What are the functions of optimism in modern societies? How is hope culturally transmitted? What values and attitudes does it reflect? This book explores how and why powerful institutions propagate 'cultures of optimism' in different domains, such as politics, work, the family, religion and psychotherapy.

What lies at the heart of humanity's capacity for evil? Any tenable answer to this age-old question must include an explanation of our penchant for objectifying and dehumanizing our fellow human beings. The Objectification Spectrum: Understanding and Transcending Our Diminishment and Dehumanization of Others draws upon timeless wisdom to propose a new model of objectification. Rather than offering a narrow definition of the term, the author explores objectification as a spectrum of misapprehension running from its mildest form, casual indifference, to its most extreme manifestation, dehumanization. Using vivid examples to clearly demarcate three primary levels of objectification, the author engages in a thoughtful exploration of various dispositional and situational factors contributing to this uniquely human phenomenon. These include narcissism, the ego, death denial, toxic situations, and our perceived boundaries of self, among others. Rector then gives us reason to hope by orienting his model of objectification into a broader continuum of human capability--one that includes a countervailing enlightenment spectrum. Gleaning insights from classic philosophy, the world's five most prominent religious traditions, and current social science research, he examines the best antidotes humankind has devised thus far to move us from casual concern for our fellow human beings toward interconnectedness and, ultimately, unity consciousness. Broad in scope and deeply penetrating, The Objectification Spectrum advances the conversation about the nature of human evil into personally relevant, potentially transformative territory.

Industrial/Organizational psychologists are a rather diverse group of people with a common interest in applying psychology to work settings. This is the conclusion reached by George Alliger in the opening chapter of this volume, setting the tone for the rest of the book, which attempts to expand our view of what can be considered as I/O psychology. The authors of the individual chapters are from a variety of backgrounds, not all of them directly associated with I/O psychology, and they discuss topics such as managerial success and training, as well as topics much more on the edge of I/O such as team-building and organizational theory. Thus, this volume makes an important statement about the potential diversity of our field. At the same time, it will help move us towards that diversity by providing insights and information in areas that should be, and are becoming part of the realm of I/O psychology. These insights into non-traditional topics, as well as particularly interesting approaches to more traditional areas, make this volume worthwhile and useful to almost anyone concerned with I/O psychology.

Mortality is a recurrent theme in films across genres, periods, nations, and directors. This book brings together an accomplished set of authors with backgrounds in film analysis, psychology, and philosophy to examine how the knowledge of death, the fear of our mortality, and the ways people cope with mortality are represented in cinema.

This book examines the treatment of suspects in interrogation and explores issues surrounding the right to silence. Employing a socio-legal approach, it draws from empirical research in the social sciences including social psychology to understand the problem of obtaining reliable evidence during interrogation.

This book examines wayfinding from a broad public health perspective and articulates what needs to be done to create better wayfinding for all people regardless of age, ability, or mode of transportation. Addressing both science and the human experience, the book brings together a group of international experts to examine community wayfinding from a variety of viewpoints. It first presents a critical foundation for understanding wayfinding from an individual perspective. Next, it describes relevant design principles and practices by drawing upon architecture, environmental graphic design, universal design (UD), and urban planning. The book then goes on to examine wayfinding tools and innovative technologies ranging from maps to apps to complex systems. In addition, coverage includes case studies, lessons from wayfinding improvement initiatives, and recommendations for future research, practice, and policy. Overall, the book focuses on the economic and commercial benefits of good wayfinding, its potential impact on the health of individuals and communities, as well as strategies for the journey ahead. It will appeal to numerous professionals across many disciplines from architecture and cartography to public health and urban planning. Additionally, the book can help advance a dialogue among those interested in enhancing the livability of their communities.

This book offers a broad-based critical examination of the consequences--moral, psychological, sociological, educational, and economic--of increasing specialization in today's world. According to the author, we have now reached a stage where the education and professional work of both elite and non-elite groups are so narrowly focused as to diminish both the individual and society. The development of the complete individual has given way to the development of a complete collective, made up of narrowly focused, fragmented individuals. And educators--the very people who should be able to lead us out of this path of increasing specalization--have themselves fallen victim, unable to function outside their own specialized areas of expertise. This controversial work will be of interest to scholars and students in social psychology, philosophy, educational foundations, economics, Third World development, and business--in short, to all thinking members of modern society.

