This original and engaging book advocates an unabashedly empirical approach to understanding human values: abstract ideals that we consider important, such as freedom, equality, achievement, helpfulness, security, tradition, and peace. Our values are relevant to everything we do, helping us choose between careers, schools, romantic partners, places to live, things to buy, who to vote for, and much more. There is enormous public interest in the psychology of values and a growing recognition of the need for a deeper understanding of the ways in which values are embedded in our attitudes and behavior. How do they affect our well-being, our relationships with other people, our prosperity, and our environment? In his examination of these questions, Maio focuses on tests of theories about values, through observations of what people actually think and do. In the past five decades, psychological research has learned a lot about values, and this book describes what we have learned and why it is important. It provides the first overview of psychological research looking at how we mentally represent and use our values, and constitutes important reading for psychology students at all levels, as well as academics in psychology and related social and health sciences.

The eighth Ontario Symposium brought together an international group of scholars who work in the area of the psychology of values. Among the categories these experts address are the conceptualizations of values, value systems, and value-attitude-behavior relations; methodological issues; the role of values in specific domains, such as prejudice, commitment, and deservingness; and the transmission of values through family, media, and culture. Each chapter in the volume illustrates both the diversity and vitality of research on the psychology of values.

The book provides conceptual and theoretical elaborations on human values from a cultural psychological approach. The authors illustrate their original contributions with empirical data, allowing for productive discussion on the topic of ontogenesis of values from a historical-cultural perspective.

Values in Therapy is a powerful and practical guide for any therapist—chock-full of insight and tools to conceptualize, integrate, and effectively apply values work in-session. With an emphasis on cultivating meaning and vitality in client lives, the values component of acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) is what draws many clinicians to the treatment model. Yet, until now, there have been no practical guides available on values-based practice written from an ACT perspective. And while values work may appear deceptively simple, it’s often difficult to effectively carry out in practice. That’s where this comprehensive guide comes in. Values in Therapy emphasizes the facilitation of specific qualities inherent in effective values conversations, such as vitality, choice, present-focused awareness, and willing vulnerability. This book will help you move away from basic techniques and exercises and toward the nuance and skills you need to do effective values work. You’ll also learn how to use these tools, with detailed scripts for in-session exercises, handouts for clients, homework ideas, assessment and tracking tools, case examples, practical vignettes, and more. Whether you’re an ACT clinician, or simply looking to incorporate values-based work into your treatment, this essential guide provides everything you need to help clients connect with what really matters to them, so they can live full and meaningful lives.

Originally published in 1982, this book examines the current status of expectancy-value models in psychology. The focus is upon cognitive models that relate action to the perceived attractiveness or aversiveness of expected consequences. A person’s behavior is seen to bear some relation to the expectations the person holds and the subjective value of the consequences that might occur following the action. Despite widespread interest in the expectancy-value (valence) approach at the time, there was no book that looked at its current status and discussed its strengths and its weaknesses, using contributions from some of the theorists who were involved in its original and subsequent development and from others who were influenced by it or had cause to examine the approach closely. This book was planned to meet this need. The chapters in this book relate to such areas as achievement motivation, attribution theory, information feedback, organizational psychology, the psychology of values and attitudes, and decision theory and in some cases they advance the expectancy-value approach further and, in other cases, point to some of its deficiencies.

Cross-cultural psychology has come of age as a scientific discipline, but how has it developed? The field has moved from exploratory studies, in which researchers were mainly interested in finding differences in psychological functioning without any clear expectation, to detailed hypothesis tests of theories of cross-cultural differences. This book takes stock of the large number of empirical studies conducted over the last decades to evaluate the current state of the field. Specialists from various domains provide an overview of their area, linking it to the fundamental questions of cross-cultural psychology such as how individuals and their cultures are linked, how the link evolves during development, and what the methodological challenges of the field are. This book will appeal to academic researchers and post-graduates interested in cross-cultural research.