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Social issues are important dividing lines in the "culture wars" between the political left and right. Despite much research into social issue stance and ideology, little research has explored these with Relational Models Theory (RMT). RMT proposes four distinct models that people use to construe social relations, each entailing distinct moral considerations. In two studies, participants read summaries of the models, rated how relevant each was to their positions on several social issues (e.g., capital punishment), and expressed issue positions. In Study 1, Communal Sharing and Equality Matching construals predicted prototypical liberal positions across a range of issues; Authority Ranking and Market Pricing construals predicted prototypical conservative positions. By using multilevel modelling in Study 2, individual differences in average Communal Sharing and Authority Ranking construals predicted prototypical liberal and conservative positions, respectively, independent of several factors known to predict social issue stance. In issue-specific analyses (e.g., focusing on euthanasia), all models showed effects independent of self-reported ideology, while for certain issues (same-sex marriage, animal testing, gun control, and flag burning), issue construal using different models predicted opposing positions, implicating relational models in moral disagreement. This paper provides novel tests of Relationship Regulation Theory and suggests that RMT is relevant in understanding political ideology, social issue stance, and moral judgement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Measures of self-forgiveness that merely focus on the outcome of positive self-regard risk neglecting the process through which offenders restore it. They may thus tap pseudo self-forgiveness where offenders downplay their responsibility for the wrongdoing. For genuine self-forgiveness, the process should instead involve an attenuation of the negative link between responsibility acceptance and positive self-regard. In this paper, we examine how acts of value reaffirmation facilitate genuine self-forgiveness. In Study 1, a role-play experiment (N = 90), participants either confessed their wrongdoing to the victim or not. Although responsibility acceptance was strongly negatively related to reported self-forgiveness (i.e., self-regard), this relationship was tempered when participants confessed their wrongdoing to the victim and, through this, reaffirmed the violated values. In Study 2, a longitudinal study referring to self-reported transgressions (N = 74), responsibility acceptance was negatively related to self-forgiveness measures as well as self-esteem when offenders showed little value reaffirmation, but not when they more strongly reaffirmed the violated values. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]