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Does helping promote well-being in at-risk youth and ex-offender samples?
Abstract
Numerous theories attempt to explain humans' extraordinary prosociality, but predictions are rarely tested among antisocial individuals, whose dampened concern for others offers a particularly strong test of general-izability for prosocial action. To build upon past research demonstrating the emotional benefits of prosociality among non-offending populations and broaden our understanding of how far this relationship may extend, we examined whether the emotional benefits of prosocial spending are detectable in samples of delinquent youth and recent criminal offenders reporting elevated antisocial tendencies and psychopathic personality features. Findings reveal that, controlling for baseline happiness, ex-offenders (N = 501) report greater positive affect after recalling a time they spent money on others than after recalling a time they spent money on themselves. Similarly, delinquent youth (N = 64) and ex-offenders (N = 777) randomly assigned to purchase an item for a needy child reported greater positive affect than those who purchased an item for themselves. Finally, a large pre-registered replication (N = 1295) suggests the immediate emotional benefits of prosocial spending are detectable among ex-offenders when controlling for baseline happiness. Together, these findings demonstrate the emotional rewards of recalled and immediate acts of giving in a new and theoretically relevant population. Humans are considered one of the most prosocial species on the planet and recent research suggests that most people feel good after helping others (Aknin, Barrington-Leigh et al.
... On the other hand, a large and growing body of research suggests that the emotional reward of prosocial behavior are robust and detectable in a range of contexts. For example, prosocial behavior has been shown to increase positive affect in rich and poor countries around the globe (Aknin et al., 2013), in small-scale, rural societies (Aknin et al., 2015), in young children (Aknin et al., 2012), and among exoffenders reporting elevated levels of antisocial tendencies (Hanniball et al., 2019). Building on this evidence, we hypothesized that prosocial behavior could enhance emotional well-being, even during an ongoing pandemic when social isolation and mental stress are prevalent (Tull et al., 2020). ...
... (one-tailed tests given our directional hypotheses). Our effect size estimate of d = .25 was informed by previous preregistered studies using a similar paradigm Hanniball et al., 2019;ds = .36, .15), ...
... Following baseline affect ratings, participants were told that they had received a 5 cent voucher that they could use in an upcoming task. Using an adapted version of the online goody bag paradigm from Hanniball et al. (2019), participants were randomly assigned to either a prosocial or a non-pro-social control condition. In the prosocial condition, participants read about two U.S. charities: Direct Relief, an organization that provides frontline health workers with medical resources (e.g., protective masks, exam gloves and isolation gowns) to protect them from COVID-19; and No Kid Hungry, an organization that provides free meals to children when schools are closed due to COVID-19. ...
The COVID-19 pandemic has raised concerns about humans' physical and mental well-being. In response, there has been an urgent "call to action" for psychological interventions that enhance positive emotion and psychological resilience. Prosocial behavior has been shown to effectively promote well-being, but is this strategy effective during a pandemic when ongoing apprehension for personal safety could acutely heighten self-focused concern? In two online preregistered experiments (N = 1,623) conducted during the early stage of pandemic (April 2020), we examined this question by randomly assigning participants to engage in other- or self-beneficial action. For the first time, we manipulated whether prosocial behavior was related to the source of stress (coronavirus disease 2019 [COVID-19]): Participants purchased COVID-19-related (personal protective equipment, PPE) or COVID-19-unrelated items (food/writing supplies) for themselves or someone else. Consistent with preregistered hypotheses, prosocial (vs. non-pro-social or proself) behavior led to higher levels of self-reported positive affect, empathy, and social connectedness. Notably, we also found that psychological benefits were larger when generous acts were unrelated to COVID-19 (vs. related to COVID-19). When prosocial and proself spending involved identical COVID-19 PPEs items, prosocial behavior's benefits were detectable only on empathy and social connectedness, but not on posttask positive affect. These findings suggest that while there are boundary conditions to be considered, generous action offers one strategy to bolster well-being during the pandemic. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).
... On the other hand, a large and growing body of research suggests that the emotional reward of prosocial behavior are robust and detectable in a range of contexts. For example, prosocial behavior has been shown to increase positive affect in rich and poor countries around the globe (Aknin et al., 2013), in small-scale, rural societies (Aknin et al., 2015), in young children (Aknin et al., 2012), and among exoffenders reporting elevated levels of antisocial tendencies (Hanniball et al., 2019). Building on this evidence, we hypothesized that prosocial behavior could enhance emotional well-being, even during an ongoing pandemic when social isolation and mental stress are prevalent (Tull et al., 2020). ...
... (one-tailed tests given our directional hypotheses). Our effect size estimate of d = .25 was informed by previous preregistered studies using a similar paradigm Hanniball et al., 2019;ds = .36, .15), ...
... Following baseline affect ratings, participants were told that they had received a 5 cent voucher that they could use in an upcoming task. Using an adapted version of the online goody bag paradigm from Hanniball et al. (2019), participants were randomly assigned to either a prosocial or a non-pro-social control condition. In the prosocial condition, participants read about two U.S. charities: Direct Relief, an organization that provides frontline health workers with medical resources (e.g., protective masks, exam gloves and isolation gowns) to protect them from COVID-19; and No Kid Hungry, an organization that provides free meals to children when schools are closed due to COVID-19. ...
The COVID-19 pandemic has raised concerns about humans’ physical and mental well-being. In response, there has been an urgent “call to action” for psychological interventions that enhance positive emotion and psychological resilience. Prosocial behavior has been shown to effectively promote well-being, but is this strategy effective during a pandemic when ongoing apprehension for personal safety could acutely heighten self-focused concern? In two online pre-registered experiments (N =1,623) conducted during the early stage of pandemic (April 2020), we examined this question by randomly assigning participants to engage in other- or self-beneficial action. For the first time, we manipulated whether prosocial behavior was related to the source of stress (COVID-19): participants purchased COVID-19-related (personal protective equipment, PPE) or COVID-19-unrelated items (food/writing supplies) for themselves or someone else. Consistent with pre-registered hypotheses, prosocial (vs. non-prosocial or proself) behavior led to higher levels of self-reported positive affect, empathy and social connectedness. Notably, we also found that psychological benefits were larger when generous acts were unrelated to COVID-19 (vs. related to COVID-19). When prosocial and proself spending involved identical COVID-19 PPEs items, prosocial behavior’s benefits were detectable only on empathy and social connectedness, but not on post-task positive affect. These findings suggest that while there are boundary conditions to be considered, generous action offers one strategy to bolster well-being during the pandemic.
... To conduct an even more stringent test of this idea by examining a population in which this effect should be difficult to detect, we studied people who report marked levels of disregard for others and have committed a felony-level offense within the past 5 years, such as murder, rape, robbery, domestic violence, or theft over $5000 (Hanniball, Aknin, Douglas, & Viljoen, 2019, Study 1). Using this sample (recruited online), we conducted a conceptual replication of our previous recollection study. ...
... In our oft-used goody bag paradigm, participants spent just $2.50 CAD (which they earned for completing a survey), and in one online study, participants donated just $1 CAD (Hanniball et al., 2019). Still, in studies in which participants have been allowed to choose how much money to give away, we typically see that giving more money leads to experiencing more happiness (Aknin, Dunn, Sandstrom, et al., 2013;Aknin, Dunn, Whillans, et al., 2013, Study 1;Dunn et al., 2008, Study 1;Dunn, Ashton-James, Hanson, & Aknin, 2010). ...
... For example, after spending $5 or $20 on other people, individuals experienced greater positive mood than after spending $5 or $20 on themselves (Dunn et al., 2008). The positive mood benefits of prosocial spending have also been documented in rich and poor countries, small-scale traditional societies, antisocial populations, and for toddlers under the age of 2 Aknin, Broesch, Hamlin, & Van de Vondervoort, 2015;Aknin, Hamlin, & Dunn, 2012;Hanniball, Aknin, Douglas, & Viljoen, 2018). ...
... We should note that the results that we observed between prosocial spending and positive mood were small. The effect sizes that we documented were slightly smaller yet consistent with past published research in this area (see Hanniball, Aknin, Douglas, & Viljoen, 2018 for an overview). The effect sizes that we observed in this tightly controlled experiment are consistent with the diminutive effects that are often observed between small actions and the multiply determined construct of well-being (see : Fredrickson, 2001;Lyubomirsky et al., 2005). ...
Who benefits most from helping others? Previous research suggests that common polymorphisms of the oxytocin receptor gene (OXTR) predict whether people behave generously and experience increases in positive mood in response to socially focused experiences in daily life. Building on these findings, we conducted an experiment with a large, ethnically homogenous sample (N = 437) to examine whether individual differences in three frequently studied single nucleotide polymorphisms of OXTR (rs53576, rs2268498, rs2254298) also predict differences in the positive mood benefits of financial generosity. Consistent with past research, participants who were randomly assigned to purchase items for others (vs. themselves) reported greater positive affect. Contrary to predictions, using Bayesian statistics, we found conclusive evidence that the benefits of generosity were not moderated by individual differences in OXTR single nucleotide polymorphisms. The current work highlights the importance of publishing null results to build cumulative knowledge linking neurobiological factors to positive emotional experiences.
... In the offending population, it has been observed that interventions that seek to promote well-being, e.g., by setting goals and objectives, can contribute to a decrease in negative affect and an increase in positive affect and mental health (Ferguson et al., 2009). Incentivizing altruism and prosocial behavior can also help emotional rewards and positive affect (Hanniball et al., 2019). ...
In psychology, subjective well-being can be assessed mainly from two approaches: hedonic and eudaimonic. Hedonic well-being refers to life satisfaction and positive and negative affect, and eudaimonic well-being refers to the search for meaning and good living. The Positive and Negative Experiences Scale (SPANE) assesses the frequency of different emotional responses and measures hedonic well-being. This study aimed to analyze the psychometric properties of the SPANE in a sample of Colombian adolescents belonging to the Criminal Responsibility System. The sample consisted of 776 participants (M = 16.28, SD = 1.08, females = 24.2%). Reliability analysis and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) were performed. Construct validity was assessed by correlations between the SPANE and mood, emotional intelligence, and prosocial behavior measures. Through linear regressions, predictive validity was assessed; positive and negative experiences were used as predictor variables for life satisfaction and emotional symptoms of depression, anxiety, and stress. The results corroborated the two dimensions of the original scale. The reliability of the subscales presented values above .80, and the goodness-of-fit indices of the FCA were adequate (X2 (1,53) = 224.79, IFI = 94, TLI = .95, CFI = .95, RMSEA = .065 CI90% (.056, .074); also, invariance by gender was observed. The relationship of the SPANE subscales with emotional states, emotional intelligence, and emotional symptoms was evidenced. It was also observed that Positive and Negative Experiences predict life satisfaction and depression, anxiety, and stress symptoms. In conclusion, satisfactory reliability, factorial, construct, and criterion validity were evidenced. The observed results indicate that the SPANE may be useful in assessing adolescent offenders’ positive and negative emotional experiences. It is suggested to conduct verifications in larger samples and with different populations.
