The Longitudinal Relationships Between Basic Psychological Needs Satisfaction at School and School-Related Subjective Well-Being in Adolescents

Situated within a positive psychology perspective, this study aimed at examining the nature and directionality of longitudinal relationships between basic psychological needs satisfaction at school and adolescents’ school-related subjective well-being. A total of 576 students (40.5 male and 36.8 % students in junior high school) completed measures of adolescent students’ basic psychological needs at school and school-related subjective well-being at two time points, 6 weeks apart. Cross-lagged structural equation modeling showed significant bidirectional longitudinal relationships between autonomy, relatedness, and competence needs satisfaction and school satisfaction. Furthermore, significant bidirectional relationships were observed between competence need satisfaction and positive affect in school. The findings provided important evidence of the roles of adolescents’ different types of needs satisfaction, experienced specifically during school, in adolescents’ school-related subjective well-being. The findings also helped extend the positive psychology perspective to the relatively neglected context of education.     

Action,Technology, and the Homogenisation of Place: Why Climate Change is Antithetical to Political Action

According to Hannah Arendt, the concept of ‘political action’ is a fundamental component of the human condition because it encapsulates how the uniqueness of each human being intersects to create unpredictable political initiatives and effects. Recently, despite being one of the most daunting political challenges ever faced by humanity, there has been a noted collective action failure, or inaction, concerning the global threat of anthropogenic climate change. Why? This article seeks to explain this political inaction in a new way: by examining the metaphysical role that technology plays in disclosing the climate as a thinkable and global object. After applying the philosophy of Martin Heidegger to the complex mathematical general circulation models (GCMs) used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), this article details how the metaphysics underlying GCMs manifests the perceivable world by ‘enframing’ it, or by implicitly representing subjects, objects, and Nature itself, as a predictable, calculable, and orderable relation of static forces. When this metaphysical and mathematical uniformity constructs the climate as a calculable object that is globalised through the IPCC, it is ultimately found to be contradictory to the distinctness and unpredictability necessary for distinct human action to occur. Paradoxically, therefore, political action is argued to be metaphysically antithetical to the technologically enframed science, politics, and discourse, of global climate change itself. The importance of distinct and plural human places, when filtered through GCMs, becomes subsumed by the climate as a homogenous, calculative, and politically inactive, global object.     

The preeminent sacred symbol: Theorizing image of God outcomes

Images of God are the most consequential religious beliefs known to social science. Although sociologists have identified a wide and diverse range of outcomes of imagining different versions of God, more work is needed to show how these outcomes fit together within a multistep theoretical framework. To lay groundwork for such a theory, the present paper (a) briefly summarizes major theoretical perspectives on sources and outcomes of images of God, from psychology, social psychology, and sociology; (b) reviews a wide range of studies that identify specific outcomes of different images of God; and (c) recommends a new theoretical direction based on (a) and (b). Although this new direction will need to be developed in substantially greater detail in another context, the starting point for such work, suggested here, is that images of God function as humans' preeminent sacred symbols. This insight helps bridge an unnecessary chasm between Durkheim's theory of ritual and Stark's theory of gods.     

Videogame Assisted Emotional Regulation Training: An ACT with RAGE-Control Case Illustration

This paper describes the treatment of an adolescent girl (age 16) who received the ACT with RAGE-Control intervention during her treatment in an urban inpatient psychiatry unit. ACT with RAGE-Control utilizes five traditional Cognitive Behavioral techniques combined with an active biofeedback videogame designed to strengthen a patient’s self-regulatory capacities while facing simulated stress in a virtual environment. The treatment is delivered as daily individual psychotherapy sessions over five consecutive days of an inpatient psychiatric admission. The following case illustrates the theory and techniques of the ACT with RAGE-Control intervention.     

