Search

Copyright of Psocial is the property of Revista de Investigacion en Psicologia Social and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The importance of emotional climate in the organizational climate literature has gained interest. However, few studies have concentrated on adequately measuring the emotional climate of organizations. In this study, a reliable and valid scale was developed to measure the most important aspects of emotional climate in different organizations. This study presents evidence of reliability and validity for 28 items constructed to measure emotional climate in an organization in four separate studies. The data were obtained from working people from four different organizations by self-administered questionnaires. The findings indicate that three factors--Trust, Hope, and Security--were factors of the 28-item scale. Validation data also included correlations with duration of employment. The other method of assessing criterion validity was by comparing mean scores in organizations with differing productivity; results indicated that the organization with more productive members had a significantly higher mean score on emotional climate and its subscales. The generalizability of the results to private businesses also was assessed. DOI 10.2466/PMS.110.2.501-516

To purchase or authenticate to the full-text of this article, please visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-4560.2007.00518.x Byline: Daniel Bar-Tal (1), Eran Halperin (2), Joseph de Rivera (3) Abstract: It is well established today that emotions are an important part of most societal dynamics. The current article focuses on the role of different collective emotional elements in creating, preserving, and resolving conflicts. The main premise is that collective emotions play a pivotal role in shaping individual and societal responses to conflicting events and in contributing to the evolvement of a social context that maintains the emotional climate and collective emotional orientation that have developed. The first part of the article provides a conceptual framework to discuss the relations between conflict, context, and collective emotions. The second part uses the conceptual framework to discuss the societal implications of the articles presented in this issue. Taken together, the parts create a platform for future research on the role of collective emotions in conflict resolution and the construction of cultures of peace. Author Affiliation: (1)Tel-Aviv University (2)Haifa University (3)Clark University Article note: (*) Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Daniel Bar-Tal, School of Education, Tel Aviv University, P.O.B. 39040, Tel-Aviv 69978 [e-mail: daniel@post.tau.ac].

To purchase or authenticate to the full-text of this article, please visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-4560.2007.00507.x Byline: Joseph de Rivera (1), Rahael Kurrien (1), Nina Olsen (1) Abstract: Societies seem to have emotional climates that affect how people feel and act in public situations. Unlike the emotions experienced in an individual's personal life, these modal feelings reflect a collective response to the socio-economic-political situation of the society and influence how most people behave toward one another and their government. A government may foster a climate of fear to ensure social control, or it may encourage the formation of heterogeneous social groups to facilitate a climate of trust between people from different groups. On one hand, emotional climates may be viewed as reflecting the relative peacefulness or violence of a society. Thus, an assessment of emotional climate may provide a subjective index of human security to complement objective measures of democracy, human rights, equality, and other factors that we presume are beneficial to human welfare. On the other hand, we may view emotional climates as influences that act to further or to impede the development of the culture of peace advocated by the General Assembly of the United Nations. Thus, their assessment may have predictive power, and measuring a society's emotional climate may help us to create desirable policy. In this article we show that it is possible to measure some important aspects of the emotional climates of three nations that have different degrees of a culture of peace: Norway, the United States, and India. We show that estimates of the collective emotions that constitute climate can be distinguished from reports of personal emotions in that the former are more influenced by nation and the latter by social class. It is the subjective experience of national emotional climate, rather than personal emotional experience, that appears most related to objective indices for the culture of peace in the different nations. Author Affiliation: (1)Clark University Article note: (*) Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Joseph de Rivera, Department of Psychology, Clark University, 950 Main St., Worcester, MA 01610 [e-mail: jderivera@clarku.edu].

To purchase or authenticate to the full-text of this article, please visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-4560.2007.00506.x Byline: Joseph de Rivera (1), Dario Paez (2) Author Affiliation: (1)Clark University (2)University of Basque Country Article note: (*) Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Joseph de Rivera, Department of Psychology, Clark University, 950 Main Street, Worcester, MA 01610 [e-mail: jderivera@clarku.edu].

An educational peace fair held at Clark University was successful in convincing individuals that they could do something to help prevent nuclear war; however, it revealed that the current peace movement was unable to portray convincingly a course of national action that could promote peace and justice. (Author/BJV)