... The benefits of helping appear to extend to criminal offending populations as well. For example, Hanniball et al. (2019) found that both delinquent youth and adult exoffenders who were randomized to a prosocial helping condition reported greater positive affect compared with those assigned to a personal benefit condition. Another qualitative study found that incarcerated adults who were assigned to act as caretakers for inmates with mental or physical impairments showed improved relationships with prison staff and reduced levels of self-reported violent or aggressive behaviors. ...
In U.S. schools, disruptive behavior is by far the primary reason for disciplinary referrals, including suspensions and expulsions. School-based interventions targeting disruptive behavior usually position struggling youth as treatment recipients and neglect the psychosocial benefits of helping others. In this mixed methods pilot study, we evaluate the preliminary feasibility and acceptability of Peer Coach Training (PCT), a novel, school-based intervention for youth referred for disruptive behavior that deemphasizes the youth’s existing problems and focuses instead on training youth to help their peers. We used quantitative and qualitative methods to evaluate the feasibility and acceptability of PCT on two cohorts of disruptive youth (N = 9) in an urban middle school in Southern California. Youth and teachers completed assessments at baseline, post-treatment, and three-month follow-up. At posttreatment and follow-up, youth reported significant reductions in externalizing problems, as well as reductions in conduct problems, attention problems, and aggressive behavior; in contrast, teacher ratings yielded null findings. Qualitative interviews revealed that youth and teachers observed positive changes in peer interactions, self-confidence, and classroom participation efforts. Youth satisfaction data indicated that youth enjoyed participating in PCT and would highly recommend it to their friends. Results from this pilot evaluation suggest that training youth to help their peers is an appealing, feasible, and promising strategy for reducing disruptive behavior, however, controlled trials are needed to provide evidence for treatment efficacy.
... • The effects were found in a sample of delinquent youths, as well as exoffenders and toddlers (Hanniball et al., 2019). • The effects were found whether it concerned money that was presented as a bonus or whether individuals had to work for it themselves (Geenen et al., 2014). ...
The second chapter is targeted at readers who wish to know what matters for subjective wellbeing, and in particular for those who wish to design policies in order to improve it. It begins with an extensive discussion on the direct measurement of wellbeing, covering both prevalent current measures and promising future measures, after which it presents some key findings and rules of thumb on what influences wellbeing. It then organizes the wellbeing lessons for governments by discussing the relation between wellbeing and four areas where government is very active: the provision of basic comforts, the regulation and production of experience goods and skills, the importance of status concerns, and social identities. This come with rules of thumb on how to recognize possible improvements and some indication as to what would be good value for money in terms of interventions. This chapter also discusses frameworks of wellbeing to aid appraisals, evaluations, and overall policy thinking in different areas. It presents a mental framework that embeds wellbeing into the whole economy (a capital framework) and then apply the theories and general framework to mental health and relationship-type interventions. The chapter ends with a taxonomy of thinking about wellbeing in government departments, including departments directly oriented towards some aspect of wellbeing (like health) and others that are oriented towards enabling the government to function (like tax authorities) or towards identity (like culture).
... Even young children under the age of two smile more when giving treats away to others than when receiving treats themselves (Aknin et al., 2012). Finally, new evidence suggests that gang-involved youth and felony level ex-offenders also experience greater joy from giving than buying for themselves (Hanniball et al., 2019). ...
This open access book presents a novel multidisciplinary perspective on the importance of human flourishing. The study of the good life or Eudaimonia has been a central concern at least since Aristotelian times. This responds to the common experience that we all seek happiness. Today, we are immersed in a new paradoxical boom, where the pursuit of happiness seems to permeate everything (books, media, organizations, talks), but at the same time, it is nowhere, or at least very difficult to achieve. In fact, it is not easy to even find a consensus regarding the meaning of the word happiness. Seligman (2011), one of the fathers of the positive psychology, confirmed that his original view the meaning he referred to was close to that of Aristotle. But, he recently confessed that he now detests the word happiness, since it is overused and has become almost meaningless.The aim of this open access book is to shed new light on human flourishing through the lenses of neurosciences and health, organizations, and arts. The novelty of this book is to offer a multi-disciplinary perspective on the importance of human flourishing in our lives. The book will examine further how different initiatives, policies and practices create opportunities for generating human flourishing.
... Even young children under the age of two smile more when giving treats away to others than when receiving treats themselves (Aknin et al., 2012). Finally, new evidence suggests that gang-involved youth and felony level ex-offenders also experience greater joy from giving than buying for themselves (Hanniball et al., 2019). ...
In this chapter, we examine the association between forgiveness and flourishing. We begin by identifying what forgiveness and flourishing are. We then move to considering conceptual models as well as evidence supporting the connection between forgiveness and flourishing. An early model of the forgiveness and mental health relationship offers a beginning in this regard. Next, we examine the stress-and-coping models of forgiveness of oneself and others. The final model is the scaffolding self and social systems model of forgiveness and subjective well-being. These models offer multiple vantage points from which to consider the forgiveness-flourishing connection. Limitations to these models and to the current state of knowledge on forgiveness and flourishing are highlighted, especially the limits to comprehensive assessment of flourishing in the extant literature. Conclusions and future directions for studying and promoting flourishing in people of different religious affiliation, cultures, countries, and life-circumstances are discussed in closing.
... Even young children under the age of two smile more when giving treats away to others than when receiving treats themselves (Aknin et al., 2012). Finally, new evidence suggests that gang-involved youth and felony level ex-offenders also experience greater joy from giving than buying for themselves (Hanniball et al., 2019). ...
This chapter attempts to connect fatherhood involvement with human flourishing. We begin by presenting to the reader the reasons why fatherhood involvement matters. We then review fatherhood as a transformative event, together with the barriers that may limit the transformational aspect of fatherhood. Next, we review the concept of generativity, and a new definition of paternal generativity is also provided. Then, we present a model that connects fatherhood to human flourishing, partially explained by the role of paternal generativity and relational flourishing. Finally, the chapter ends with implications for researchers, organizations, and governments.
... Even young children under the age of two smile more when giving treats away to others than when receiving treats themselves (Aknin et al., 2012). Finally, new evidence suggests that gang-involved youth and felony level ex-offenders also experience greater joy from giving than buying for themselves (Hanniball et al., 2019). ...
To establish a “neuroscience of flourishing” one must first boil down its definition to only feature psychological concepts and then build a definition based on what the brain does. The “trait” perspective treats flourishing as a trait of the person that is reflected by forms of brain structure and/or patterns of neural functioning. The “behavioral” perspective emphasizes the brain as doing the behaviors that flourishing people do. I spend more time fleshing out the “belief” perspective, which is the brain’s representions of ‘having flourishing. In particular, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) forms these flourishing beliefs by generating positive evaluations of life circumstances (e.g., life satisfaction), the self (e.g., self-esteem), relationships (e.g., relationship satisfaction), and goal progress (e.g., purpose). This “belief” neuroscientific perspective on flourishing is parsimonious, helps explain the overlapping yet distinct features of hedonic and eudaimonic flourishing, and forms the basis for neurologically constrained psychological models of flourishing.
... Even young children under the age of two smile more when giving treats away to others than when receiving treats themselves (Aknin et al., 2012). Finally, new evidence suggests that gang-involved youth and felony level ex-offenders also experience greater joy from giving than buying for themselves (Hanniball et al., 2019). ...
Work and family are two domains of human life that are closely interconnected. For that reason, job resources can potentially contribute to have a better non-work life domain. The purpose of this research is to study how contextual resources, such as spouse behavior at home, can foster human flourishing through spill crossover, resulting in enriched outcomes in the work and home domain. We explore how support for work received from the spouse can lead to the generation of resources such as creativity, self-efficacy and strategic renewal. This chapter contributes to the work and family literature by introducing the concept of work supportive spouse behavior (WSSB), defined as behaviors exhibited by spouses that are supportive of their partner’s role in the workplace—this concept mirrors the family supportive supervisor behavior (FSSB) that denotes behaviors by supervisors that favor their employees’ role as family members.
... Even young children under the age of two smile more when giving treats away to others than when receiving treats themselves (Aknin et al., 2012). Finally, new evidence suggests that gang-involved youth and felony level ex-offenders also experience greater joy from giving than buying for themselves (Hanniball et al., 2019). ...
Eudaimonic well-being builds on the writings of Aristotle and integrates contemporary theories of positive psychological functioning. The empirically operationalization is detailed, emphasizing the importance of rigorous psychometric evaluation. Scientific advances of this model of well-being are noted, showing links to sociodemographic factors, experiences in work and family life, and health outcomes. Three future directions for research are considered. The first addresses growing problems of socioeconomic inequality and their role in undermining the opportunities of disadvantaged segments of society to experience eudaimonia. These problems have now been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, which has disproportionately impacted those who were already vulnerable. The second new direction examines the role of the arts and humanities as factors that nurture eudaimonic well-being. Whether the arts can activate needed compassion and caring among the privileged is also considered. The third new direction examines the intersection of entrepreneurial studies with eudaimonic well-being. Conventional conceptions of entrepreneurial success focus on business profits; a case is made that eudaimonia, of the entrepreneur as well as his/her employees and surrounding communities, constitute further measure of success that elevate issues of virtue, morality, and ethics.
... Even young children under the age of two smile more when giving treats away to others than when receiving treats themselves (Aknin et al., 2012). Finally, new evidence suggests that gang-involved youth and felony level ex-offenders also experience greater joy from giving than buying for themselves (Hanniball et al., 2019). ...
The great architect Antoni Gaudí i Cornet (1852–1926) is one of the shining lights of humanity on its path to social and individual perfection.
Through his works, his life, and his teaching to his disciples and collaborators, we can easily describe a real form of human flourishing. Millions of people from every corner of the world are interested in the works of Gaudí and the positive impact it has on humanity.
In this chapter, first we discuss human flourishing in the life and the teachings to his disciples of Gaudí, how Antoni Gaudí achieved his own flourishing; secondly, we indagate about how his art works are contributing to the flourishing of millions of human beings and, finally, we illustrate our opinions with three examples of Gaudí’s works which demonstrate to others ways to flourish themselves.
... Even young children under the age of two smile more when giving treats away to others than when receiving treats themselves (Aknin et al., 2012). Finally, new evidence suggests that gang-involved youth and felony level ex-offenders also experience greater joy from giving than buying for themselves (Hanniball et al., 2019). ...
Human flourishing has been defined as a subjective and holistic sentiment related to growth, prosperity, fulfillment, and sense of life completeness. This definition may lead to think that human flourishing is unique to people living under privileged circumstances of health and well-being, whereas people with life limiting illnesses are deprived from this possibility.
In this paper, we reflect on the idea of human flourishing in the context of palliative care. Although people with advanced illnesses experience in a special manner the limits of human life and vulnerability, and the final stages may inevitably imply considerable suffering, we argue that it is also possible to experience this final stage as an opportunity for personal growth, to live it in full accordance with one's beliefs and values, and to reestablish a profound connection to oneself and to others. In sum, the end of life may also be a time of human flourishing.
