The purpose of this study was to identify the persistent and dynamic association between bullying and victimization. Gender differences in patterns of school bullying was hypothesized based on the literature. Analysis were based on waves 3-6 of the Korea Children and Youth Panel Survey, a nationally representative data of primary and secondary school students in South Korea (N = 1,881). Autoregressive cross-lagged model was employed to identify the reciprocal association between bullying and victimization in longitudinal data. As hypothesized, regardless of gender, lagged effects were statistically significant between each time points such that current bullying caused future bullying and current victimization led to future victimization. However, there was no cross-lagged effects of current victimization on future bullying nor current perpetration on future victimization for both male and female youth. Findings from this study may have implications for designing policies against school bulling. Not only is short-term intervention for handling immediate psycho-social maladjustment important, but so are long-term plans that prevent youth from falling into continued perpetration and victimization in the system of school bullying.
Do social situations have an impact on an individual’s information processing and emotional experiences? Two studies were conducted to investigate relationships between self-reference effects, emotional experiences and social information processing. Study 1 examined whether biases favoring self-related stimuli could occur automatically. Participants had to judge whether sequential geometric shape–label pairs matched or mismatched. The results showed that self-related stimuli are more rapidly processed than friends/others-related stimuli. In Study 2, the participants had to recall items which were presented with different instructions (either chosen by a friend or by the computer). Here we explored whether the self-reference effect is reduced in a social learning condition. When comparing the social learning condition (seated in pairs) with the nonsocial learning condition (seated alone), the participants recalled more self-related words in the nonsocial learning condition than in the social learning condition. Importantly, the automatic self-reference effect disappeared in the social learning condition. More friends-related words were recalled in the social condition than self-related words. In addition, while tasting chocolates, the participants judged them to be more likeable in the social condition than in the nonsocial condition. These results implicated that social processing can be useful for reducing the automatic self-reference effects and shared experiences are perceived more intensely than unshared experiences.
The purpose of this study is to examine the effect of distress tolerance on subjective well-being and the mediating effect of experiential avoidance in the relationship between distress tolerance and subjective well-being. We conducted an online survey a total of 285 normal adults in the nation from October 21 to 24, 2015. The questionnaire was composed of a distress intolerance index, a concise measure of subjective well-being, and acceptance action questionnaire. And questionnaires were distributed and retrived by an online survey company. Collected data has been analyzed by the structural equation modeling. The correlation analysis showed that distress tolerance was positively correlated with subjective well-being, while negatively with experiential avoidance. Also, the verification of mediating effects of experiential avoidance in the relation between distress tolerance and subjective well-being indicated that experiential avoidance partly mediated the relationship at a meaningful level. Additionally, deflection correction bootstrap analysis was used to verify indirect effects and its results revealed that the mediating effect going from distress tolerance to subjective well-being passing through experiential avoidance was statistically significant. That is, distress tolerance not only influences subjective well-being directly but also influences indirectly through experiential avoidance. Finally, significance and limitations of this study were discussed along with the suggestions for further research.
The purpose of this study is to identify factors that improve psychological health of Korean navies who are dispatched overseas. Specifically, we examined the effects of the navies' occupational calling, perceived social support, and their interaction on anxiety. One hundred thirty-eight dispatched navies were recruited, and they completed the Korean calling scale, multifaceted social support scale, and anxiety scale-Y form. Results showed that after controlling for gender, marital status, and the previous experiences of dispatch, those who had a higher level of occupational calling and social support experienced a lower level of anxiety respectively before they were dispatched overseas. Furthermore, the significant interaction effect between occupational calling and social support on anxiety confirms that the effect of social support on anxiety is more prominent for those who have a lower level of occupational calling. We discussed the implications of these results, study limitations, and directions for future research.
Studies find that money spent for others (vs self) increases happiness. This study examines whether the hedonic benefit of prosocial spending varies according to one’s level of loneliness. Given that prosocial spending strengthens social bonding, social spending was expected to have a greater impact on the happiness of lonely individuals. This prediction was supported in two studies that employed different measurements of prosocial spending (typical spending habit, Study 1; resource allocation task, Study 2) for predicting happiness either at the trait- (Study 1) or state-level (Study 2). In short, lonely people seem to benefit more from prosocial spending than less lonely counterparts. This research contributes to the prosocial spending and happiness literature by shedding light on an important individual difference factor, loneliness.
Social class has become a major focus of research in the field of Western psychology due to its critical impact on human life. The Korean scholarship in psychology, however, has paid very little attention to the issue of social class despite the deepening of social stratification in the country; and the concepts and measurement they used were typically borrowed from sociology. In this study, I discussed what social class means and how it should be measured in order to emphasize the importance of the concept and its related issues. To this end, I examined a variety of theoretical backgrounds on the measurement of social class and the concept of socioeconomic status (SES)—a term commonly used as a synonym for social class. This study divided the method of measuring social class into objective social class and subjective social class, and outlined the characteristics of each approach and their main indicators. Finally, I assessed the recent trend in the Korean psychology on social class measurement. Among the 23 studies I have found, 65.2% used the objective social class index; and education was the objective indicator they most frequently employed, followed by income and occupation. Social stratification identity was used in all seven studies that applied subjective social class. And seven different words to describe social class was found. Based on these results, I concluded that there should be a call for more direct research on social class variables. In addition, I suggest that ‘social class’, instead of socioeconomic status, should be used as a preferred term in the future studies and propose a few notes on how to use the objective indicators and subjective social class measurement.