While the role parents play in supporting young people is well established, support from other caring adults also becomes important during adolescence, particularly when young people are facing problems in their lives. The goal of this paper is to reflect on youth support seeking when facing problems, exploring differences between youth who seek…

Psychopathy is a clinical construct defined by a cluster of personality traits and behaviors, including grandiosity, egocentricity, deceptiveness, shallow emotions, lack of empathy or remorse, irresponsibility, impulsivity, and a tendency to ignore or violate social norms. The majority of empirical research on psychopathy involves forensic…

The recent publication of David Heise's "Expressive Order" (2007) provides an occasion for discussing some of the key ideas in Affect Control Theory. The theory proposes that a few dimensions of affective meaning provide a common basis for interrelating personal identities and social actions. It holds that during interpersonal interactions, social…

This paper describes the Self-Evaluation Maintenance (SEM) model of social behavior which consists of three variables: the psychological closeness of another, the relative performance of that other, and the relevance of the performance dimension to one's self-definition. The SEM model is described as involving two processes, the reflection process…

High and low socially anxious women were given identical feedback about their personality traits after a brief social interaction with a male confederate. The male confederate was trained to respond positively to half and negatively to half. High socially anxious subjects had more accurate memory for negative information about themselves. (Author)

This study examined reciprocal-influence models of the association between relational self-views and peer stress during early adolescence. The first model posited that adolescents with negative self-views disengage from peers, creating stress in their relationships. The second model posited that exposure to peer stress fosters social…

Utilizes the lyrics of popular recordings to illustrate how intense emotional involvements can affect individual behavior as it examines the lyrical question, "What kind of fool am I?" The commentary is supplemented by an extensive discography featuring more than 150 recordings released over the past five decades. (AEF)

Fifth grade students with socially deprived family backgrounds met weekly with a teacher for twenty minute discussions. They progressed from a need to resolve conflict, through sharing of thinking and objectives, to a degree of self-understanding and an awareness of one another's needs. (Author/JB)

Results of this experiment demonstrate that brief, even fleeting, affective experiences appear to have significant implications for behavior toward others. The transient experience of positive affect makes children more generous to others, while the equally ephemeral experience of negative affect appears to make them more niggardly. (Authors)

This bibliography is designed to offer assistance and guidance to those educators who are beginning to focus more attention on the non-academic aspects of a child's growth in school and who are introducing new courses and activities to enhance positive self-concept, increase achievement motivation, promote creative thinking and behavior, and…

An attributional approach to social behavior traces problems in personal adjustment back to the assumptions individuals formulate about the causes of behaviors and events. Attributional information presented during counseling may have therapeutically beneficial consequences. The effectiveness of attribution therapy was investigated in a factorial…

Provides guidelines and examples of ways preschool teachers can use fairy tales to help children understand their lives. (BB)

The activities and experiences suggested in this guideline are organized into units of work, or topics, which are sequences designed to last for some weeks. The units are intended to add to the secondary school program certain fields of instruction that are important to the development of today's students. The guide is in three sections. The…

Situations in which sighted people behaved inappropiately toward blind individuals were recalled by 60 blind subjects, who described their reactions and feelings and offered suggestions for sighted people. A lack of knowledge and understanding of the skills, abilities, and feelings of visually impaired individuals were revealed. (SEW)

This digest discusses factors associated with the acceptance and rejection of preschool children by their peers and offers a number of strategies that teachers and other adults can use in their attempts to help children achieve social acceptance. Behaviors and characteristics associated with peer rejection include aggression and misinterpretation…