... Even young children under the age of two smile more when giving treats away to others than when receiving treats themselves (Aknin et al., 2012). Finally, new evidence suggests that gang-involved youth and felony level ex-offenders also experience greater joy from giving than buying for themselves (Hanniball et al., 2019). ...
We tend to think of flourishing as a place we get to, where we have arrived, but often do not see that act of change itself is a core facet of what it means to flourish. Indeed, we argue that flourishing is in fact our ability to change and adapt rather than a state that we are striving for. This points to human flourishing requiring an ‘adaptive’ approach to manage change: supporting careful navigation, negotiation and trade-offs. On this basis we need to identify the barriers that get in the way of enacting these possibilities and as such organisations and institutions that seeks to facilitate behaviour change will lean on barrier identification as well identifying ways to overcome them thought educating, assisting and facilitating. Using a behaviour change framework to identify the mechanisms shaping behaviour can help to identify ways to overcome barriers and facilitate positive outcomes.
... Even young children under the age of two smile more when giving treats away to others than when receiving treats themselves (Aknin et al., 2012). Finally, new evidence suggests that gang-involved youth and felony level ex-offenders also experience greater joy from giving than buying for themselves (Hanniball et al., 2019). ...
Governments should help citizens thrive, not merely survive. Doing so means alleviating stress and addressing mental illness, as well as amplifying positive experiences and emotions that allow humans to blossom and grow. But what factors support human flourishing? In this chapter, I challenge early pessimistic views of human nature as purely selfish by summarizing evidence demonstrating that humans are social and prosocial beings. Critically, I discuss how social and prosocial behavior have been repeatedly shown to promote well-being, a finding that aligns with numerous theories espousing that meaningful social connections are the essential feature to human flourishing (Ryff and Singer, Personality and Social Psychology Review 4(1):30–44, 2000). Using these insights, I suggest that institutions should revise their policies to mirror and inspire human proclivities to connect and care.
... Even young children under the age of two smile more when giving treats away to others than when receiving treats themselves (Aknin et al., 2012). Finally, new evidence suggests that gang-involved youth and felony level ex-offenders also experience greater joy from giving than buying for themselves (Hanniball et al., 2019). ...
Human flourishing is a complete state of well-being, comprised of essential elements that are universally valued across cultures as ends in themselves rather than as means to ends. Understanding the ontological interconnectedness of individual and communal flourishing has important implications for health. A narrow view of health has been framed in biomedical—and frequently physical—terms as the absence of disease or impairment. But broader and more holistic understandings derived from long-standing wisdom in the humanities are increasingly being used in tandem with the allopathic approach, thereby offering a relational understanding of health that transcends a focus on physical infirmity and locates the individual in social, ecological, and spiritual contexts. This wisdom has profound implications for the organization of healthcare, including a restoration of compassion as the heart of healthcare practice, as recent iterations of lifestyle medicine and integrative medicine have demonstrated. A synthesis of interdisciplinary knowledge affirms the goal of building a wellbeing ecosystem that transcends self-centeredness and reimagines health as flourishing.
... Even young children under the age of two smile more when giving treats away to others than when receiving treats themselves (Aknin et al., 2012). Finally, new evidence suggests that gang-involved youth and felony level ex-offenders also experience greater joy from giving than buying for themselves (Hanniball et al., 2019). ...
This chapter concerns how artificial agents can be used to bolster moral emotions like compassion that are linked to well-being. While technology-based interventions for well-being are plentiful, e.g., wellness apps, two critical components for flourishing in the twenty-first century are currently overlooked: (1) promoting moral emotions , e.g., gratitude, that relies on complex emotional experiences rather than simple negative or positive affect, and (2) using conversational agents , e.g., chatbots, rather than other technological interventions, e.g., mobile apps, which reframes well-being interventions as conversations . We look into gratitude and compassion as specific moral emotions that can be fostered by talking with technology rather than clicking through technology. This extends our relations of care to include artificial agents, in which we explore flourishing along with (not despite) technology in a new light.
... Even young children under the age of two smile more when giving treats away to others than when receiving treats themselves (Aknin et al., 2012). Finally, new evidence suggests that gang-involved youth and felony level ex-offenders also experience greater joy from giving than buying for themselves (Hanniball et al., 2019). ...
One of the clearest manifestations of a flourishing life is manifested in the positive impact one projects on society, in the sense of making other lives flourish. Cristóbal Balenciaga is a paradigm of a flourishing life in the fields of creation and education within fashion. This article explains his professional achievements from a doble perspective, artistic and entrepreneurial, and his contribution to the flourishing of clients, workers, and even the fashion of future generations. The legacy of Balenciaga show that human flourishing may be considered as the result of a creative process, for which setting goals, audacity, resilience and consistency are required. When these capacities are put into practice they transcend the improvement of the personal well being to create an expansive mechanism that generates flourishing societies.
... Even young children under the age of two smile more when giving treats away to others than when receiving treats themselves (Aknin et al., 2012). Finally, new evidence suggests that gang-involved youth and felony level ex-offenders also experience greater joy from giving than buying for themselves (Hanniball et al., 2019). ...
Wellbeing and flourishing are two interconnected concepts. Usually both are studied from just one discipline. In this book we combine research from academics look to combine the evidence on how flourishing has an impact and is influenced by health, art, entrepreneurship, and work life, among other factors. These influences and impact can be categorized in three groups. First, the interconnection with the self that is how we construction the image of ourselves impacts how we interpret and perceive different stimuli or experiences, and this has an impact on our flourishing. Second, the interconnection with others impacts the relationship we build with them, and this relationship impacts our flourishing. Finally, the interconnection with the environment shows us that being aware of the impact that our behaviors and traditions the environment can foster behaviors and changes that look to promote flourishing.
... Even young children under the age of two smile more when giving treats away to others than when receiving treats themselves (Aknin et al., 2012). Finally, new evidence suggests that gang-involved youth and felony level ex-offenders also experience greater joy from giving than buying for themselves (Hanniball et al., 2019). ...
Travel Literature can be a way of approaching eudaimonia and an interdisciplinary meeting point. When travelling, the individual is exposed to a multiple encounter experience. On the other hand, travelling is an intergenerational experience, and it will be increasingly so. From this perspective, it is possible to enrich studies by focusing on tourism and globalization, but also on relationships with technology. It is also possible, from this angle, to open new ways of developing new narratives that deepen in the encounter with oneself, with other cultures and that define new values in an ethics of human flourishing. The attempt to synthetize Travel Literature, an “elusive genre”, does not only contribute to sort out a tenuous typology, but also evidences the need to keep thinking about two fundamental dimensions of human existence; the dimension of circumstance, and the dimension of imagination.
... Even young children under the age of two smile more when giving treats away to others than when receiving treats themselves (Aknin et al., 2012). Finally, new evidence suggests that gang-involved youth and felony level ex-offenders also experience greater joy from giving than buying for themselves (Hanniball et al., 2019). ...
The study of the good life or Eudaimonia h as been a central concern for academics and philosophers, as well as for many people, at least since Aristotelian times. This responds to the common experience that we all seek happiness. Today, we are witnessing a new paradoxical boom. The pursuit of happiness seems to permeate everything (i.e., books, media, organizations, talks), without reducing, or in some cases even increasing, the numbers of suicides, depression, and similar pathological consequences of anxiety and stress.
... Accordingly, some studies that reported social decision-making regarding psychopathy used psychopathy measures to confirm the higher antisociality level of an offender sample compared with a sample of community or student controls (da Cunha-Bang et al., 2017;Hanniball et al., 2019;Mayer et al., 2018Mayer et al., , 2019Scheeff et al., 2018;Tonnaer et al., 2016). But even though psychopathy resembles the antisocial personality disorder (Baskin-Sommers, 2016), studies that include both behavioral and neural measures have stated important differences in underlying cognitive and emotional mechanisms as well as etiological origins in these constructs (for an overview, see . ...
Despite their decisions to frequently manipulate or even callously harm others in real life, highly psychopathic individuals often exhibit judgments comparable to individuals low in psychopathy when examined experimentally. This conundrum has generated a rich body of studies exploring social decision-making in psychopathy, but no systematic review to date has identified decision-making as measured in real-world or simulated social interactions in criminal offender samples assessed for psychopathic traits. Out of 807 studies provided by database searching in August 2022, 16 studies were included in this review and revealed behavioral economic games and paradigms for the assessment of aggressive behavior as the two main approaches to dissect social decision-making in offender samples regarding psychopathy. The specific paradigms exposed the multidimensional structure of both, the psychopathy construct and social decision-making. On one side, the distinct affordances of the social tasks, such as trust, power, or reactions to unfairness and provocation shed light on the inconsistent relations of decisions in experimental situations and psychopathy. On the other side, studies analyzing decision outcomes with respect to the distinct psychopathy subcomponents revealed nuanced interference effects with the social decision tasks. The review encourages a differentiated perspective to the psychopathy construct and social decision-making processes alike.
... In fact, recent research examining the emotional rewards of generosity in antisocial actors, including gang-involved youth and ex-offenders, further supports the reach and generalizability of these findings. In a series of four studies (N = 2,637), including a pre-registered experiment with nearly 1,300 participants, prosocial spending led to higher levels of happiness than spending on oneself in samples reporting elevated antisocial tendencies (Hanniball et al., 2019). ...
People frequently spend money on others and research shows that such prosocial spending often promotes the benefactor’s happiness, even sometimes when reflecting upon past prosocial purchases. But on whom and what do people generally spend their money? And what features of prosocial spending memories are associated with greater post-recall happiness? In a pre-registered examination, human coders and a text analysis software coded over 2,500 prosocial spending recollections for information regarding the target, content, and presence of five theoretically motivated dimensions: affiliation, volition, impact, authenticity, and level of detail. Exploratory analyses revealed that people often recalled buying gifts or food and typically spent money on significant others, friends, or children. Consistent with the pre-registered hypotheses, higher levels of volition and impact were associated with greater post-recall happiness (rs: .05 – .07), controlling for pre-recall happiness. However, in contrast to the pre-registered hypotheses, affiliation, authenticity, and level of detail did not predict greater happiness. These findings illuminate some key characteristics of prosocial purchases and the most rewarding features of people’s prosocial spending recollections.
... Furthermore, prototypicality research with the CAPP-LRS has allowed evaluation of the 33 primary CAPP symptoms with respect to their relevance and centrality for the psychopathy construct, with results suggesting that forensic mental health experts and community members alike rate the majority of CAPP symptoms as highly prototypical of psychopathy Kreis et al., 2012). 1 These findings have been found to hold relatively consistently across gender, age, and several language groups Hoff et al., 2014;Kreis & Cooke, 2011;Sörman et al., 2014), suggesting that the CAPP model may be less biased than other existing conceptualizations of psychopathic personality. In addition to conceptual and content-based evaluations, studies examining the reliability, adequacy, and psychometric properties of CAPP instruments have suggested these measures exhibit moderate to high levels of internal consistency across several relevant populations and have demonstrated sound convergent validity with other established measures of psychopathic personality (Dawson et al., 2012;Hanniball et al., 2018Hanniball et al., , 2019Pedersen et al., 2010;Sandvik et al., 2012;Sellbom et al., 2015). From a structural perspective, most research with the CAPP model has favored a threefactor solution over the originally proposed six-factor model (Hanniball et al., 2020;Sellbom et al., 2015); findings which hold constant when tested in diverse cultures . ...
