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We aim to examine the potential risk of exercising forgiveness on people’s trust in the integrity of leaders. Further, we investigate whether explaining the leader's moral principle would mitigate the risk.

Three studies examined cultural perceptions of self-change in romantic relationships. In Study 1 ( N = 191), Chinese participants perceived hypothetical couples who changed for the sake of the relationship to have better relationship quality than couples who did not, compared to European American participants. In Study 2 ( N = 396), Chinese individuals in a dating relationship were more likely to perceive that they had changed in the relationship, and self-change was a stronger predictor of relationship quality for them than for American dating individuals. In Study 3 ( N = 115 dyads), Chinese married couples perceived greater self-change, and their perceived self-change was due in part to higher endorsement of dutiful adjustment beliefs than American couples. Self-change was a stronger predictor of relationship quality for Chinese married couples than American couples. Our studies provide support for cultural differences in the role of self-change in romantic relationships, which have implications for partner regulation and relationship counseling across cultures.

In this paper, we examine the relationship between entrepreneurship education and entrepreneurial passion. Despite the advancement of entrepreneurship education literature and the increasing focus on entrepreneurship education in business schools, we lack empirical exploration on how entrepreneurship education can impact students’ passion for founding new organizations. We hypothesize that students who take entrepreneurship classes would develop high levels of founding passion due to a great perception of skills and abilities that increase positive emotions and decrease negative emotions about the entrepreneurship process. Moreover, we draw on the literature on role models to suggest that students’ entrepreneurial family background (students whose immediate family members are entrepreneurs) strengthens the influence of entrepreneurship education on entrepreneurial passion. Utilizing survey data collected from 160 university students, we found that entrepreneurship education positively influences students’ founding passion and that this relationship is strengthened when students have entrepreneurs in their immediate family.

Theories of culture, cognition, and social relations suggest there may be differences in conceptions of forgiveness between the members of East Asian and Western cultures, but few researchers have examined this issue. This article builds on previous research on prototypes of forgiveness in the United States to address the question “What is forgiveness?” in Japan. In Studies 1a and 1b, we investigated Japanese conceptions of forgiveness. Study 2 demonstrated that forgiveness features that U.S. and Japanese participants generated are meaningfully different. Compared with Americans, Japanese participants focused more on aspects related to relationship harmony; they seemed to emphasize an adjustment motive and decisional forgiveness. They also put less emphasis on emotional forgiveness and attention to individuals in comparison with Americans. Our results suggest that the high value placed on relationship maintenance in Japan leads to different understandings of forgiveness. Inclusion of culturally diverse conceptions into the definition of forgiveness aids further understanding of forgiveness, which, in turn, enhances the development and application of existing theories.

Although it is well established that depressed individuals have a tendency to interpret ambiguous stimuli in a negative manner, previous studies have rarely applied narrative analysis to investigate this relation. Our purpose for the present study was to extend the literature by examining whether individuals with depressive symptoms generate negatively distorted narratives when taking the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT). We focused on emotional tone and agentic theme in fictional narratives to investigate (1) whether depression is related to the emotional tone of the narrative, and (2) whether agency emerging in narratives mediates the relation between depression and emotional tone. Participants wrote fictional stories in response to three different TAT cards. Two independent sets of three coders coded narratives for emotional tone and agentic theme, respectively. As expected, depression was positively related to the negative emotional tone, and this relation was mediated by the lack of agentic themes in the narratives.

Supplemental material, Supplemental_Material_2 for How Does Culture Shape Conceptions of Forgiveness? Evidence From Japan and the United States by Minjoo Joo, Kari A. Terzino, Susan E. Cross, Naomi Yamaguchi and Ken-ichi Ohbuchi in Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology

Debates regarding the nature of self-enhancement versus accurate self-assessment have been active among psychologists for decades. More recently, researchers have become interested in the panculturality of self-enhancement. Some researchers argue that self-enhancement is universal and present within all cultures. Others declare self-enhancement to be a Western tendency, with self-diminishment being the norm among East Asians. Importantly, the majority of such studies have not compared self-perceptions against objective external criteria, especially those with East Asians. Furthermore, the link between narcissism and self-enhancement has been largely overlooked within Korean samples. To address such gaps, we utilized scores on an objective test as a criterion to investigate the accuracy of Koreans’ self-assessments of performance, as well as how individual differences in narcissism are related to such assessments. A sample of Korean students (N = 146; 71 women) completed self-report measures of narcissism and self-esteem, and took a listening comprehension quiz. Estimated and actual scores were collected and used to compute self-enhancement scores. Results demonstrated that Koreans’ self-perceptions of performance on the quiz were quite accurate. As has been found in Western cultures, narcissism was related to self-enhancement.

The present research investigated the roles of identity fusion and impulsiveness in extreme sacrifices for romantic partners. After completing questionnaires assessing identity fusion, inclusion of other in the self, passionate love, and communal orientation, participants responded to the trolley dilemma in which they could save their partner by sacrificing themselves. Participants in the time-pressure condition were given eight-seconds to respond to the dilemma; the other group had no time constraints. Identity fusion was the only variable that significantly predicted ultimate sacrifice. Hurrying participants' response to the dilemma (i.e., inducing impulsive decision-making) increased self-sacrifice in highly fused but not in weakly fused individuals.