This book is part of the continuing research on quality of life issues conducted by its authors, and builds on past research on the values and lifestyles of Singaporeans (published in 1999 and 2004) and the wellbeing of Singaporeans (published in 2009). It focuses on the happiness and wellbeing of Singaporeans and details the findings of a large-scale quality-of-life survey of 1500 Singapore residents in 2011 (the QOL 2011 Survey). This comprehensive study provides insights into Singaporeans' general life satisfaction and satisfaction with their life domains, happiness, enjoyment, achievement, emotional wellbeing, psychological wellbeing, economic wellbeing, overall wellbeing, happiness, enjoyment, achievement, personal values, spirituality, value orientations, national identity, and satisfaction with rights. In addition, the QOL 2011 Survey builds on previous nation-wide surveys in 1991, 1996, and 2001, thus providing a longitudinal perspective into how the various aspects of the wellbeing of Singaporeans have evolved through the years. This book aims to provide a comprehensive reference for academics, practitioners, policy makers, researchers, and students who are interested in the subject of happiness and wellbeing in Singapore. It can also be used as a reference for other countries who are interested to promote happiness and wellbeing of their nations.

Marriages across ethnic borders are increasing in frequency, yet little is known of how discourses of 'normal' families, ethnicity, race, migration, globalisation affect couples and children involved in these mixed marriages. This book explores mixed marriage though intimate stories drawn from the real lives of visibly different couples.

Advances in Experimental Social Psychology continues to be one of the most sought after and most often cited series in this field. Containing contributions of major empirical and theoretical interest, this series represents the best and the brightest in new research, theory, and practice in social psychology. This serial is part of the Social Sciences package on ScienceDirect. Visit info.sciencedirect.com for more information. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology is available online on ScienceDirect - full-text online of volume 32 onward. Elsevier book series on ScienceDirect gives multiple users throughout an institution simultaneous online access to an important complement to primary research. Digital delivery ensures users reliable, 24-hour access to the latest peer-reviewed content. The Elsevier book series are compiled and written by the most highly regarded authors in their fields and are selected from across the globe using Elsevier's extensive researcher network. For more information about the Elsevier Book Series on ScienceDirect Program, please visit store.elsevier.com.

This volume explores the use and relevance of qualitative methods for the study of quality of life. It analyzes the role of qualitative researcher and the role of the context and the culture in quality of life studies. It presents the use of qualitative methods in real projects carried out in specific fields: geography, health, community studies, labor life and yoga. Finally, the book proposes the use of mixed methods that are considered as the third methodological approach in social research. The main purpose of using qualitative methods is to understand what it means for participants to be involved in certain events, situations and actions. Such methods help understand the context in which participants act and the influence of that context on their actions. The decision to use a particular methodology implies a philosophic, theoretical and political decision. Qualitative methodology constitutes an approach that is essential for understanding people's experiences of well-being and discovering new issues related to quality of life.

While studies of San children have attained the peculiar status of having delineated the prototype for hunter-gatherer childhood, relatively few serious ethnographic studies of San children have been conducted since an initial flurry of research in the 1960s and 1970s. Based on the author's long-term field research among several San groups of Southern Africa, this book reconsiders hunter-gatherer childhood using "play" as a key concept. Playfulness pervades the intricate practices of caregiver-child interactions among the San: immediately after birth, mothers have extremely close contact with their babies. In addition to the mother's attentions, other people around the babies actively facilitate gymnastic behavior to soothe them. These distinctive caregiving behaviors indicate a loving, indulgent attitude towards infants. This also holds true for several language genres of the San that are used in early vocal communication. Children gradually become involved in various playful activities in groups of children of multiple ages, which is the major locus of their attachment after weaning; these playful activities show important similarities to the household and subsistence activities carried out by adults. Rejuvenating studies of San children and hunter-gatherer childhood and childrearing practices, this book aims to examine these issues in detail, ultimately providing a new perspective for the understanding of human sociality.

For anyone who wants to be heard at work, earn that overdue promotion, or win more clients, deals, and projects, the bestselling author of Captivate, Vanessa Van Edwards, shares her advanced guide to improving professional relationships through the power of cues.

What makes someone charismatic? Why do some captivate a room, while others have trouble managing a small meeting? What makes some ideas spread, while other good ones fall by the wayside? If you have ever been interrupted in meetings, overlooked for career opportunities or had your ideas ignored, your cues may be the problem – and the solution.

Cues – the tiny signals we send to others 24/7 through our body language, facial expressions, word choice, and vocal inflection – have a massive impact on how we, and our ideas, come across. Our cues can either enhance our message or undermine it.

