Thanks, but No Thanks: Unpacking the Relationship Between Relative Power and Gratitude

Power and gratitude are universal features of social life and impact a wide range of intra- and interpersonal outcomes. Drawing on the social distance theory of power, we report four studies that examine how relative power influences feelings and expressions of gratitude. An archival analysis of author acknowledgements in published academic articles ( N = 1,272) revealed that low-power authors expressed more gratitude than high-power authors. A pre-registered experiment ( N = 283) involving live conversations online found that having relatively low power caused increased feelings and expressions of gratitude after benefiting from a favor. Another pre-registered experiment ( N = 356) demonstrated that increased interpersonal orientation among lower power individuals and increased psychological entitlement among higher power individuals drove these effects. Finally, an archival analysis of conversational exchanges ( N = 136,215) among Wikipedia editors revealed that relational history moderated the effect of relative power on gratitude expression. Overall, our findings highlight when and why relative power influences feelings and expressions of gratitude.

On the Fraught Internationalism of Intellectuals

This chapter investigates the idea and practice of intellectual cooperation as a tool of international governance: an innovation of the League’s International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation (ICIC). It shows how Austria’s involvement decisively shaped both the ICIC’s agenda and the future European intellectual order. From the mid-1920s onwards, cooperation included the newly emerging area of cultural heritage and its institutions, such as libraries, archives, and museums, all of which had a rich imperial tradition in Vienna. The chapter also elaborates how interwar intellectual cooperation subsequently informed the strategy that UNESCO, ICIC’s successor organization, would adopt after 1945. This chapter provides a relational history of the development of international intellectual cooperation between Austria and the League of Nations, and aims to illuminate the opportunities, expectations, and realities of international intellectual cooperation from a regional, actor- and institution-oriented perspective. It reconstructs the ‘international’ of intellectual cooperation in the making.

Relational History

Adam Smith writes history to teach people how a plurality of forces informs our moral and economic actions. He employs the stadial theory—prevalent in his day—to explore four different states, or kinds of society, but he does not intend to use these to write a simple, linear history of the ‘stages’ of human progress. This article employs Smith’s typological method for writing history to create a four-fold typo­lo­gy of how contemporary scholars have interpreted Smith’s use of history. By using an approach, drawn from Smith’s historiography, to understand his later interpreters, this article demonstrates that Smith’s approach to history is about telling a story that embraces plurality, holds differences in tension, and resists simplification.

Relational History: An Interview with Dale Tomich

Interview with historian Dale Tomich, conducted on May 5, 2019, in the city of Niterói

Editing the first Journal of World History: global history from inside the kitchen

This article offers the first study of the Cahiers d’Histoire Mondiale, the Journal of World History published under the auspices of UNESCO from 1953 to 1972 as a by-product of the ‘History of mankind’ project. Drawing on material in the UNESCO archives, it delves into what Lucien Febvre, the first editor of the Cahiers, called his ‘kitchen’, in order to understand world history as a practice. Data on author origin and article subject matter point to the journal’s mitigated success in overcoming Eurocentrism. The article ultimately contends that the Cahiers was at once a laboratory that experimented with new forms of relational history, and a forum where the very nature of world history was discussed by scholars from around the world (mainly from the West, but also from the East and the South). It suggests that today’s epistemological discussion on global history might benefit from the reflection offered by this now largely forgotten experiment.

Moral impoliteness

This study is concerned with the increasing use of impolite language that one observes during interactions which take place over the Internet. Drawing on a number of Instagram posts uploaded by various socialites and public figures, this study proposes the notion of a ‘Basic Moral Perspective’ as being a window to an understanding of the nature of some impolite language witnessed on social media. I define ‘Basic Moral Perspective’ as the moral predisposition which interactants possess. As the study shows, in contexts in which there appears to be little relational history between interactants, the ‘Basic Moral Perspective’, amongst other factors, that interactants bring to an interaction can potentially result in impolite language. As will be shown throughout the study, the interactants’ Basic Moral Perspective can provide a clue as to how certain interactions are responded to.

The post-traumatic growth: The wisdom of the mind, its clinical and neuropsychoanalytic vicissitudes

The purpose of this symposium is to bring awareness about and to promote knowledge of the phenomenon of posttraumatic growth (PTG) and its neurobiological mechanisms. The other purpose is to explore neuro-psycho-education as an important tool in understanding trauma and in promoting PTG.The idea of PTG was pioneered by Calhoun and Tedeschi (1999), who addressed positive psychological change (as they compared it with the “mind's wisdom”), which occurs in some individuals after trauma. PTG happens in the context of and despite of processing traumatic pain and loss. This phenomenon includes five main factors: relating to others with greater compassion; finding new possibilities, personal strength, spiritual change, and a deeper appreciation of life.Both neuropsychoanalysis and neuro-psycho-education offer us the knowledge of neurobiology and its mechanisms of “action” (such as neuroplasticity, neurointegration, mind-body integration, connectomes, ‘triune brain’, ‘bottom up processing’ and ‘top-down regulation’, etc.) and help modern mental health practitioners to understand their clients from “inside out”: to read the cues of their underlying (and not verbalized) patterns of being; to access their undisclosed, untold, emotional-relational history; to understand how this history shapes the present; to appreciate one's unique personal growth, even in the aftermath of trauma, and to understand mindfulness and mentalization as two powerful healing processes which play significant role in PTG.Both neuropsychoanalysis and neuro-psycho-education also help clinicians to be in touch with and to regulate our own emotions and somatic responses to a “difficult client”, while maintaining “benevolent curiosity” and empathic stance.Disclosure of interestThe author has not supplied his/her declaration of competing interest.