Communal relational context (or lack thereof) shapes emotional lives

Effect of social cohesion on crime control strategies among rural dwellers in Nigeria

This study examined how social cohesion variables, SCV are associated with effective crime control strategies, CCS in Nigeria's rural areas. With mixed-methods, we collected data from 3408 participants and 12 interviewees in 48 rural areas; the results showed that strong SCV indirectly hindered an effective CCS. Significant correlation was found between SCV and CCS. The SCV are shared emotions, strong-family and religious-ties, mutual-trust, communal cohesion, well-articulated common information network, and longstanding age-group bond. The CCS adopted by the law enforcement agents were largely ineffective; these strategies are indiscriminate arrest or search with/without warrant, secret deployment of informants, liaising with local security guards and prompt documentation of cases. Other strategies include monitoring crime black-spots, collaboration among different security agencies, awareness programs and strong community-police relationship. There is a need for public awareness about the negative effects of communal bond on crime control to have a crime-free society in Nigeria.

Support provision in a digitalized world: The consequences of social sharing across different communication channels

People tend to share their emotional experiences with others, with sharing increasingly done online. This raises questions about the quality of computer-mediated vs. face-to-face sharing. The present review (1) outlines conditions for sharing to improve emotional and relational well-being, (2) discusses when computer-mediated sharing with other people may (not) be conducive to these conditions, and (3) reviews recent research on the effectiveness of computer-mediated sharing with humans and virtual agents. It is concluded that the emotional and relational consequences of sharing are dependent on the responsiveness of the listener, regardless of the communication channel. Differences exist, however, in the extent to which channels are conducive to various forms of responding, with implications for speakers' emotional and relational well-being.

State relationship orientation and helping behaviors: the influence of hunger and trait relationship orientations

Exchange orientation (EO) and communal orientation (CO) are two fundamental relationship orientations (ROs). We argue that state RO (i.e., the relative activation of the two ROs at a specific moment) varies across situations and should be differentiated from trait ROs. In two studies, we examined how state RO affected subsequent helping behaviors and how it was influenced by a situational factor (i.e., hunger). We also examined whether trait ROs moderated the above links. An eye-tracking paradigm (Study 1) and a scenario-based paradigm (Study 2) were adopted to assess state RO. The two studies consistently found that relatively more activation of state EO over state CO reduced helping tendency toward strangers (Study 1) and acquaintances (Study 2). High trait CO amplified the effect in Study 1. Moreover, hunger heightened the relative activation of state EO over state CO in both studies, but the effect was only significant for participants with high trait EO in Study 1. The results highlight the importance to study the momentary variation of ROs and open new research directions.

Supplementary information

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s12144-022-03666-y.

How emotions, relationships, and culture constitute each other: advances in social functionalist theory

Social Functionalist Theory (SFT) emerged 20 years ago to orient emotion science to the social nature of emotion. Here we expand upon SFT and make the case for how emotions, relationships, and culture constitute one another. First, we posit that emotions enable the individual to meet six "relational needs" within social interactions: security, commitment, status, trust, fairness, and belongingness. Building upon this new theorising, we detail four principles concerning emotional experience, cognition, expression, and the cultural archiving of emotion. We conclude by considering the bidirectional influences between culture, relationships, and emotion, outlining areas of future inquiry.

Perspective on COVID-19 Pandemic Factors Impacting Organizational Leadership

Employees are important assets of an organization. Therefore, the employee engagement in teamwork is extremely vital for long-term organizational development. Good managers need excellent leadership skills. However, as the COVID-19 pandemic rapidly spreads around the world, many countries implemented strategies to avoid infection, such as working from home, isolation of infected people from others, and 14 days of self-quarantine. These strategies impact the trust, communal relationships, and social exchange relationships among organizational employees. However, communal and social exchange relationships are necessary for organizational leadership, and they are considered as the basis of social networks. The trust, communal relationships, social exchange relationships, and leadership in an organization are an interesting issue, particularly in the COVID-19 time, since the role of leaders is very crucial for maintaining organizational sustainability. The main objective of this study is to investigate the impact of COVID-19 on leadership in organizations based on trust, communal relationships, and social exchange relationships. The study employed correlation analysis to explore the interrelationships between variables. The 220 samples collected consisted of basic, middle, and high managers of organizations. The findings show that COVID-19 impacted organizational leadership. COVID-19 (F1) and (F2) factors integrated with each variable: (1) trust, (2) communal relationships, and (3) social exchange relationships created a stronger relationship between trust and leadership, communal relationships and leadership, and also social exchange relationship and leadership in organizations. On the contrary, Covid-19 (F3) factors integrated with each variable: (1) trust, (2) communal relationships, and (3) social exchange relationships decreased a relationship between trust and leadership, communal relationships and leadership, and also social exchange relationships and leadership in organizations. These results can help CEOs in organizations to perceive what factors have a positive impact or a negative impact on leadership in organizations in order to improve their leadership skills, even post COVID-19. The managerial implications are that (1) leaders need good communication skills to share true information with empathy and optimism and (2) leaders need to be thoughtful and capable to handle change in uncertain situations ethically.

A collective perspective: shared attention and the mind

I review the recent literature on shared attention, instances in which one's personal perspective is also another's. As described by Shteynberg [6^••], shared attention involves the activation of a psychological perspective that is personal and plural and irreducibly collective-a perspective in which the world is experienced from 'our attention'. When shared attention is perceived, information under shared attention receives deeper cognitive processing. By updating mutual knowledge, shared attention facilitates communication and, quite possibly, the creation of shared attitudes and beliefs. In this review, I focus on the last 5 years of empirical work detailing the cognitive and affective consequences of shared attention. I also highlight empirical work on the relevance of shared attention to pragmatically important challenges, such as the polarizing effects of social and mass media consumption, as well as the cognitive mechanisms behind autism-like traits. In all, the findings underscore the possibility that shared attention is a basic psychological building block of human sociality-a capacity to act collectively with others who share one's reality.