In this entertaining and accessible guide to the hidden language of cues, Vanessa Van Edwards teaches you how to convey power, trust, leadership, likeability, and charisma in every interaction. You’ll learn:

  •  Which body language cues assert, “I’m a leader, and here’s why you should join me.”
  •  Which vocal cues make you sound more confident
  •  Which verbal cues to use in your résumé, branding, and emails to increase trust (and generate excitement about interacting with you.)
  •  Which visual cues you are sending in your profile pictures, clothing, and professional brand.
 
Whether you're pitching an investment, negotiating a job offer, or having a tough conversation with a colleague, cues can help you improve your relationships, express empathy, and create meaningful connections with lasting impact. This is an indispensable guide for entrepreneurs, team leaders, young professionals, and anyone who wants to be more influential.

Through dramatic personal stories, Claude Steele shares the experiments and studies that show, again and again, that exposing subjects to stereotypes--merely reminding a group of female math majors about to take a math test, for example, that women are considered naturally inferior to men at math--impairs their performance in the area affected by the stereotype. Steele's conclusions shed new light on a host of American social phenomena, from the racial and gender gaps in standardized test scores to the belief in the superior athletic prowess of black men. Steele explicates the dilemmas that arise in every American's life around issues of identity, from the white student whose grades drop steadily in his African American Studies class to the female engineering students deciding whether or not to attend predominantly male professional conferences. Whistling Vivaldi offers insight into how we form our senses of identity and ultimately lays out a plan for mitigating the negative effects of "stereotype threat" and reshaping American identities.

"Intelligently addresses several of the most important unresolved issues and controversies about altruism."
--"The Journal of Politics"

All but buried for most of the twentieth century, the concept of altruism has re-emerged in this last quarter as a focus of intense scholarly inquiry and general public interest. In the wake of increased consciousness of the human potential for destructiveness, both scholars and the general public are seeking interventions which will not only inhibit the process, but may in fact chart a new creative path toward a global community. Largely initiated by a group of pioneering social psychologists, early questions on altruism centered on its motivation and development primarily in the context of contrived laboratory experiments. Although publications on the topic have been considerable over the last several years, and now represent the work of representatives from many disciplines of inquiry, this volume is distinguished from others in several ways.

"Embracing the Other" emerged primarily as a response to recent research on an extraordinary manifestation of real-life altruism, namely to recent studies of non-Jewish rescuers of Jews during World War II. It is the work of a multi-disciplinary and international group of scholars, including philosophers, social psychologists, historians, sociologists, and educators, challenging several prevailing conceptual definitions and motivational sources of altruism. The book combines both new empirical and historical research as well as theoretical and philosophical approaches and includes a lengthy section addressing the practical implications of current thinking on altruism for society at large. The resultis a multi-textured work, addressing critical issues in varied disciplines, while centered on shared themes.

Biographical Ruptures and their Repair: Cultural Transitions in Development represents the efforts of bridging theoretical, methodological, and practice oriented issues revolving around the notion of biographical ruptures and their repairs from cultural psychological perspectives in order to bring novel understandings to the debateof what it means to be a developing human being in an ever changing world. While persons develop in their every day interactions, they are bound to experience different forms of ruptures, which then must be managed individually. Contrary to mainstream psychology ruptures and repairs are here not necessarily understood as a personal experience, which then must be overcome through various coping strategies, but rather as an experience, which necessarily emerges out of the complex interrelatedness of intra-psychological, inter-personal, and societal processes. Moving along these different levels of analysis, each of the 13 chapters of this book contributes to the general cultural psychological understanding of ruptures from their own particular standpoint. The notion of ruptures and their repairs are thus discussed from e.g. classical developmental psychological theories, while following chapters then challenge such developmental approaches. Ruptures in relation to racial interpellations are discussed using the documentary method and these analyses are then further developed in a following chapter with social representations theory. On the object level ruptures are pointed to within popular music videos to further develop the documentary method, which is then taken up in another chapter and discussed from a Ganzheitspsychological approach. The current book thus does not only represent a conglomerate of various theoretical, methodological, or practice oriented approaches to ruptures and their repairs, each adding with their own expertise a little part to a better understand of the phenomenon in its whole. It further demonstrated a lively debate between leading specialists and practitioners from different disciplines and countries discussing theoretical and methodological issues, but also ethical and moral ones, each from their own cultural psychological viewpoint. This book will interest anyone who is interested biographical rupture and their repairs from a cultural psychological, developmental, social psychological, or psychotherapeutic viewpoint.

