Modesty can promote trust: Evidence from China

When people let others know about their accomplishments, they can improve their social standing, but doing so may also have a cost, especially within social environments in which there is great emphasis on the value of modesty. One particular downside of self‐promotion, the risk of being seen as untrustworthy, was examined among children in China. Across three studies, children ranging in age from 7 to 11 years (total N = 251) judged the trustworthiness of protagonists who exhibited either modesty or immodesty. In Study 1, protagonists who told lies in the service of modesty were judged as more trustworthy than those who told lies to avoid getting into trouble. In Study 2, protagonists who demonstrated modesty were rated as trustworthy, but those who demonstrated immodesty were not. Study 3 showed that the positive implications of modesty for trust are specific to downplaying one’s own accomplishments and do not extend to downplaying the accomplishments of a peer. Taken together, the results suggest that for children in China, the level of modesty serves as a cue about which people can be trusted.     

Preschoolers' Ability to Make Dispositional Predictions Within and Across Domain.

Although children over eight years of age appear to view others in dispositional terms, findings for children of kindergarten age are mixed. Few studies have examined dispositional thinking in children younger than kindergarteners. The present studies addressed two questions about trait conceptions in 4- and 5-year-old preschoolers'. (1). Do children of this age use past behaviors to predict future behavior si (2) Do they show evidence of global evaluative thinking, such that they generalize information about behavior in one domain to make predictions in other domains'? Three studies of 4- and 5-year-old preschoolers addressed these issues by presenting information about individuals' behavior in the target domain of sociomoral goodness, and asking subjects to predict the protagonists' future behaviors with regard to goodness, intelligence, and athletic skill. Study 1 focused on children's predictions for highly familiar fairy-tale characters, whereas Studies 2 and 3 required children to make predictions for unfamiliar characters. Studies 1 and 2 utilized a dichotomous choice task for assessing predictions, and Study 3 employed a quantitative rating procedure. The results of the three studies converged and suggested that preschoolers can use past behaviors to predict future behaviors. Children showed some evidence of global thinking and also some evidence of differentiation across distinctive domains.     

Children's Self-esteem and Moral Self: Links to Parent–Child Conversations Regarding Emotion

The current study has two aims: (1) to examine associations between the emotional content of parent–child past event conversations and two aspects of children's self‐concept—moral self and self‐esteem; and (2) to examine the degree to which talk about past events is uniquely associated with self‐concept when compared with talk about ongoing events and situations. Fifty‐one five‐ and six‐year‐old New Zealand children and their parents discussed four emotional past events and two ongoing conflicts. Children's moral self, self‐esteem and language ability were also assessed. When parents referred to a greater number of positive emotions and evaluations, regardless of conversation type, their children had higher self‐esteem. Past event talk also uniquely predicted children's self‐esteem: Parents who used more explanations during conversations regarding past negative emotions, and more explanations and confirmations of past positive emotions, had children with higher self‐esteem. We discuss these results with respect to an autobiographical memory approach to self‐concept development.     

Psychosocial Anatomy of the Catholic Sexual Abuse Scandal

As the sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic Church captured headlines throughout 2002 and into 2003, many within the Church and outside of it tried to understand how it all had happened. Perhaps understandably, there was a temptation to keep it simple, to find one or two identifiable, easily grasped causes for the crisis. Despite the allure of simple answers, however, it must be recognized that the root causes of the crisis are embedded in an intricate matrix of power relationships, traditions, and teachings that, in combination, rendered the abuse scandal almost inevitable. Further, every constituency within the Church–bishops, abusing priests, rank-and-file priests, and the laity, as well as the Vatican and Pope John Paul II–share varying degrees of accountability for tolerating decades, if not centuries, of sexual abuse of the Church's young. This article introduces a comprehensive view of the underpinnings of the scandal.     

The Symmetry and Asymmetry of Cultures: A Point of Departure for Bicultural Psychotherapy

The we-self and I-self relationships of the Asian and Western cultures, respectively, are examined from the perspectives of two creation myths, asymmetrical and symmetrical modes of thought, and an example of bicultural therapy.     

The Use of Tracking Technologies for the Analysis of Outdoor Mobility in the Face of Dementia: First Steps into a Project and Some Illustrative Findings From Germany

As people age in place, cognitive impairment is a major threat to maintaining out-of-home mobility. The SenTra project measures outdoor mobility by taking advantage of tracking technology in an interdisciplinary project involving researchers from geography, social work, gerontology, psychology, and medicine disciplines. The project assesses mobility patterns of urban-dwelling demented and mildly cognitively impaired elders and cognitively intact persons over a period of 3 years in Israel and Germany. The main objectives are to learn more about out-of-home mobility by means of global positioning system/geographical information system technology, to analyze the relationships between cognitive functioning, mobility behavior, and well-being, to examine the ethical implications of the use of advanced tracking technologies in this population, and to assess the potential of tracking technologies in the diagnosis of various types of cognitive impairment. The article presents preliminary findings to illustrate the potential of interdisciplinary data analyses to be performed later in the project. Pilot data were drawn from a combined psychiatric, psycho-social, and tracking data assessment of a group of 19 men and women between 63 and 80 years of age (7 who were healthy, 6 who were mildly cognitive impaired, 6 who were demented) living in Germany. The findings revealed that healthy participants have better health and higher levels of well-being and smaller networks compared to elders who are cognitively impaired. Examples of daily outdoor trips indicate meaningful mobility patterns and the need to combine psycho-social and geographical data to understand the relationships between outdoor mobility, socio-structural dimensions, behavior patterns, and well-being. By achieving its aims, the project will be able to make a substantial contribution to basic, applied, and clinical knowledge gaps in the area of mobility and cognitive impairment research.     

Organizational discourse analysis (ODA): Examining leadership as a relational process

There was a time when survey research was our only viable means of studying leadership processes. That is no longer the case. In its many forms, ODA offers a fly-on-the-wall methodology for researchers to see more of how leadership unfolds in a co-created process among relational beings. We showcase a discursive perspective and ODA as a broad set of methods for adding relational views to leadership research—and moving beyond leadership as a quality or characteristic of individuals. We begin with an overview of leadership as a relational process. From there we provide a primer on a discursive perspective and ODA, followed by a review of several types of ODA with examples. We conclude with a set of key questions leadership scholars might pose with respect to this broad class of approaches.     

Enactments in Emotionally Focused Couple Therapy: Shaping Moments of Contact and Change

Emotionally focused couple therapy (EFT) uses enactments to shape responsive attachment‐significant contact and to change couple interaction. In this article, we show how EFT enactments differ from enactments in other therapy approaches, present a theory of EFT enactments, a model for creating EFT enactments, and an extended case example of an EFT enactment. Video Abstract     

Peer Educators Reach College Students with Nutrition Information

Abstract

Leighton C. Whitaker and Jeffrey W. Pollard, eds. Campus Violence: Kinds, Causes, and Cures. New York: Haworth Press, 1993. 313 pps, $39.95.