The Comprehensive Assessment of Psychopathic Personality–Lexical Rating Scale (CAPP-LRS) is a self-report instrument designed to index psychopathy according to the CAPP psychopathy framework. Developed with the expressed goal of advancing the state of knowledge regarding the specific features of psychopathy, the CAPP model and associated
instruments have garnered increasing attention and support in the field. Despite the conceptual strength of the CAPP model, the advanced lexical structure of its primary research tool (the CAPP-LRS) has led researchers to question the utility of the instrument for use with some populations of interest (e.g., forensic/correctional and adolescent/young adult samples). The aim of the present work was to address this issue by creating a lexically simplified, though functionally equivalent, version of the CAPP-LRS to increase accessibility to critically relevant populations. A set of two studies (N = 602) describes the adaptation protocol and the initial validation of the modified instrument.
... Furthermore, prototypicality research with the CAPP-LRS has allowed evaluation of the 33 primary CAPP symptoms with respect to their relevance and centrality for the psychopathy construct, with results suggesting that forensic mental health experts and community members alike rate the majority of CAPP symptoms as highly prototypical of psychopathy Kreis et al., 2012). 1 These findings have been found to hold relatively consistently across gender, age, and several language groups Hoff et al., 2014;Kreis & Cooke, 2011;Sörman et al., 2014), suggesting that the CAPP model may be less biased than other existing conceptualizations of psychopathic personality. In addition to conceptual and content-based evaluations, studies examining the reliability, adequacy, and psychometric properties of CAPP instruments have suggested these measures exhibit moderate to high levels of internal consistency across several relevant populations and have demonstrated sound convergent validity with other established measures of psychopathic personality (Dawson et al., 2012;Hanniball et al., 2018Hanniball et al., , 2019Pedersen et al., 2010;Sandvik et al., 2012;Sellbom et al., 2015). From a structural perspective, most research with the CAPP model has favored a threefactor solution over the originally proposed six-factor model (Hanniball et al., 2020;Sellbom et al., 2015); findings which hold constant when tested in diverse cultures . ...
The Comprehensive Assessment of Psychopathic Personality–Lexical Rating Scale (CAPP-LRS) is a self-report instrument designed to index psychopathy according to the CAPP psychopathy framework. Developed with the expressed goal of advancing the state of knowledge regarding the specific features of psychopathy, the CAPP model and associated instruments have garnered increasing attention and support in the field. Despite the conceptual strength of the CAPP model, the advanced lexical structure of its primary research tool (the CAPP-LRS) has led researchers to question the utility of the instrument for use with some populations of interest (e.g., forensic/correctional and adolescent/young adult samples). The aim of the present work was to address this issue by creating a lexically simplified, though functionally equivalent, version of the CAPP-LRS to increase accessibility to critically relevant populations. A set of two studies ( N = 602) describes the adaptation protocol and the initial validation of the modified instrument.
... The first, helping others, is the primary purpose of the 12-step programs and is underscored in Tradition five, "Each group has but one primary purpose-to carry its message to the alcoholic who still suffers." Supported by a substantial scientific literature, personal well-being is enhanced by helping behaviors [46][47][48][49], and 12-step mutual aid recovery is founded on the principle of service. A common evidence-based practice for SUDs, contingency management [50], where rewards and incentives are provided to help reinforce abstinence and other health promoting behaviors, is exemplified in nearly every 12-step meeting. ...
Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) is the longest-running mutual aid group for people with alcohol use disorders, and AA turned 85 years old in 2020. Though there has been much criticism regarding AA and other 12-step programs, there has been an equal amount of evidence to support their efficacy. This chapter explores the history of AA and other 12-step approaches, the foundational philosophy of the 12-steps, the key elements that support recovery, cultural considerations for special populations, and a review of the criticisms as well as strengths of 12-step approaches. The chapter concludes with recommendations for the integration of the approach into clinical practice.
... For example, having social capital and enough income [57] can support wellbeing. From a personal perspective, altruism or volunteering [32,58] and adapting to your own needs for wellbeing and your life circumstances [29] have all been identified as antecedents to wellbeing. Antecedents to low levels of wellbeing (i.e., languishing) may also be resources and contextual factors-for example, family and work variables and life stressors [32,59], limited resources [32], and lack of social engagement [60,61]. ...
Children with impairments are known to experience more restricted participation than other children. It also appears that low levels of participation are related to a higher prevalence of mental health problems in children with neurodevelopmental disorders (NDD). The purpose of this conceptual paper is to describe and define the constructs mental health problems, mental health, and participation to ensure that future research investigating participation as a means to mental health in children and adolescents with NDD is founded on conceptual clarity. We first discuss the difference between two aspects of mental health problems, namely mental disorder and mental illness. This discussion serves to highlight three areas of conceptual difficulty and their consequences for understanding the mental health of children with NDD that we then consider in the article: (1) how to define mental health problems, (2) how to define and assess mental health problems and mental health, i.e., wellbeing as separate constructs, and (3) how to describe the relationship between participation and wellbeing. We then discuss the implications of our propositions for measurement and the use of participation interventions as a means to enhance mental health (defined as wellbeing). Conclusions: Mental disorders include both diagnoses related to impairments in the developmental period, i.e., NDD and diagnoses related to mental illness. These two types of mental disorders must be separated. Children with NDD, just like other people, may exhibit aspects of both mental health problems and wellbeing simultaneously. Measures of wellbeing defined as a continuum from flourishing to languishing for children with NDD need to be designed and evaluated. Wellbeing can lead to further participation and act to protect from mental health problems.
... Our findings highlight the importance of person-activity congruence in understanding the pathway to happiness. Although prior studies have suggested that the effect of prosocial behavior on happiness is a "functional universal" and detectable across lifespans and the world [38,39] and that benevolence may be a "basic wellness enhancer" [40], the current findings suggest that the effect of prosocial behavior on happiness depends on the extent of individuals' person-activity congruence. These findings are consistent with those of Hill and Howell [25], who found that the relationship between prosocial spending and happiness was only significant for individuals with high self-transcendence values. ...
Engaging in prosocial behavior is considered an effective way to increase happiness in a sustainable manner. However, there is insufficient knowledge about the conditions under which such a happiness boosting effect occurs. From a person-activity congruence perspective, we proposed that an individual’s eudaimonic orientation moderates the effect of prosocial behavior on happiness, whereas hedonic orientation does not. For this purpose, 128 participants were assigned to play a gamein which half of them were explained the benevolence impact of playing the game (the benevolence condition), and the other half played the same game without this knowledge (the control condition). Participants’ eudaimonic and hedonic orientations were assessed before the game, and their post-task happiness were measured after the game. The results showed that participants in the benevolence condition reported higher post-task positive affect than those in the control condition. Furthermore, this happiness boosting effect was moderated by participants’ eudaimonic orientation—participants with high eudaimonic orientation reaped greater benefits from benevolence, and their hedonic orientation did not moderate the relationship between benevolence and happiness. The importance of the effect of person-activity congruence on happiness is discussed, along with the implications of these findings for sustainably pursuing happiness.
... One reason for the null effect may be that many participants did not provide detailed spending recollections despite the request to describe their purchase "as vividly and in as much detail as possible." Indeed, participants in Experiment 2 wrote an average of 22 words in response to the recollection prompts, which is less than half the length of responses captured in a recent study demonstrating the emotional benefits of prosocial spending upon reflection (an average of 45 words in Hanniball et al., 2019), signalling a possible lack of engagement in the task. Whereas participants in our past studies have offered vivid descriptions of their experiences, many participants in the present study wrote just a brief phrase, such as "as a birthday gift" (in the prosocial spending condition) or "buy coffee" (in the personal spending condition). ...
Research indicates that spending money on others-prosocial spending-leads to greater happiness than spending money on oneself (e.g., Dunn, Aknin, & Norton, 2008, 2014). These findings have received widespread attention because they offer insight into why people engage in costly prosocial behavior, and what constitutes happier spending more broadly. However, most studies on prosocial spending (like most research on the emotional benefits of generosity) utilized small sample sizes (n < 100/cell). In light of new, improved standards for evidentiary value, we conducted high-powered registered replications of the central paradigms used in prosocial spending research. In Experiment 1, 712 students were randomly assigned to make a purchase for themselves or a stranger in need and then reported their happiness. As predicted, participants assigned to engage in prosocial (vs. personal) spending reported greater momentary happiness. In Experiment 2, 1950 adults recalled a time they spent money on themselves or someone else and then reported their current happiness; contrary to predictions, participants in the prosocial spending condition did not report greater happiness than those in the personal spending condition. Because low levels of task engagement may have produced these null results, we conducted a replication with minor changes designed to increase engagement; in this Experiment 3 (N = 5,199), participants who recalled a prosocial (vs. personal) spending memory reported greater happiness but differences were small. Taken together, these studies support the hypothesis that spending money on others does promote happiness, but demonstrate that the magnitude of the effect depends on several methodological features. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).
... One reason for the null effect may be that many participants did not provide detailed spending recollections despite the request to describe their purchase "as vividly and in as much detail as possible." Indeed, participants in Experiment 2 wrote an average of 22 words in response to the recollection prompts, which is less than half the length of responses captured in a recent study demonstrating the emotional benefits of prosocial spending upon reflection (an average of 45 words in Hanniball et al., 2019), signaling a possible lack of engagement in the task. Whereas participants in our past studies have offered vivid descriptions of their experiences, many participants in the present study wrote just a brief phrase, such as "as a birthday gift" (in the prosocial spending condition) or "buy coffee" (in the personal spending condition). ...
Research indicates that spending money on others—prosocial spending—leads to greater happiness than spending money on oneself (e.g., Dunn, Aknin, & Norton, 2008; 2014). These findings have received widespread attention because they offer insight into why people engage in costly prosocial behavior, and what constitutes happier spending more broadly. However, most studies on prosocial spending (like most research on the emotional benefits of generosity) utilized small sample sizes (n<100/cell). In light of new, improved standards for evidentiary value, we conducted high-powered registered replications of the central paradigms used in prosocial spending research. In Experiment 1, 712 students were randomly assigned to make a purchase for themselves or a stranger in need and then reported their happiness. As predicted, participants assigned to engage in prosocial (vs. personal) spending reported greater momentary happiness. In Experiment 2, 1950 adults recalled a time they spent money on themselves or someone else and then reported their current happiness; contrary to predictions, participants in the prosocial spending condition did not report greater happiness than those in the personal spending condition. Because low levels of task engagement may have produced these null results, we conducted a replication with minor changes designed to increase engagement; in this Experiment 3 (N = 5,199), participants who recalled a prosocial (vs. personal) spending memory reported greater happiness but differences were small. Taken together, these studies support the hypothesis that spending money on others does promote happiness, but demonstrate that the magnitude of the effect depends on several methodological features.