The Holocaust, civil war in Bosnia, drug wars in the cities, random violence in schools, streets, and homes - such events and their aftermath pose special problems for mental health professionals, educators, and others who must help children make sense of acts that endanger them physically and psychically. In this book, edited by Drs. Roberta J. Apfel and Bennett Simon, mental health professionals share their knowledge, experiences, and hopefulness in working with children exposed to war and violence. The result is a moving history of young lives affected by war, persecution, and communal violence, and an invaluable resource for anyone working with children subjected to such traumas. The contributors to this book - who include psychiatrists, psychologists, and social workers, all with direct experience working with children who are victims of war and violence - address the ethics involved in working with children in war zones, children's development under circumstances of war or violence, post-traumatic stress disorder and other stress reactions, refugee children, "survivor guilt", interventions and treatments, and the emotional health of the caretakers. The book includes case studies on children of war in Kuwait, on a program involving children of Holocaust survivors and children of Nazi perpetrators, and on the Child Development-Community Policing Program in New Haven.

This study examines the suffering narratives of the Bimo and Christian religious communities of the Yi minority who reside in the remote mountains of Sichuan and Yunnan, China, respectively. It is informed by the theoretical framework of ecological rationality, which posits that religions influence and are influenced by cognitive styles that have co-evolved with the ecological niche of a culture. It was predicted and found that in times of adversity, traditional religious communities differ in emotion expression, causal attribution, and help-seeking behavior, with far-reaching ramifications for how they are uniquely vulnerable to the ravages of modernization. The authors hope that the voices of the study participants, heard through their harrowing narratives, may inspire a deepened sensitivity to the plight of rural Chinese communities as China races to become a superpower in the global economy.

The Politics of Reparations and Apologies examines the evolution and dynamics of reparation politics and justice. The volume introduces the key concepts, theories, and terms associated with social movements and in particular, the redress and reparation movement (RRM). Drawing from RRMs that have their foundation in World War II--the German genocides, the United States internments, and the Japanese "comfort women" system-- the volume explores each case study's relative success or failure in achieving its goals and argues that there are overarching trends that can explain success and failure more generally in the RRM movement. Using the backdrop of international criminal law and normative concepts of reparations, the volume establishes and analyzes the roles of reparations and apologies in obtaining transitional justice. In each case study, there is a detailed rundown of the political actions that were attempted to obtain redress and reparation for the victims, of how successful the attempts were, and of the crucial factors which influenced the relative success or failure. Crucially, the volume offers a comparative framework of the actions that contribute to a successful outcome for transitional justice. With the increasing normative expectation of justice in post-conflict situations, this volume is a valuable resource for researchers in international affairs, human rights, political science, and conflict studies.

The Avoider. The Deflector. The Self-Blamer. The Aggressor. Recognize someone you know? Or yourself? We all know people who seem to get stuck in unhealthy patterns of relating to others. Sometimes we're puzzled by a loved one's evasiveness or surprised by a friend's defensive aggression. Occasionally we look in the mirror and see such troubling behaviors in ourselves. All of these are masks that we hide behind, and they prevent us from having authentic relationships with others. Counselor Russell Willingham identifies the relational masks that obstruct us from relating freely to other people and to God. Drawing on a wealth of practical experience and biblical insight, he diagnoses the destructive ways that we respond to others and shows how underlying false beliefs govern our thinking and actions. He also shows how each mask can be subverted from within and turned inside out to help us move toward healthy relationships. Each chapter includes tools and questions for discussion and application. Discover how to relate to others with the honesty and authenticity God intended--and find the relational freedom and satisfaction you?ve been yearning for.

This edited volume explores the influence of role modelling as a process in the workplace; in particular, whether it can aid career development, offer psycho-social support, and provide the motivation and means to achieve goals. Chapters examine whether the dynamics of personal identification and self-belief can affect the way that role models are chosen, placing emphasis on geographical diversity and cultural aspects. By including studies of gender and followership in both American and Indian settings, the scholars and practitioners who contribute to this collection outline key aspects of role modelling, and its effect as a developmental tool in the workplace, from the perspective of the individual and organisations. This book is a valuable resource for academics interested in organisations, management, and diversity, as well as practitioners and policy-makers involved in leadership programmes, who will find its collection of both theoretical and empirical findings extremely useful.