parent emotion regulation difficulties, and adolescent brain responsivity to negative and positive emotional stimuli. Participants included 64 12–14 year‐old adolescents (31 females) and their female primary caregivers. Adolescents viewed negative, positive, and neutral emotional stimuli during an fMRI scanning session. Region of interest analyses showed that higher parent negative emotion was related to adolescents' greater ACC and vmPFC response to both negatively‐ and positively‐valenced emotional stimuli; whereas, parent negative emotion was related to adolescents' greater amygdala response to negative emotional stimuli only. Furthermore, parent emotion regulation moderated the association between parent negative emotion and adolescents' brain response to negative emotional stimuli, such that parents with high negative emotion and high emotion regulation difficulties had adolescents with the greatest affective brain response. Findings highlight the importance of considering both parent emotional arousal and regulation in understanding the family affective environment and its relation to adolescent emotion‐related brain development.     

The Social Sharing of Emotion as an Interface Between Individual and Collective Processes in the Construction of Emotional Climates

The study of private emotional experiences reveals that an emotion is typically followed by social sharing. Additionally, the target's responses stimulate the sharing person's emotional expression. The reciprocal stimulation of interactants favors empathy and emotional communion. Consequences are two-fold: (1) the sharing process reactivates emotional arousal in both agent and target, and (2) it strengthens social bonds. Sharing targets also share what they heard with others, who then experience a similar need. Social sharing also develops when an emotional event strikes collectively. In this case, however, the propagation consequences are geared up in a spectacular manner both because there are as many sharing sources as there are members in the community and because every sharing reactivates felt emotions among interactants, thus reloading the propagation flow. It is argued that such chain reactions contribute to construct an emotional climate in the concerned community. It is predicted that emotion sharing would impact (1) on emotional climate in general; (2) on group cohesion and solidarity, with positive consequences for emotional climate; and (3) on collective memory, with potential consequences for emotional climate in the long run. Each of these predictions is detailed and illustrated with available empirical evidence.     

Implicit Theories of Peer Relationships

This research investigated the role of children's implicit theories of peer relationships in their psychological, emotional, and behavioral adjustment. Participants included 206 children (110 girls; 96 boys; M age =  10.13 years, SD =  1.16) who reported on their implicit theories of peer relationships, social goal orientation, need for approval, depressive and aggressive symptoms, and exposure to peer victimization. Parents also provided reports on aggressive symptoms. Results confirmed that holding an entity theory of peer relationships was associated with a greater tendency to endorse performance-oriented social goals and to evaluate oneself negatively in the face of peer disapproval. Moreover, entity theorists were more likely than incremental theorists to demonstrate depressive and aggressive symptoms when victimized. These findings contribute to social–cognitive theories of motivation and personality, and have practical implications for children exposed to peer victimization and associated difficulties.     

Negotiating via Information Technology: Theory and Application

In this review article, we examine how people negotiate via e-mail and in particular, how the process and outcomes of e-negotiations differ from those of traditional face-to-face bargaining. We review the key tasks of negotiation and then undertake a review of the research literature that has examined e-negotiations. We outline four theories of interaction that provide insights about social behavior in e-media: rapport building, social contagion, coordination, and information exchange. Our research program has focused on the interpersonal factors and social identity factors that can enhance the quality of e-negotiations. E-negotiators often succumb to the temporal synchrony bias, the burned bridge bias, the squeaky wheel bias, and the sinister attribution bias. We discuss social psychological factors that can reduce these biases and the future of research on e-negotiations.     

Psychosocial and relationship-based theories for child and family social work: political philosophy, psychology and welfare practice

Psychosocial perspectives on children’s development are allied to theories that recognize the ‘self’ as essentially a social entity. The quality of relationships that children experience in their social environment have a profound effect on their socio-emotional development, personality formation and social competence. To this extent, psychosocial theories of children’s development and wellbeing can provide child and family social workers with a powerful framework within which to analyse, assess and practise. However, it is also recognized that the character of child welfare practices and policies are influenced by prevailing political climates. A simple dichotomy is described between political philosophies of the right and left; libertarianism and communitarianism; individual freedom and collective action. It is argued that the present swing to libertarian individualism has brought about major changes in the policy and practice of much child and family social work, including a preference for theories that emphasize people’s psychological independence, rationality and personal responsibility. In such a climate, child and family social work becomes more legalistic, orientated towards principles of justice rather than welfare, and towards rights and responsibilities rather than personal relationships and social competence. Psychosocial developmental theories, with their emphasis on the importance of social relationships and the emotional interconnectedness of people in community, fare less well under the rigours of psychological individualism and free-market economics. The paper concludes that if children’s psychosocial development and competence are a product of their social history, practices that psychologically ‘disembed’ people from their relationship environment are unable to consider children’s needs within a coherent, well-grounded theoretical framework. If child and family social work is premised on helping children develop social understanding and emotional wellbeing, theory and practice are best served by taking a psychosocial perspective.     

Nothing is Concealed: De-centring Tacit Knowledge and Rules from Social Theory

The concept of "tacit knowledge" as the means by which individuals interpret the "rules" of social interaction occupies a central role in all the major contemporary theories of action and social structure. The major reference point for social theorists is Wittgenstein's celebrated discussion of rule-following in the Philosophical Investigations. Focusing on Giddens' incorporation of tacit knowledge and rules into his "theory of structuration", I argue that Wittgenstein's later work is steadfastly set against the "latent cognitivism" inherent in the idea of tacit knowledge and tacit rules. I also argue that the idea of tacit knowledge and tacit rules is either incoherent or explanatorily vacuous.     

Testing the qualitative differences between empathy and personal distress: Measuring core affect and self-orientation

In two studies the emotional valence, the level of arousal and self-orientation of empathic concern and personal distress are tested. The empathic concern prevalence versus personal distress prevalence is induced through pictures in Study 1 (N = 62) and perspective-taking instructions in Study 2 (N = 60). Results of Study 1 show that participants in the personal distress-prevalence condition report significantly more negative emotional valence (d = .65), higher arousal (d = .48), and higher self-orientation (d = .57) than participants in the empathic concern-prevalence condition. Results of Study 2 show that participants in the self-oriented condition report the highest arousal, followed by participants in the other-oriented condition, and the objective condition (η_p² = .58). Concerning the increase of self-orientation, results show that it is mediated by the personal distress induced by self-perspective instructions. Similar results in emotional valence were found between self- and other-oriented conditions.     

因病信教农民的宗教心理及其演变:试论把握“信念”概念对理解中国农村宗教实践的启示

本文通过对苏北望村基督徒因病信教现象的考察,关注信教农民的宗教心理及其演变。用"信念"来把握农民"信"的起点心理,它蕴含了个体面临生命困境时寻求宗教帮助并对之赋以期许的自然心态和家庭伦理。"信念"的宗教建构、"信念"的情感嵌入以及"信仰"要求三个宗教操演环节促使个体心理的由俗入圣。基于原有病型及其疗效基础上的个体与宗教间的互动,信徒发生了信念坍塌、信念过渡和信仰升级三种类型的心理分化。"信念"操演与分化构成了农民宗教心理演变的机理,也形塑了农民的信仰方式。文章进一步探讨"信念"对于理解中国农村宗教实践中的个体宗教心理、宗教皈信、宗教复兴等议题所具有的启发。