... Moreover, people randomly assigned to spend money on others, called prosocial spending, report greater positive emotion than people randomly assigned to spend money on themselves (Dunn et al., 2008(Dunn et al., , 2014. This latter finding has been detected in hundreds of people from rich and poor countries around the globe (Aknin et al., 2013a), as well as among ex-offenders (Hanniball et al., 2019). Even children under the age of two smile more when giving treats away to others than when receiving treats themselves (Aknin et al., 2012). ...
The paper by Frijters, Clark, Krekel and Layard makes a strong historical case for treating happiness as a primary measure of human welfare. They argue that it is now time to revamp the science of policy-making to re-establish this central tradition, building on recent progress in measuring and understanding subjective wellbeing. I agree with them. There are three key questions raised in or by their presentation that need further evidence. I shall try to address these in turn. The questions relate to how to measure happiness, how to measure and deal with inequality and how to take due account of the social context of wellbeing, including the need to achieve consistency between individual and societal happiness.
Past studies show that spending money on other people— prosocial spending—increases a person’s happiness. However, foundational research on this topic was conducted prior to psychology’s credibility revolution (or “replication crisis”), so it is essential to ask whether the evidence supporting this claim is robust and replicable. Here, we consider all 15 published preregistered experiments on prosocial spending to evaluate whether there is causal evidence for the idea that spending money on other people promotes happiness. Although the evidence appears somewhat mixed, we argue that the emotional benefits of prosocial spending are robust and replicable in large samples. These benefits are particularly likely when people have some choice about whether or how to give and when they understand how their generosity makes a difference. This review provides renewed support for the idea that prosocial spending promotes happiness and offers a template for revisiting phenomena that were established prior to the credibility revolution.
There are concerns that risk assessment instruments may exacerbate racial/ethnic disparities in the justice system. Risk factors measured by Western-normed tools may not accurately reflect the life experiences of non-White offenders. Systemic biases may also be baked into tools if certain risk items are unfairly associated with race/class. Despite these concerns, few studies have rigorously examined how common risk factors for violence compare across racial/ethnic groups in the U.S. This cross-sectional study addressed these gaps by examining cross-cultural differences in the performance of 10 common historical risk factors. White, Hispanic, and Black adults (N = 270) sampled from Amazon Mechanical Turk completed risk ratings and self-reported lifetime violence/offending. Overall, risk scores performed relatively well in the strength and form of their associations with offending across groups. However, rates of general offending were consistently lower for Hispanics and Blacks compared to similar-scoring Whites. In addition, several risk domains overclassified high-scoring Hispanics and Blacks but were better calibrated with low-scoring minority groups. Although our results reveal modest evidence of racial bias, definite conclusions about the universality of similar risk factors may be premature given mixed findings of overestimation/over-classification. Results have implications for fairness in risk assessment and underscore the need for further prospective investigations.
The COVID19 pandemic has put people under severe psychological pressure, especially in a country like India that is one of the most populated countries in the world. The objective of the present study is to investigate the association and possible impact of certain factors (gender, age, living status, working status, and location) with claustrophobia and anxiety disorders on home quarantine individuals. A self-reported data was gathered from 684 individuals between the age group of 18 − 60 years of which 63.2% were males and 36.8 % were females. The statistical tools used in the study were correlation, regression, and mediation analysis. The results showed that women and the elderly were more anxious and showed symptoms of claustrophobia. Without exception, mediation analysis showed that gender, location, and age have a direct significant effect on claustrophobia and an indirect effect on anxiety through claustrophobia. The main findings emphasize the adverse psychological effects of claustrophobia and anxiety during the quarantine period and provide crucial information for home quarantine individuals and medical practitioners. © 2022 The Author(s). This open access article is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) 4.0 license.
Despite the clear clinical and forensic importance of psychopathy, definitions of psychopathy and the optimal measurement of the disorder are issues of continued controversy. The present research provides an empirical examination of two self-report instruments indexing recent conceptualizations of psychop-athy: the Comprehensive Assessment of Psychopathic Personality-Self-Rating Scale (CAPP-SR) and Triarchic Psychopathy Measure (TriPM). This study provides the first examination of the convergence between the two tools, and the first investigation into the criterion-related validity of the CAPP-SR within a self-identified offender population. Our findings suggest strong support for the criterion-related validity of the CAPP-SR and the convergent validity of the CAPP-SR and the TriPM Meanness and Disinhibition domains. TriPM Boldness exhibited a clearly bifurcated pattern of association with all outcome criteria as compared with all domains in the CAPP model, and the Meanness and Disinhibition domains of the TriPM. Further, TriPM Boldness did not add incrementally or interact with Meanness or Disinhibition to predict the majority of outcomes. Findings are discussed with respect to the relevance of TriPM Boldness in the conceptualization of psychopathy, and the possible contributions of the CAPP-SR to the field of psychopathy research and assessment.
Research on young offenders has primarily focused on identifying predictors of the maladaptive, aggressive behavior; there is a scarcity of evidence on factors that relate to prosocial behavior in these adolescents. The current study examined the link from parenting, emotional instability, and prosocial reasoning to prosocial behavior, while also examining the mediating roles of empathic concern (EC) and perspective taking (PT) in a sample of Spanish adolescent offenders compared to a sample of nonoffenders. Participants were 440 adolescents: 220 young offenders residing in four Youth Detention Centres of Valencia (67.3% men) and 220 enrolled in public and private schools within the metropolitan area of Valencia (65.9% men). The two subsamples were similar in age (15−18 years), gender, and social class. Analyses show differences in mother’s permissiveness with empathy (PT and EC), in emotional instability and internalized reasoning with PT in predicting prosocial behavior in offenders and nonoffenders adolescents. EC and PT are significative and positively related to prosocial behavior in both groups. These findings have implications for prevention and reeducation interventions oriented to social reinsertion of adolescent offenders and the development of family and social counseling programs that favor adaptive behavior.
Evidence-based recommendations for increasing subjective happiness and wellbeing or decreasing depression and anxiety in non-clinical populations: systematic review of meta-analyses of observational studies, interventional trials and meta-analyses of interventional trials.
The Comprehensive Assessment of Psychopathic Personality is a recently developed conceptual model of psychopathy designed to index the disorder across 33 personality traits. Although recent research has evidenced support for the CAPP model with respect to the convergent, criterion, and predictive validity of CAPP instruments, little work has examined the optimal internal structure and generalizability of the model and associated measures. The present study sought to elaborate on the construct validity and psychometric properties of the CAPP Lexical Self Rating Scale and determine the utility of the instrument across men and women, and individuals of Caucasian and East Asian descent. Within a large sample of self-identified offenders (N=1414), we found strong support for a three-factor model comprising domains reflecting interpersonal dominance, behavioral disinhibition, and deficient emotional attachment. Analyses examining the generalizability of the model provide further insight into its applicability for diverse populations.
Who benefits most from helping others? Previous research suggests that common polymorphisms of the oxytocin receptor gene (OXTR) predict whether people behave generously and experience increases in positive mood in response to socially focused experiences in daily life. Building on these findings, we conducted an experiment with a large, ethnically homogenous sample (N = 437) to examine whether individual differences in three frequently studied single nucleotide polymorphisms of OXTR (rs53576, rs2268498, rs2254298) also predict differences in the positive mood benefits of financial generosity. Consistent with past research, participants who were randomly assigned to purchase items for others (vs. themselves) reported greater positive affect. Contrary to predictions, using Bayesian statistics, we found conclusive evidence that the benefits of generosity were not moderated by individual differences in OXTR single nucleotide polymorphisms. The current work highlights the importance of publishing null results to build cumulative knowledge linking neurobiological factors to positive emotional experiences.
Do acts of kindness improve the well-being of the actor? Recent advances in the behavioural sciences have provided a number of explanations of human social, cooperative and altruistic behaviour. These theories predict that people will be ‘happy to help’ family, friends, community members, spouses, and even strangers under some conditions. Here we conduct a systematic review and meta-analysis of the experimental evidence that kindness interventions (for example, performing ‘random acts of kindness’) boost subjective well-being. Our initial search of the literature identified 489 articles; of which 24 (27 studies) met the inclusion criteria (total N = 4045). These 27 studies, some of which included multiple control conditions and dependent measures, yielded 52 effect sizes. Multi-level modeling revealed that the overall effect of kindness on the well-being of the actor is small-to- medium (δ = 0.28). The effect was not moderated by sex, age, type of participant, intervention, control con- dition or outcome measure. There was no indication of publication bias. We discuss the limitations of the current literature, and recommend that future research test more specific theories of kindness: taking kindness-specific individual differences into account; distinguishing between the effects of kindness to specific categories of people; and considering a wider range of proximal and distal outcomes. Such research will advance our un- derstanding of the causes and consequences of kindness, and help practitioners to maximise the effectiveness of kindness interventions to improve well-being.
Callous-unemotional (CU) traits, that is, a lack of guilt or empathy and poverty of emotion, are believed to be the developmental precursor to psychopathy in adulthood, capturing its emotional detachment dimension. Similar to psychopathic adults, research shows that children and adolescents with high CU traits represent an important population at heightened risk for criminal behavior. The present study is the first to examine whether a self-report measure of CU traits, the Inventory of Callous-Unemotional Traits (ICU), predicts general and violent recidivism postinstitutional release among a sample of 227 juvenile justice-involved adolescent boys (M age = 15.73, SD = 1.27). Results indicated that boys high on CU traits were faster to reoffend postrelease both nonviolently (Hazard Ratio [HR] = 1.27, p < .01) and violently (HR = 1.54, p < .05). Further, the Uncaring subscale of the ICU predicted faster time to general recidivism (HR = 1.21, p < .05), whereas the Callousness subscale (i.e., "I do not care who I hurt to get what I want") predicted faster time to violent recidivism (HR = 1.39, p < .05). The present study provides preliminary support for the predictive validity of a brief, yet comprehensive self-report measure of CU traits. Findings inform youth risk assessment by offering possibilities within the domain of self-report for screening high-risk youth in need of intensive, comprehensive, and individualized intervention. (PsycINFO Database Record
Charities often circulate widespread donation appeals, but who is most likely to donate and how do appeals impact the well-being of individual donors and non-donors, as well as the entire group exposed to the campaign? Here, we investigate three factors that may influence donations (recent winnings, the presence of another person, and matched earnings) in addition to the changes in affect reported by individuals who donate in response to a charitable opportunity and those who do not. Critically, we also investigate the change in affect reported by the entire sample to measure the net impact of the donation opportunity. Results reveal that people winning more money donate a smaller percentage to charity, and the presence of another person does not influence giving. In addition, large donors experience hedonic boosts from giving, and the substantial fraction of large donors translates to a net positive influence on well-being for the entire sample.
Objective:
Does spending money on others (prosocial spending) improve the cardiovascular health of community-dwelling older adults diagnosed with high blood pressure?
Method:
In Study 1, 186 older adults diagnosed with high blood pressure participating in the Midlife in the U.S. Study (MIDUS) were examined. In Study 2, 73 older adults diagnosed with high blood pressure were assigned to spend money on others or to spend money on themselves.
