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Christopher Peterson

Christopher Peterson Books

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“Clusters of items in the scale point to the following tendencies associated with social responsibility: greater concern for social and moral issues; disapproval of privilege and favor; emphasis on duties and self-discipline; greater conventionality; less rebelliousness; greater sense of trust and confidence in the world; greater poise, assurance, and personal security.”

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“However, research with activists in the Civil Rights and antiwar movements of the 1950s and 1960s and of those who sheltered Holocaust survivors during World War II confirm that compassion, empathy, and social responsibility were core family values that motivated their actions. Once exercised in action, values of social responsibility and service to others may become integral to identity.”

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“The ties that bind younger generations to the broader community are reciprocal, that is, when young people feel that the community cares about them and that they have a say in community affairs, they are more likely to identify with the community’s goals and to want to commit to its service. The evidence from prevention and community youth development studies is clear: When youths feel connected to others in the institutions of their communities, they are less likely to violate the norms and more likely to serve the common good of those communities.”

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“In contrast to the objectivity of blind justice and the abstract logic of principled reasoning, care reasoning requires understanding particularity—the needs, interests, and well-being of another person—and understanding the relationship between oneself and that other person. This requires a moral stance “informed by care, love, empathy, compassion, and emotional sensitivity.”

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“For both justice and care, perspective taking is a source of knowledge about others and about the possible consequences of one’s own actions as they have impact on the lives of others. Developing this ability, in either its strictly cognitive form or its cognitive and affective mix, constitutes an epistemological advantage. That is to say, it deepens and broadens one’s knowledge and the forms of one’s knowledge regarding moral contexts, deliberation, action, and likely consequences.”

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“In addition, the care perspective legitimates emotional responsiveness, in the form of empathy or being moved by the plight of another, as a source of knowledge and appropriate motivation. The strong emotional sense that one must prevent harm or right an interpersonal or social injustice is seen as a moral voice as undeniable as our justice-based codes and laws regarding moral conduct.”

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“... Enright’s developmental theorizing emphasizes that reasoning about the use of forgiveness appears to mature as people age, with the lowest levels of maturity reflecting the idea that forgiveness is appropriate only after revenge has been obtained or after restitution has been made. As people’s moral reasoning develops, their reasoning about forgiveness becomes oriented toward viewing forgiveness as an unconditional gift given to transgressors based on the belief in the innate value of all persons.”

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“Higher stage [regarding moral reasoning] parents do not use love withdrawal as a parenting technique and prefer discussion-based parenting (e.g., induction). Higher stage parents are less likely to endorse “conventional” values (e.g., obedience, manners, respect for rules and law) and are more likely to endorse values that promote autonomy and commitment to and respect for others.”

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“... Nix et al. (1999) showed in experimental studies that whereas task success can produce happiness, only success at autonomously motivated tasks maintained or enhanced vitality. Finally, in new research, Bernstein and Ryan (2001) argued that subjective vitality can be affected by contact with nature.”

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“Several studies have found that people are less likely to persist on difficult or unsolvable problems if they have already exerted self-control on a prior task, such as attempting to control their thoughts or emotions or resisting the temptation to eat chocolates and cookies. Some recent evidence suggests that the capacity for self-control is enhanced by positive emotions, and there is evidence that people in good moods persist longer (and perform better) at solving tasks.”

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“Humble individuals will not willfully distort information in order to defend, repair, or verify their own image. For humble people, there should be no press toward self-importance and no burning need to see—or present—themselves as being better than they actually are. They should also not be particularly interested in dominating others in order to receive entitlements or to elevate their own status. On the other hand, humility should not lead people to take harsh or condemning approaches toward themselves, magnifying weaknesses and severely punishing failures while overlooking strengths and successes.”

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“This character strength is a quiet one. Those who are modest let their accomplishments speak for themselves. They do not seek the spotlight. They do not toot their own horns. They acknowledge mistakes and imperfections. They do not take undue credit for their accomplishments, instead regarding themselves as fortunate to be in a position where something good has happened to them.”

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“True self-respect, according to Mencius, is based on the vales of benevolence, dutifulness, conscientiousness, truthfulness, and delight in what is good. Bravery, in Chinese philosophy, is the quality that allows people to pursue those values, hold steadfast to them in times when they are challenged, and remain true to them when faced with conventional social ideals that conflict with full human excellence.”

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“Models of leader attributes that dominated in the early part of the 20th century emphasized leader traits. Several surveys and reviews of this literature identified a number of dispositional qualities that distinguished leaders from nonleaders, including intelligence, originality, dependability, initiative, desire to excel, sociability, adaptability, extroversion, and dominance. However, no single personal quality was strongly and consistently correlated with leadership.”

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“Indeed, lack of self-control may be at the root of all emotional disorders, so named because the person is controlled by anxiety and depression rather than vice versa. Everyone experiences negative emotions; what determines whether they escalate to full-blown disorders may simply be whether the person has the ability to circumscribe them.”

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“Attention is crucial to the success of self-regulation, and indeed attentional processes often constitute the first step toward either success or failure at self-regulation. As mentioned, reduced self-monitoring is often a precipitating factor in self-regulation failure because it is quite easy to lose track of one’s status or quit regulating oneself when one cannot evaluate the distance between the current state and the goal state ... When people cease to attend to their own behavior, self-regulation typically deteriorates.”

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“Self-regulation is highly valued. Even if we find them a bit tedious, we admire people who stick to an exercise regimen. We certainly value people who do not express every negative emotion they experience, those who are “low maintenance” because they can control their reactions to disappointment and insecurity. We can count on the self-controlled person to keep her promises because she will not be distracted in the course of so doing.”

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“If parents can instill self-control in their children, they can achieve a powerful and important effect that will benefit their offspring for years to come. Indulgent parenting and an excessive concern with maximizing children’s self-esteem may, however, be detrimental to self-control, producing instead a personality that is weak, narcissistic, and self-indulgent.”

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“Balanced and restorative justice is a new approach to juvenile crime that conceives of crime as an act that not only harms people but also violates relationships in a community. Thus, rather than a retributive approach, in which the state punishes an offender, restorative justice practices emphasize healing of the victim, the offender, and the community.”

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“An aha experienced decades ago by one of us is relevant to this point. Halfway through a grueling clinical internship, CP [Christopher Peterson] complained to his supervisor, “No one [meaning the patients] ever says thank you for anything I try to do.” The response from the experienced psychiatrist stopped CP mid-whine: “If they [the patients] could say thank you, how many of them do you think would be in a psychiatric hospital?”

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“We classify the positive traits that protect us from excess as strengths of temperance. What are the types of excess of special concern? Hatred—against which forgiveness and mercy protect us. Arrogance—against which humility and modesty protect us. Short-term pleasure with long-term costs—against which prudence protects us. And destabilizing emotional extremes of all sorts—against which self-regulation protects us.”

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“What’s happened is that, almost overnight, we’ve switched from democracy in real-property recording to oligarchy in real-property recording. There was no court case behind this, no statute from Congress or the state legislatures. It was accomplished in a private corporate decision. The banks just did it.”

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