scholarly journals Insecure Attachment to God and Interpersonal Conflict

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (9) ◽  
pp. 739
Author(s):  
Kevin D. Jordan ◽  
Katie L. Niehus ◽  
Ari M. Feinstein

Research has expanded the notion of attachment to caregivers to other figures such as God, and there is now literature supporting positive effects of attachment to God with various psychosocial outcomes. The dimensions of attachment to God—anxiety and avoidance—reflect varying ways that people see God as supportive and reliable versus unsupportive and inconsistent. As a stable aspect of the individual, attachment to God results in recurring patterns of interpersonal behavior that can maintain and support self-control or disrupt it. No studies have examined the moderating effect of attachment to God on the relationship between self-control and negative social exchanges. To fill this gap, a sample of 1049 adults across the United States completed measures on attachment to God, self-control, and interpersonal outcomes. First, results showed that insecure attachment to God is associated with a hostile-dominant interpersonal style. Second, it was found that the highest level of negative social exchanges occurred in individuals low in self-control and high in attachment avoidance and anxiety. Results are discussed in terms of self-regulation, stress exposure, and situation selection. An implication of the current study is that secure attachment to God may foster less stress exposure by influencing a person’s situation selection.

Author(s):  
Michael Pettit

Various self-concepts constitute major keywords in both psychological science and liberal political discourse. They have been central to psychology’s public-facing, policy-oriented role in the United States, dating back to the mid-19th century. Psychologists’ articulations of self-concept include an understanding of the individual, society, and the interventions needed to augment them both. Psychologists’ early enthusiasm for self-esteem has given way to competing concepts of the individual, namely self-regulation and self-control. Self-esteem in a modern sense coalesced out of the deprivation of the Great Depression and the political crises it provoked. The fate of self-esteem became tied to the capacities of the liberal welfare state to improve the psychic capacities of its citizens, in order to render them both more equal under the law and more productive in their daily existence. Western democracies, especially the United States, hit peak self-esteem in early 1990s. Since then, psychologists lost faith in the capacity of giving away self-worth to improve society. Instead, psychologists in the 21st century preached a neo-Victorian gospel of self-reliance. At the very historical juncture when social mobility became more difficult, when inherited social inequality became more entrenched, psychologists abandoned their Keynesian model of human capital and embraced its neoliberal counterpart.


1994 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-27 ◽  
Author(s):  
Doreen Ray Steg ◽  
Irving Lazar ◽  
Carolyn Boyce

Studies investigated the long term achievement of Get-Set children, Philadelphia Head Start, who participated in SCILS, the Self-Controlled Interactive Learning Systems program at the Drexel Early Childhood Center, and who were later enrolled in eighteen Philadelphia public and parochial schools. The original purpose for the program was to find ways of creating an environment to enhance learning, creativity, and exploration. It was assumed that if the above occurred it would be reflected in standardized testing regardless of subject matter. Its premise is that learning involves both the acquisition of skills, training, and the formation of new concepts, going beyond the “given,” education. The proper use of instructional technology is to enable the learner—the child—to acquire skills which can be utilized in new concept formation. The teacher's role then shifts from concentration on training to involvement in education. However, if instructional technology is to be effective in helping students acquire mastery it should incorporate: 1) choice, 2) control by the student, 3) instantaneous dynamic feedback to the student which allows for self-control, self-organization, self-regulation, and self-correction, and 4) enhancement of adapting behavior. Fifty-seven Head Start children who were enrolled in the Drexel Early Childhood Center for an average of 2.54 years were the subject of these studies. Fifty-three of the subjects were followed through the sixth grade, fourteen through the ninth and a small group (all those who could be found) were followed into the tenth and eleventh grades. SCILS children are at or above grade level in reading and reading comprehension with thirty hours of instructional time. Outcomes compared with other Early Intervention Programs, in the United States, since the 1960s, show that with SCILS the Head Start children's achievement reaches the level of average middle-class children.