Results:
In Study 1, the more money people spent on others, the lower their blood pressure was 2 years later. In Study 2, participants who were assigned to spend money on others for 3 consecutive weeks subsequently exhibited lower systolic and diastolic blood pressure compared to participants assigned to spend money on themselves. The magnitude of these effects was comparable to the effects of interventions such as antihypertensive medication or exercise.
Conclusions:
Together, these findings suggest that spending money on others shapes cardiovascular health, thereby providing a pathway by which prosocial behavior improves physical health among at-risk older adults. (PsycINFO Database Record
The Good Lives Model (GLM) is a contemporary theory of offender rehabilitation that has the dual foci of promoting offenders’ goals and reducing their risk of reoffending. It has proved popular with practitioners working with offenders in correctional services but its potential as a rehabilitation framework for mentally disordered offenders (MDOs) in forensic mental health services has been largely untapped. The purpose of this article is to explore how the GLM can be theoretically augmented for use with offenders with mental illness and applied to MDOs in a forensic mental health setting. A case study is provided to illustrate how the enriched GLM can promote a cohesive and holistic approach to forensic rehabilitation that integrates risk, psychiatric treatment, and well-being perspectives. The potential benefits of utilizing the GLM as an overarching rehabilitation framework in forensic mental health are discussed and important points of difference from a traditional approach are highlighted. The authors conclude that the GLM represents a paradigm shift for forensic mental health whereby the person, rather than risk reduction and/or the treatment of mental illness, is at centre stage.
Anecdotal evidence suggests that many of the staff members working for prisoner reentry programs are formerly incarcerated persons. Moreover, criminologists have written that the strengths-based role of the “wounded healer” or “professional ex-” is exemplified by released prisoners who desist from a deviant career by replacing it with an occupation as a paraprofessional, lay therapist, or counselor. Despite these observations, there is a paucity of research about formerly incarcerated persons employed by agencies that provide reentry-related programming. This study begins to fill this gap by examining whether, how, and why the staff members of prisoner reentry programs differ from the clients. Characteristics of formerly incarcerated persons thought to be related to desistance and reconciling a criminal past such as overcoming stigma, prosocial attitudes and beliefs, active coping strategies, psychological well-being, and satisfaction with life are examined. Findings support the notion that the wounded healer or professional ex- role is related to desistance and can potentially transform formerly incarcerated persons from being part of “the problem” into part of “the solution” to reduce crime and recidivism.
Humans are extraordinarily prosocial, and research conducted primarily in North America indicates that giving to others is emotionally rewarding. To examine whether the hedonic benefits of giving represent a universal feature of human behavior, we extended upon previous cross-cultural examinations by investigating whether inhabitants of a small-scale, rural, and isolated village in Vanuatu, where villagers have little influence from urban, Western culture, survive on subsistence farming without electricity, and have minimal formal education, report or display emotional rewards from engaging in prosocial (vs. personally beneficial) behavior. In Study 1, adults were randomly assigned to purchase candy for either themselves or others and then reported their positive affect. Consistent with previous research, adults purchasing goods for others reported greater positive emotion than adults receiving resources for themselves. In Study 2, 2- to 5-year-old children received candy and were subsequently asked to engage in costly giving (sharing their own candy with a puppet) and non-costly giving (sharing the experimenter's candy with a puppet). Emotional expressions were video-recorded during the experiment and later coded for happiness. Consistent with previous research conducted in Canada, children displayed more happiness when giving treats away than when receiving treats themselves. Moreover, the emotional rewards of giving were largest when children engaged in costly (vs. non-costly) giving. Taken together, these findings indicate that the emotional rewards of giving are detectable in people living in diverse societies and support the possibility that the hedonic benefits of generosity are universal. (PsycINFO Database Record
(c) 2015 APA, all rights reserved).
Mechanical Turk (MTurk), an online labor market created by Amazon, has recently become popular among social scientists as a source of survey and experimental data. The workers who populate this market have been assessed on dimensions that are universally relevant to understanding whether, why, and when they should be recruited as research participants. We discuss the characteristics of MTurk as a participant pool for psychology and other social sciences, highlighting the traits of the MTurk samples, why people become MTurk workers and research participants, and how data quality on MTurk compares to that from other pools and depends on controllable and uncontrollable factors.
Previous research has shown that the way people spend their money is as important to happiness as how much money people earn. Specifically, it has been shown that spending money on others contributes more to an individual's happiness than spending money on oneself. In the present study, we investigated this effect and examined the role of the money's origin. Students were randomly assigned either to spend a small amount of money on themselves or to spend the money on others. Moreover, half of the participants received the money as a wage, whereas the other half received the money as a windfall. The results replicated previous research indicating that prosocial spenders report greater happiness than do selfish spenders. However, the happiness effect was unaffected by the source of the money (i.e. wage vs. windfall). Implications for well-being and happiness are discussed.
Can others detect the emotional consequences of our personal choices? Here, we investigate whether third-party observers can detect the emotional benefits of two factors shown to influence self-reported happiness: the speed with which people make decisions and the generosity of spending choices. Participants were randomly assigned to purchase a goody bag either for themselves or for a sick child, and to choose the contents of this goody bag either as quickly as possible, or by taking as much time as needed. Then, participants reported their current emotional state and were rated for happiness by a research assistant blind to their spending condition. Analyses revealed that purchasing a gift for someone else not only improved participants' self-reported mood, but that observers could detect these affective differences as well. Observers also rated participants who made their spending decision more quickly as happier, although participants did not report these emotional differences.
When are the emotional benefits of generous behaviour most likely to emerge? In three studies, we demonstrate that the hedonic benefits of generous spending are most likely when spending promotes positive social connection. Study 1 shows that people feel happier after giving more to charity, but only when they give to someone connected with the cause. Studies 2 and 3 show that the emotional rewards associated with giving to friends or acquaintances are greatest in situations that facilitate social connection. Thus, social connection may be important for turning good deeds into good feelings, and maximising connectedness between givers and recipients may enhance the emotional payoff of charitable initiatives.
Pro-social spending is associated with greater happiness than spending money on oneself (Dunn, Aknin, & Norton, 2008). However, research has yet to identify who is most likely to benefit from spending money on others, and why pro-social spending leads to greater happiness. The current study had two goals: (a) to examine whether values moderate the relation between pro-social spending and happiness, and (b) to test if psychological need satisfaction mediates this link. First, there was support for our interaction hypothesis. We found the positive relation between pro-social spending and happiness was only significant for individuals higher, and not those lower, on self-transcendence values (i.e., a concern for persons and entities outside of the individual). Additionally, the link from pro-social spending to happiness was mediated by psychological need satisfaction only for individuals higher on self-transcendence. We discuss why individuals who do not endorse a value system that emphasizes a concern for others experience no increased happiness from increased pro-social spending.
The triarchic model of psychopathy (Patrick, Fowles, & Krueger, 2009) was formulated as an integrative framework for reconciling differing conceptions of psychopathy. The model characterizes psychopathy in terms of 3 distinguishable phenotypic components: boldness, meanness, and disinhibition. Data from a large mixed-gender undergraduate sample (N = 618) were used to examine relations of several of the best known measures for assessing psychopathic traits with scores on the Triarchic Psychopathy Measure (TriPM), an inventory developed to operationalize the triarchic model through separate facet scales. Analyses revealed that established inventories of psychopathy index components of the model as indexed by the TriPM to varying degrees. Although each inventory provided effective coverage of meanness and disinhibition components, instruments differed in their representation of boldness. Present results demonstrate the heuristic value of the triarchic model for delineating commonalities and differences among alternative measures of psychopathy and provide support for the utility of the triarchic model as a framework for reconciling alternative conceptions of psychopathy. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2013 APA, all rights reserved).
Using a sample of adjudicated French Canadian males from the Montreal Two Samples Longitudinal Study, this article investigates individual and social characteristics associated with differential cost avoidance. The main objective of this study is to determine whether such traits are randomly distributed across differential degrees of cost avoidance or whether they reflect some degree of rationality. Differential cost avoidance is a composite measure that includes the ratio of self-reported career length to officially recorded career length, the ratio of self-reported offending gravity to officially recorded gravity, and the ratio of time “free” to periods of incarceration. Findings reveal that it is particularly difficult to predict differential cost avoidance at early ages. The main predictors of the residual degree of differential cost avoidance in the early 30s include substance use (especially drugs), the accumulation of debts, and the use of violence in the perpetration of crime. Implications for desistance research are discussed.
The self-report technique is one of three major ways of measuring involvement in delinquent and criminal behavior. The basic approach of the self-report method is to ask individuals if they have engaged in delinquent or criminal behavior, and if so, how often they have done so. In this chapter, we review the origins of the self-report method in the 1950s, the growth and refinement of this measurement technique since then, and its role in criminological research, especially longitu- dinal research on the etiology of delinquent and criminal behavior. Particular attention is paid to assessing the reliability and validity of self-reported measures of delinquency. We also discuss specialized data collection methods, such as random response techniques and audio assisted computer-based interviewing, that have the potential to increase the accuracy of responses. Overall, we conclude that the psy- chometric quality of the self-report method has increased consider- ably since its inception in the 1950s. Although there is much room for continued improvement, self-report data appear acceptably valid and reliable for most research purposes. MEASUREMENT AND ANALYSIS OF CRIME AND JUSTICE
This research provides the first support for a possible psychological universal: Human beings around the world derive emotional benefits from using their financial resources to help others (prosocial spending). In Study 1, survey data from 136 countries were examined and showed that prosocial spending is associated with greater happiness around the world, in poor and rich countries alike. To test for causality, in Studies 2a and 2b, we used experimental methodology, demonstrating that recalling a past instance of prosocial spending has a causal impact on happiness across countries that differ greatly in terms of wealth (Canada, Uganda, and India). Finally, in Study 3, participants in Canada and South Africa randomly assigned to buy items for charity reported higher levels of positive affect than participants assigned to buy the same items for themselves, even when this prosocial spending did not provide an opportunity to build or strengthen social ties. Our findings suggest that the reward experienced from helping others may be deeply ingrained in human nature, emerging in diverse cultural and economic contexts. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2013 APA, all rights reserved).
