Maria da Graça Bompastor Borges Dias

Affect, culture, and morality, or is it wrong to eat your dog ?

Are disgusting or disrespectful actions judged to be moral violations, even when they are harmless? Stories about victimless yet offensive actions (such as cleaning ones toilet with a flag) were presented to Brazilian and U.S. adults and children of high and low socioeconomic status (N = 360). Results show that college students at elite universities judged these stories to be matters of social convention or of personal preference. Most other Ss, especially in Brazil, took a moralizing stance toward these actions. For these latter Ss, moral judgments were better predicted by affective reactions than by appraisals of harmfulness. Results support the claims of cultural psychology (R.A. Shweder, 1991a) and suggest that cultural norms and culturally shaped emotions have a substantial impact on the domain of morality and the process of moral judgment. Suggestions are made for building cross-culturally valid models of moral judgment.

O lúdico e suas implicações nas estratégias de regulação das emoções em crianças hospitalizadas

The present study aimed to investigate if play resources modify the strategies used by hospitalized children to cope with emotions of anger and sadness. Thirty-six 6-and 10-years old children, divided into two control groups, inside and outside the hospital, and one experimental group (inside the hospital), were assessed. They were all submitted to pre and post tests that analysed how these children justified ways to stop feeling angry and sad in a hospitalization situation. In only one of the groups a play activity was developed with suggestions for more elaborated strategies. The results showed that strategies varied according to play activity; that there were no observed variations according to age and gender; that testing itself was considered a play activity and may enable changes in hospitalized children.

Compreensão de leitura: Estratégias de tomar notas e da imagem mental

The aim was to verify and compare the effect of strategies at Note-Taking and Mental Image training on reading comprehension among children from eight to 14 years old with difficulty in this area, from public and private schools. Firstly, they were classified in Groups of Little and Much Comprehension Difficulty (DG1 and DG2) and distributed in three groups: two experimental groups (EG1 and EG2) and a control group (CG). Then the EG1 performed the activity of Taking Notes and the EG2, the strategy of the Mental Image. The CG did not receive any training, but accomplished the same task as the experimental groups. The results demonstrate a performance significantly better of the EG1 than EG2 and CG. It was verified that DG1 progressed more on inferential subjects than DG2. Public school children succeeded the most. Both strategies caused the emergency of answers to the inferential and literal subjects.

Reasoning From Unfamiliar Premises: A Study With Unschooled Adults

A long tradition of research initiated by Luria in the 1930s has established that unschooled adults perform poorly on reasoning tasks. Particularly when the premises are unfamiliar, they adopt an inappropriate empirical bias. However, recent findings show that young children with little or no schooling reason competently if prompted to think of the unfamiliar premises as pertaining to a distant planet. We tested two groups of adults: illiterate, unschooled adults and adults with limited schooling. Both groups received problems that included either a premise with unknown content or a premise contradicting their everyday experience. When given a minimal prompt, both groups manifested the customary empirical bias. By contrast, when explicitly prompted to think of the unfamiliar premises as pertaining to a distant planet, they reasoned accurately and appropriately justified their conclusions in terms of the supplied premises.

A escola e o ensino da leitura

The access to the reading process comes as one of the various challenges to school and, perhaps, as the highly regarded and most claimed one by society. In the present article, what is firstly discussed is the need to propose students reading activities in which they can realise the idea that the meaning of the text to be built depends on the objectives and on the readers questions, as well as on the nature of the text and its macro and super structure. Besides, as insisted by Sole, it is important and essential those children learn how to use the reading strategies used by the experienced reader, so that they also become efficient and independent readers. Then, carrying on with some empirical evidences, comprehension strategies are dealt with as well as the place they occupy in the reading learning process.

Ownership reasoning in children across cultures

To what extent do early intuitions about ownership depend on cultural and socio-economic circumstances? We investigated the question by testing reasoning about third party ownership conflicts in various groups of three- and five-year-old children (N=176), growing up in seven highly contrasted social, economic, and cultural circumstances (urban rich, poor, very poor, rural poor, and traditional) spanning three continents. Each child was presented with a series of scripts involving two identical dolls fighting over an object of possession. The child had to decide who of the two dolls should own the object. Each script enacted various potential reasons for attributing ownership: creation, familiarity, first contact, equity, plus a control/neutral condition with no suggested reasons. Results show that across cultures, children are significantly more consistent and decisive in attributing ownership when one of the protagonists created the object. Development between three and five years is more or less pronounced depending on culture. The propensity to split the object in equal halves whenever possible was generally higher at certain locations (i.e., China) and quasi-inexistent in others (i.e., Vanuatu and street children of Recife). Overall, creation reasons appear to be more primordial and stable across cultures than familiarity, relative wealth or first contact. This trend does not correlate with the passing of false belief theory of mind.

A leitura, a produção de sentidos e o processo inferencial

In texts sense production the reader plays an active role, being the inferences an important cognitive process during this activity. It is believed, therefore, that reading comprehension is not guided, just, by the graphic marks of the text, but, above all, by what those marks have to say and by the way the reader apprehends and interprets the intention passed by the author. It is also believed that this interpretation happens at the reader/author interaction moment, generating senses that vary according to the reader and the nature of such interaction.

The cross-cultural validity of the Resilience Scale for Adults: a comparison between Norway and Brazil

BackgroundThe resilience construct is of increasing interest in clinical and health psychology. The Resilience Scale for Adults (RSA) is a measure of protective factors. The evidence supporting its construct validity is good, however evidence of cross-cultural validity is modest.The present study explored the factorial invariance of the RSA across a Brazilian and a Norwegian sample, as well as the construct validity in the Brazilian sample.MethodsThe Brazilian sample (N = 222) completed the Hopkins Symptom Check List-25 (HSCL-25), the Sense of Coherence (SOC), and the RSA. The Norwegian sample (N = 314) was included in order to examine the factorial invariance.ResultsThe results indicated that the latent constructs of the RSA (its primary factors) are the same in the Brazilian sample as in the Norwegian sample. The correlations between the subscales of the RSA were significant. In the Brazilian sample, the correlations with HSCL-25 and SOC were negative and positive, respectively, thus supporting its construct validity.ConclusionThe results indicate that the original factor structure of the RSA based on Norwegian samples remains stable in a Brazilian sample.

Raciocínio moral em interação social: um estudo sobre sugestionabilidade

Moral reasoning in social interaction: A study about suggestibility Studies were conducted in which children chose whether to keep a promise or tell the t...

Perceived efficiency and use of strategies for emotion regulation.

A total of 819 students, 208 women and 210 men from Norway and 201 women and 200 men from Brazil, of whom 76.9% were in the 20- to 29-yr. age range, rated the use and efficiency of 14 strategies in regulation of emotion aimed at stopping anger, anxiety, and sadness. The same strategies were rated as most frequently used in both cultures for all three negative emotions. The most used strategies were “talking to somebody” and “saying something to oneself.” Used strategies were rated as more efficient than nonused strategies; cultural variation in use of strategy was consistent with the distinction between individualism and collectivism and womens ratings supported prior research on confidence in emotions by showing use of more strategies for anxiety and sadness than mens. Ratings from an outpatient sample of 80 women (M age = 25.5 yr., SD = 4.4) and 80 men (M age = 25.4 yr., SD = 4.1) supported expectations that there would be differences between nonpatients and patients based on diagnostic characteristics of depression and anxiety.