2018 ◽  
Vol 62 (2) ◽  
pp. 97-107 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nina Keith

Abstract. The positive effects of goal setting on motivation and performance are among the most established findings of industrial–organizational psychology. Accordingly, goal setting is a common management technique. Lately, however, potential negative effects of goal-setting, for example, on unethical behavior, are increasingly being discussed. This research replicates and extends a laboratory experiment conducted in the United States. In one of three goal conditions (do-your-best goals, consistently high goals, increasingly high goals), 101 participants worked on a search task in five rounds. Half of them (transparency yes/no) were informed at the outset about goal development. We did not find the expected effects on unethical behavior but medium-to-large effects on subjective variables: Perceived fairness of goals and goal commitment were least favorable in the increasing-goal condition, particularly in later goal rounds. Results indicate that when designing goal-setting interventions, organizations may consider potential undesirable long-term effects.


2017 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 78-89 ◽  
Author(s):  
Asmir Gračanin ◽  
Igor Kardum ◽  
Jasna Hudek-Knežević

Abstract. The neurovisceral integration model proposes that different forms of self-regulation, including the emotional suppression, are characterized by the activation of neural network whose workings are also reflected in respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA). However, most of the previous studies failed to observe theoretically expected increases in RSA during emotional suppression. Even when such effects were observed, it was not clear whether they resulted from specific task demands, a decrease in muscle activity, or they were the consequence of more specific self-control processes. We investigated the relation between habitual or trait-like suppression, spontaneous, and instructed suppression with changes in RSA during negative emotion experience. A modest positive correlation between spontaneous situational and habitual suppression was observed across two experimental tasks. Furthermore, the results showed greater RSA increase among participants who experienced higher negative affect (NA) increase and reported higher spontaneous suppression than among those with higher NA increase and lower spontaneous suppression. Importantly, this effect was independent from the habitual suppression and observable facial expressions. The results of the additional task based on experimental manipulation, rather than spontaneous use of situational suppression, indicated a similar relation between suppression and RSA. Our results consistently demonstrate that emotional suppression, especially its self-regulation component, is followed by the increase in parasympathetic activity.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Curtis David Von Gunten ◽  
Bruce D Bartholow ◽  
Jorge S. Martins

Executive functioning (EF) is defined as a set of top-down processes used in reasoning, forming goals, planning, concentrating, and inhibition. It is widely believed that these processes are critical to self-regulation and, therefore, that performance on behavioral task measures of EF should be associated with individual differences in everyday life outcomes. The purpose of the present study was to test this core assumption, focusing on the EF facet of inhibition. A sample of 463 undergraduates completed five laboratory inhibition tasks, along with three self-report measures of self-control and 28 self-report measures of life outcomes. Results showed that although most of the life outcome measures were associated with self-reported self-control, none of the life outcomes were associated with inhibition task performance at the latent-variable level, and few associations were found at the individual task level. These findings challenge the criterion validity of lab-based inhibition tasks. More generally, when considered alongside the known lack of convergent validity between inhibition tasks and self-report measures of self-control, the findings cast doubt on the task’s construct validity as measures of self-control processes. Potential methodological and theoretical reasons for the poor performance of laboratory-based inhibition tasks are discussed.


2016 ◽  
Vol 44 (7) ◽  
pp. 1173-1190 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hyung Jin Choi ◽  
Sangmin Lee ◽  
Se-Ri No ◽  
Eung Il Kim

We examined how compassion can alleviate employees' negative emotions, behaviors, and thoughts. On the basis of self-regulatory resources theory, we hypothesized that there would be relationships between the 2 mediating variables of self-esteem and self-efficacy, and the dependent variables of anxiety, burnout, workplace deviance, and intention to quit. We collected data on these variables from 284 nurses, who work in a stressful job that necessitates compassion from colleagues, to test our theoretical model. The results revealed that compassion alleviated negative emotions (anxiety and burnout), behavior (workplace deviance), and thoughts (intention to quit), with both self-esteem and self-efficacy having mediating effects. Thus, we demonstrated the specific path through which compassion can have positive effects on an organization's employees. We discuss the observed relationship between compassion and self-regulation, and theoretical contributions regarding differences between self-esteem and self-efficacy, as well as between anxiety and burnout.


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