J. Millham and L. I. Jacobson's (1978) 2-factor model of socially desirable responding based on denial and attribution components is reviewed and disputed. A 2nd model distinguishing self-deception and impression management components is reviewed and shown to be related to early factor-analytic work on desirability scales. Two studies, with 511 undergraduates, were conducted to test the model. A factor analysis of commonly used desirability scales (e.g., Lie scale of the MMPI, Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale) revealed that the 2 major factors were best interpreted as Self-Deception and Impression Management. A 2nd study employed confirmatory factor analysis to show that the attribution/denial model does not fit the data as well as the self-deception/impression management model. A 3rd study, with 100 Ss, compared scores on desirability scales under anonymous and public conditions. Results show that those scales that had loaded highest on the Impression Management factor showed the greatest mean increase from anonymous to public conditions. It is recommended that impression management, but not self-deception, be controlled in self-reports of personality. (54 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Four replicable findings have emerged regardingthe relation between income and subjectivewell-being (SWB): 1. There are largecorrelations between the wealth of nations andthe mean reports of SWB in them, 2. There aremostly small correlations between income andSWB within nations, although these correlationsappear to be larger in poor nations, and therisk of unhappiness is much higher for poorpeople, 3. Economic growth in the last decadesin most economically developed societies hasbeen accompanied by little rise in SWB, andincreases in individual income lead to variableoutcomes, and 4. People who prize materialgoals more than other values tend to besubstantially less happy, unless they are rich.Thus, more money may enhance SWB when it meansavoiding poverty and living in a developednation, but income appears to increase SWBlittle over the long-term when more of it isgained by well-off individuals whose materialdesires rise with their incomes. Several majortheories are compatible with most existingfindings: A. The idea that income enhances SWBonly insofar as it helps people meet theirbasic needs, and B. The idea that the relationbetween income and SWB depends on the amount ofmaterial desires that people's income allowsthem to fulfill. We argue that the firstexplanation is a special case of the secondone. A third explanation is relativelyunresearched, the idea that societal norms forproduction and consumption are essential tounderstanding the SWB-income interface. Inaddition, it appears high SWB might increasepeople's chances for high income. We review theopen issues relating income to SWB, anddescribe the research methods needed to provideimproved data that will better illuminate thepsychological processes relating money to SWB.
Using a ''subjectivist'' approach to the assessment of happiness, a new 4-item measure of global subjective happiness was developed and validated in 14 studies with a total of 2 732 participants. Data was collected in the United States from students on two college campuses and one high school campus, from community adults in two California cities, and from older adults. Students and community adults in Moscow, Russia also participated in this research. Results indicated that the Subjective Happiness Scale has high internal consistency, which was found to be stable across samples. Test-retest and self-peer correlations suggested good to excellent reliability, and construct validation studies of convergent and discriminant validity confirmed the use of this scale to measure the construct of subjective happiness. The rationale for developing a new measure of happiness, as well as advantages of this scale, are discussed.
Whereas human pro-social behavior is often driven by empathic concern for another, it is unclear whether nonprimate mammals
experience a similar motivational state. To test for empathically motivated pro-social behavior in rodents, we placed a free
rat in an arena with a cagemate trapped in a restrainer. After several sessions, the free rat learned to intentionally and
quickly open the restrainer and free the cagemate. Rats did not open empty or object-containing restrainers. They freed cagemates
even when social contact was prevented. When liberating a cagemate was pitted against chocolate contained within a second
restrainer, rats opened both restrainers and typically shared the chocolate. Thus, rats behave pro-socially in response to
a conspecific’s distress, providing strong evidence for biological roots of empathically motivated helping behavior.
In a prior review involving a meta-analysis (Underwood & Moore, 1982), no relation between affective empathy and prosocial behavior was found. In this article, the literature relevant to this issue is reexamined. The studies were organized according to the method used to assess empathy. When appropriate, meta-analyses were computed. In contrast to the earlier review, low to moderate positive relations generally were found between empathy and both prosocial behavior and cooperative/socially competent behavior. The method of assessing empathy did influence the strength of the relations; picture/story measures of empathy were not associated with prosocial behavior, whereas nearly all other measures were. Several possible explanations for the pattern of findings are discussed, as are the implications of the findings.
The development of concern for others and externalizing problems were examined in young children with normative, subclinical, or clinical levels of behavior problems. There were no group differences in observable concern for others at 4-5 years of age. Children with clinical behavior problems decreased significantly in their concern by 6-7 years of age and were reported to have less concern at 6-7 years by mothers, teachers, and the children themselves, relative to other groups. Boys with clinical problems were more callous to others' distress at both time points. Girls showed more concern than boys across risk, time, and measures. Greater concern at 4-5 years predicted decreases in the stability and severity of externalizing problems by 6-7 years, and greater concern at 6-7 years predicted decreases in the stability of problems by 9-10 years. Finally, maternal socialization approaches predicted later concerned responding.
Criminal offenders with a diagnosis of psychopathy or borderline personality disorder (BPD) share an impulsive nature but tend to differ in their style of emotional response. This study aims to use multiple psychophysiologic measures to compare emotional responses to unpleasant and pleasant stimuli.
Twenty-five psychopaths as defined by the Hare Psychopathy Checklist and 18 subjects with BPD from 2 high-security forensic treatment facilities were included in the study along with 24 control subjects. Electrodermal response was used as an indicator of emotional arousal, modulation of the startle reflex as a measure of valence, and electromyographic activity of the corrugator muscle as an index of emotional expression.
Compared with controls, psychopaths were characterized by decreased electrodermal responsiveness, less facial expression, and the absence of affective startle modulation. A higher percentage of psychopaths showed no startle reflex. Subjects with BPD showed a response pattern very similar to that of controls, ie, they showed comparable autonomic arousal, and their startle responses were strongest to unpleasant slides and weakest to pleasant slides. However, corrugator electromyographic activity in subjects with BPD demonstrated little facial modulation when they viewed either pleasant or unpleasant slides.
The results support the theory that psychopaths are characterized by a pronounced lack of fear in response to aversive events. Furthermore, the results suggest a general deficit in processing affective information, regardless of whether stimuli are negative or positive. Emotional hyporesponsiveness was specific to psychopaths, since results for offenders with BPD indicate a widely adequate processing of emotional stimuli.
Nine studies were conducted with the goal of developing a self-report measure of psychological entitlement and assessing its interpersonal consequences. The Psychological Entitlement Scale (PES) was found to be reliable and valid (Study 1, 2), not associated with social desirability (Study 2), stable across time (Study 3), and correlated negatively with two of the Big Five factors: agreeableness and emotional stability (Study 4). The validity of the PES was confirmed in studies that assessed willingness to take candy designated for children (Study 5) and reported deservingness of pay in a hypothetical employment setting (Study 6). Finally, the PES was linked to important interpersonal consequences including competitive choices in a commons dilemma (Study 7), selfish approaches to romantic relationships (Study 8), and aggression following ego threat (Study 9). Psychological entitlement has a pervasive and largely unconstructive impact on social behavior.
Recent attempts to improve on the quality of psychological research focus on good practices required for statistical significance testing. The scrutiny of theoretical reasoning, though superordinate, is largely neglected, as exemplified here in a common misunderstanding of mediation analysis. Although a test of a mediation model X ➔ Z ➔ Y is conditional on the premise that the model applies, alternative mediators Z′, Z″, Z‴ etc. remain untested, and other causal models could underlie the correlation between X, Y, Z, researchers infer from a single significant mediation test that they have identified the true mediator. A literature search of all mediation analyses published in 2015 in Sciencedirect shows that the vast majority of studies neither consider alternative causal models nor alternative mediator candidates. Ignoring that mediation analysis is conditional on the truth of the focal mediation model, they pretend to have demonstrated that Z mediates the influence of X on Y. Recommendations are provided for how to overcome this dissatisfying state of affairs.
In this chapter we address two of the most significant methodological problems hampering predictions of criminal and violent behaviors: the lack of theoretically relevant predictor variables and weak criterion variables (Monahan & Steadman, 1994). To address the limitation of atheoretical predictor variables, we summarize the association between the construct of psychopathy and recidivism. Consistent with current clinical and research practice, our operational definition of psychopathy is the Hare Psychopathy Checklist (PCL; Hare 1980); its revision, the Hare Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R; Hare, 1991); a version of the PCL-R modified for use with adolescents (Forth, Hart, & Hare, 1990; Forth, Kosson, & Hare, in press); and a French translation of the PCL-R (Hare, 1996a). We also compare the predictive utility of the PCL/PCL-R with key demographic and criminal history variables, personality disorder diagnoses, and actuarial risk scales. To address the limitation of weak criterion variables, we describe two methods of measuring and analyzing criminal behaviors: survival analyses and Criminal Career Profiles (CCPs; Templeman, 1995; Wong, Templeman, Gu, Andre, & Leis, 1997). We emphasize the strengths of the newly developed CCP methodology for providing an overall measure of criminal behaviors. To illustrate the benefits of the CCP methodology for conceptualizing, coding, analyzing, and presenting criminal behaviors, we present 10-year outcome data from a random sample of federal offenders.
This chapter presents the Risk-Need-Responsivity (RNR) model of correctional assessment and treatment in three major sections. The first section outlines principles of effective crime reduction, referencing research on major risk factors for crime and "what works" to reduce it. The second section highlights gaps in the knowledge base for policy and practice. The third section enumerates implications for the supervision and treatment of individual offenders and the system-level structuring of correctional systems or programs. Because specialization in particular types of crime is very unusual and the predictors of violent and nonviolent crime are very similar, the chapter considers general offending rather than violent offending in particular.
In this chapter I review the descriptive, theoretical, and empirical overlap between psychopathy and narcissism. I demonstrate that the degree to which the two constructs overlap depends heavily on the variants of narcissism (narcissistic personality disorder, grandiose) and psychopathy (Factors 1 and 2) being assessed as well as on the specific assessment instrument used. I use correlational profiles with the five domains and 30 facets of the Five Factor Model to make sense of the divergences. I close with several conclusions, remaining questions, and a recommendation that the broad constructs of psychopathy and narcissism be exchanged for the more elemental traits found in models of general personality functioning.
Prosocial behaviors have been associated with enhanced well-being, but what psychological mechanisms explain this connection? Some theories suggest that beneficence - the sense of being able to give - inherently improves well-being, whereas evidence from self-determination theory (Weinstein & Ryan, 2010) shows that increases in well-being are mediated by satisfaction of innate psychological needs for autonomy, competence and relatedness. Here we simultaneously assess these two explanations.
Study 1 (n = 335) used a cross-sectional survey to develop a measure to assess beneficence satisfaction. The next two cross-sectional studies tested mediators between prosocial behavior and general well-being (study 2, n = 332) and situational peak moment well-being (study 3, n = 180). A fourth study (n = 85) used a diary method to assess daily fluctuations in well-being associated with needs and beneficence.
It was shown across all studies that both the three psychological needs and beneficence satisfaction mediate the relations between prosocial actions and well-being, with all four factors emerging as independent predictors.
Together these studies underscore the role of autonomy, competence, and relatedness in explaining the well-being benefits of benevolence, and also point to the independent role of beneficence as a source of human wellness. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.
© 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
This article reports the development and validation of a scale to measure global life satisfaction, the Satisfaction With Life Scale (SWLS). Among the various components of subjective well-being, the SWLS is narrowly focused to assess global life satisfaction and does not tap related constructs such as positive affect or loneliness. The SWLS is shown to have favorable psychometric properties, including high internal consistency and high temporal reliability. Scores on the SWLS correlate moderately to highly with other measures of subjective well-being, and correlate predictably with specific personality characteristics. It is noted that the SWLS is suited for use with different age groups, and other potential uses of the scale are discussed.