Empty Looks or Paying Attention? Exploring Infants' Visual Behavior during Encoding of an Elicited Imitation Task

Recently, there has been an increased interest in the relationship between looking time during encoding and subsequent memory performance in imitation tasks. Hitherto, the results have been inconclusive: one line of research supporting the link between looking time and performance and another line finding no relation. The existing studies may, however, have been restricted by using small samples, limited looking time measures, and short retention intervals. We here examined the relationship between the encoding process by means of looking time as well as pupil dilation (by means of eye‐tracking technology) in sixty‐eight 20‐month‐old infants participating in an elicited imitation task and their subsequent memory performance (at an encoding test and at a 2‐week delayed recall test). Additional twenty‐two infants provided baseline measures. Simple looking time (assessed as fixation duration) did not correlate consistently with subsequent memory measures. In some cases, however, looking time correlated negatively with imitation scores. In contrast, positive correlations were found between pupil dilation and some of the memory measures, suggesting that pupil dilation may be a more sensitive tool compared to looking time measures.     

Love,Sex, and Personality Pathology: A Life History View of Personality Pathologies and Sociosexuality

Love and sex are fundamental needs of most people, yet little research has examined such aspects of life in relation to personality pathologies. We examined the associations between pathological personality traits (i.e., negative affectivity, disinhibition, antagonism, psychoticism, and detachment) and sociosexuality (i.e., short-term mating orientation, long-term mating orientation, and sexual behavior) among 702 university students. In addition, we examined the mediating role of life history speed and tested whether sex moderated the associations that these pathological personality traits had with sociosexuality. Detachment, antagonism, disinhibition, and psychoticism had positive associations with short-term mating interests and negative associations with long-term mating interests. Life history speed mediated the associations that detachment and disinhibition had with short-term mating orientation and long-term mating orientation. Although sex did moderate the association that negative affectivity had with previous sexual behavior, we found no evidence that these mediational processes differed between men and women. Results are discussed in terms of the way personality traits shape the sociosexuality of men and women using a life history paradigm.     

Horses and baseball: social work’s cultivation of one’s ‘third eye’

Active self-reflection is a sophisticated and subtle, multi-layered process that requires learning the capacity to constantly self-monitor. These fundamental interactive skills, the core of a competent social worker, are important to work in any context. Using two distinct metaphors, one relating to horses, the other to baseball, the article will explore the importance of developing competency skills and utilize a ‘third eye.’ In current social work education curricula the use of self may not be prioritized, practiced, or well understood. Evidence from human and veterinary medicine as well as social work, are discussed. An example of an undergraduate BSW course using simulated clients and standardized measures is discussed. The paper includes a brief review of the preliminary findings for a small pilot study and the relevance to future research is considered.     

Moral conformity in online interactions: rational justifications increase influence of peer opinions on moral judgments

Over the last decade, social media has increasingly been used as a platform for political and moral discourse. We investigate whether conformity, specifically concerning moral attitudes, occurs in these virtual environments apart from face-to-face interactions. Participants took an online survey and saw either statistical information about the frequency of certain responses, as one might see on social media (Study 1), or arguments that defend the responses in either a rational or emotional way (Study 2). Our results show that social information shaped moral judgments, even in an impersonal digital setting. Furthermore, rational arguments were more effective at eliciting conformity than emotional arguments. We discuss the implications of these results for theories of moral judgment that prioritize emotional responses.     

Digital Finance and FinTech: current research and future research directions

Since decades, the financial industry has experienced a continuous evolution in service delivery due to digitalization. This evolution is characterized by expanded connectivity and enhanced speed of information processing both at the customer interface and in back-office processes. Recently, there has been a shift in the focus of digitalization from improving the delivery of traditional tasks to introducing fundamentally new business opportunities and models for financial service companies. Digital Finance encompasses a magnitude of new financial products, financial businesses, finance-related software, and novel forms of customer communication and interaction—delivered by FinTech companies and innovative financial service providers. Against this backdrop, the research on finance and information systems has started to analyze these changes and the impact of digital progress on the financial sector. Therefore, this article reviews the current state of research in Digital Finance that deals with these novel and innovative business functions. Moreover, it gives an outlook on potential future research directions. As a conceptual basis for reviewing this field, the Digital Finance Cube, which embraces three key dimensions of Digital Finance and FinTech, i.e., the respective business functions, the technologies and technological concepts applied as well as the institutions concerned, is introduced. This conceptualization supports researchers and practitioners when orientating in the field of Digital Finance, allows for the arrangement of academic research relatively to each other, and enables for the revelation of the gaps in research.