Prosocial behavior first appears in the second year of life. How can prosociality so early in life be explained? One possibility is that infants possess specialized cognitive and/or social capacities that drive its emergence. A second possibility is that prosocial behavior emerges out of infants' shared activities and relationships with others. These possibilities have motivated a number of current explanatory efforts, with a focus on two complementary questions. First, what is evolutionarily prepared in the very young child and how does it give rise to prosocial behavior? Second, how do proximal mechanisms, including social experiences, contribute to the early development of prosociality? The papers in this special issue represent some of the most recent work on these questions. They highlight a diverse array of new methods and bring them to bear on the nature and development of early prosocial understanding and behavior.
Objective:
This paper reviews a century of research on creating theoretically meaningful and empirically useful scales of criminal offending and illustrates their strengths and weaknesses.
Methods:
The history of scaling criminal offending is traced in a detailed literature review focusing on the issues of seriousness, unidimensionality, frequency, and additivity of offending. Modern practice in scaling criminal offending is measured using a survey of 130 articles published in five leading criminology journals over a two-year period that included a scale of individual offending as either an independent or dependent variable. Six scaling methods commonly used in contemporary criminological research are demonstrated and assessed using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979: dichotomous, frequency, weighted frequency, variety, summed category, and item response theory ‘theta’.
Results:
The discipline of criminology has seen numerous scaling techniques introduced and forgotten. While no clearly superior method dominates the field today, the most commonly used scaling techniques are dichotomous and frequency scales, both of which are fraught with methodological pitfalls including sensitivity to the least serious offenses.
Conclusions:
Variety scales are the preferred criminal offending scale because they are relatively easy to construct, possess high reliability and validity, and are not compromised by high frequency non-serious crime types.
Traditionally, the focus in psychology has been to relieve suffering in matters such as mental illness. In forensic interventions, the focus has been similar, with an emphasis on the removal of offence-related behaviours and thinking. That is, therapy has focused on ‘fixing’ what appears to be broken. More recent thinking in the positive psychology literature focuses on the importance of enhancing well-being and happiness in clients and enhancing the client's own strengths and positive experiences. In turn, positive psychology adopts a strengths-based approach to working therapeutically with clients. Positive psychology has a number of potential implications for working with forensic clients and the delivery of therapy and relapse prevention blocks. This paper will explores the potential application of positive psychology literature to offending behaviour interventions. Specifically, it focuses on the process of relapse-prevention and self-management, within the framework of the Self-Regulation Model of the Relapse Process (SRM-RP).
With over 2 million individuals currently incarcerated, and over half a million prisoners released each year, the large and growing number of men being processed through the criminal justice system raises important questions about the consequences of this massive institutional intervention. This article focuses on the consequences of incarceration for the employment outcomes of black and white job seekers. The present study adopts an experimental audit approach-in which matched pairs of individuals applied for real entry-level jobs-to formally test the degree to which a criminal record affects subsequent employment opportunities. The findings of this study reveal an important, and much underrecognized, mechanism of stratification. A criminal record presents a major barrier to employment, with important implications for racial disparities.
In recent studies of the structure of affect, positive and negative affect have consistently emerged as two dominant and relatively independent dimensions. A number of mood scales have been created to measure these factors; however, many existing measures are inadequate, showing low reliability or poor convergent or discriminant validity. To fill the need for reliable and valid Positive Affect and Negative Affect scales that are also brief and easy to administer, we developed two 10-item mood scales that comprise the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS). The scales are shown to be highly internally consistent, largely uncorrelated, and stable at appropriate levels over a 2-month time period. Normative data and factorial and external evidence of convergent and discriminant validity for the scales are also presented. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)
"Male Criminal Activity from Childhood Through Youth" reports the results of a large longitudinal study between 1972 and 1985 on a sample of delinquents and a comparison sample of the male population in Montreal. What emerges from this extensive study is a clarification of the ways of describing criminal activity and a comprehensive theory of crime that integrates the offense, the offending, and the patterns of offending. Using a developmental approach, Drs. Le Blanc and Fréchette observed a gradation of crimes with subjects progressing through five distinct stages of offending. In all, the research investigates the factors that sustain the development of offending and the mechanisms that accelerate, stabilize, and decelerate the commission of crimes. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Three theoretical models of the interrelations among associations with delinquent peers, delinquent beliefs, and delinquent behavior are examined. The socialization model views delinquent peers and beliefs as causally prior to delinquent behavior, whereas the selection model hypothesizes that associations with delinquent peers and delinquent beliefs are a result of delinquent behavior. The interactional model combines aspects of both the socialization and the selection models, positing that these variables have bidirectional causal influences on one another over time. Data to test for reciprocal causality are drawn from three waves of the Rochester Youth Development Study. Results suggest that simple unidirectional models are inadequate. Associating with delinquent peers leads to increases in delinquency via the reinforcing environment of the peer network. Engaging in delinquency, in turn, leads to increases in associations with delinquent peers. Finally, delinquent beliefs exert lagged effects on peers and behavior, which tend in turn to “harden” the formation of delinquent beliefs.
Few studies have examined the item functioning of youth psychopathy measures or compared the functioning of clinician and self-report based indices. Even fewer studies have made these comparisons in both male and female adolescent samples. The present study examined the applicability of items from two psychopathy measures, the Antisocial Process Screening Device (APSD; Frick, P. J., & Hare, R. D., 2001, The Antisocial Process Screening Device. Toronto, Ontario, Canada: Multi-Health Systems) and Psychopathy Checklist: Youth Version (PCL:YV; Forth, A. E., Kosson, D. S., & Hare, R. D., 2003, The Psychopathy Checklist: Youth Version. Toronto, Ontario, Canada: Multi-Health Systems), to adolescent boys and girls who had come into contact with the law. Item Response Theory was used to test item functioning of the two psychopathy indices. Examination of the Item Response Theory trace lines indicated that the APSD and the PCL:YV have both highly discriminating and poorly discriminating items and that the measures differ in the regions of psychopathy they cover. The PCL:YV is particularly effective at assessing interpersonal and affective features of psychopathy and to a lesser extent, lifestyle and antisocial features. The APSD appears to be effective at assessing narcissism and impulsivity but not callousness. In addition, the items most discriminating of the underlying construct of psychopathy for males and females demonstrate some important differences. These findings suggest that the measures may tap different underlying elements of the same overlaying construct. This may account for modest correlations between the measures. The findings suggest that clinicians should be aware of the regions that each measure best taps and also suggest that continued refinement and revisions to the youth psychopathy measures may be required. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved).
Although one of the main characteristics of psychopaths is a deficit in emotion, it is unknown whether they show a fundamental impairment in appropriately recognizing their own body sensations during an emotion-inducing task.
Skin conductance and heart rate were recorded in 138 males during a social stressor together with subjective reports of body sensations. Psychopathic traits were assessed using the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R) 2nd edition (Hare, 2003).
Nonpsychopathic controls who reported higher body sensations showed higher heart rate reactivity, but this verbal-autonomic consistency was not found in psychopathic individuals. This mind-body disconnection is particularly associated with the interpersonal-affective factor of psychopathy.
Findings are the first to document this body sensation-autonomic mismatch in psychopaths, and suggest that somatic aphasia - the inaccurate identification and recognition of one's own somatic states - may partly underlie the interpersonal-affective features of psychopathy.
Self-determination theory posits that the degree to which a prosocial act is volitional or autonomous predicts its effect on well-being and that psychological need satisfaction mediates this relation. Four studies tested the impact of autonomous and controlled motivation for helping others on well-being and explored effects on other outcomes of helping for both helpers and recipients. Study 1 used a diary method to assess daily relations between prosocial behaviors and helper well-being and tested mediating effects of basic psychological need satisfaction. Study 2 examined the effect of choice on motivation and consequences of autonomous versus controlled helping using an experimental design. Study 3 examined the consequences of autonomous versus controlled helping for both helpers and recipients in a dyadic task. Finally, Study 4 manipulated motivation to predict helper and recipient outcomes. Findings support the idea that autonomous motivation for helping yields benefits for both helper and recipient through greater need satisfaction. Limitations and implications are discussed.
Psychopathy is characterised by profound deficits in the human tendency to feel and care about what other people feel, often known as 'affective empathy'. On the other hand, the psychopath often has intact 'cognitive' empathy skills, that is, he is able to describe what and why other people feel, even if he does not share or care about those feelings. Despite a rapidly advancing neuroscience of empathy, little is known about the developmental underpinnings of this psychopathic disconnect between affective and cognitive empathy.
The parents of N = 2760, 3-13-year-olds reported on the levels of empathy, callous-unemotional traits (CU), and antisocial behaviour (AB). Consistent with current theory and measurement practice, an index of 'psychopathic traits' was derived from the CU and AB measures.
There are important gender and developmental differences in empathy deficits related to psychopathic traits. As expected, psychopathy is associated with severe deficits in affective empathy across all ages for males; however, no such deficits were found for females. Contrary to adult findings, psychopathic traits are associated with deficits in cognitive empathy in childhood for both sexes; however, males with high psychopathic traits appear to overcome these deficits in cognitive empathy as they move through the pubertal years.
In contrast to cognitive empathy, low affective empathy does not appear to be associated with psychopathic traits in females. The characteristic disconnect between cognitive and affective empathy seen in adult male psychopathy crystallises in the pubertal years when they appear to learn to 'talk the talk' about other people's emotions, despite suffering severe deficits in their emotional connection (affective empathy) to others.
During 2006, the Gallup Organization conducted a World Poll that used an identical questionnaire for national samples of adults from 132 countries. I analyze the data on life satisfaction and on health satisfaction and look at their relationships with national income, age, and life-expectancy. The analysis confirms a number of earlier findings and also yields some new and different results. Average life satisfaction is strongly related to per capita national income. High-income countries have greater life-satisfaction than low-income countries. Each doubling of income is associated with almost a one-point increase in life satisfaction on a scale from 0 to 10 and, unlike most previous findings, the effect holds across the range of international incomes; if anything, it is slightly stronger among rich countries. Conditional on the level of national per capita income, the effects of economic growth on life satisfaction are negative, not positive as would be predicted by previous discussion and previous micro-based empirical evidence. Neither life satisfaction nor health satisfaction responds strongly to objective measures of health, such as life expectancy or the prevalence of HIV infection, so that neither provides a reliable indicator of population well-being over all domains, or even over health.
The self-report method is widely used to measure offending. Previous studies suggest that it is generally valid, but that its validity may be lower for blacks than for whites. AIM To assess the validity of self-reported offending in relation to court referrals, and to investigate how it varies with types of offences, sex and race.
Annual court and self-report data were collected between ages 11 and 17 for eight offences in the Seattle Social Development Project, which is a prospective longitudinal survey of 808 youths.
Self-reports predicted future court referrals. Predictive validity was highest for drug offences, for males and for whites, and lowest for females and Asians. The probability of youths with a court referral reporting offences and arrests was highest for drug offences, for males, for whites and for blacks. Retrospective ages of onset agreed best with prospective ages for drug offences, Asians and whites. More Asians than blacks or whites failed retrospectively to report offences that had been reported prospectively.
The validity of self-reports of offending was high, especially for drug offences, for males and for whites. Contrary to prior research, validity was high for black males. It was lowest for Asian females. Sex and race differences in validity held up after controlling for socioeconomic status. Differential validity probability did not reflect police bias.