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Taking into account previous literature on the role that the parenting styles to which individuals are exposed to during childhood have in shaping prosocial behaviors and attitudes, this study aims to investigate the relationship between parenting styles of parents and peace attitudes.

The peace attitude and the parenting style questionnaires were completed by 358 adolescent and adult participants. Pearson correlation coefficients were extracted and a stepwise multiple regression analysis was performed.

The results indicate that individuals with authoritative parents tend to show stronger peace attitudes and open the way to further study what parental characteristics may be responsible for the development of peace attitudes in individuals.

Participants retrospectively assessed their parents’ style. Future research may recruit both the actual parents of participants to collect more accurate data on parenting practices or use observational methods.

This work seems to suggest that to achieve a more peaceful society, the ability of parents to raise their children by adopting an authoritative style should be taken into account and – if needed – enhanced. Understanding the developmental pathways that can influence individuals to consistently choose peace is important to promote a stable culture of peace across several levels of observation.

To the best of authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to investigate the relationship between parenting styles of parents and peace attitudes in their children.

Exploring the understandings of conflict held by Members of Parliament (MPs) provides a meaningful picture of a conflict in a particular society. The aim of the study is to explore the Kurdish conflict understandings among MPs in Turkey.

The current research used Q methodology, which is a suitable method to identify socially shared perspectives and to identify intra- and inter-group differences, and Entman’s (1993) frame analysis to explore subjective understandings of the Kurdish conflict. Data were collected from 23 MPs from four political parties.

The analysis revealed four qualitatively distinct viewpoints: Turkish Nationalist view, Social Democratic view, Conservative-Religious view and Pro-Kurdish view.

This study contributes to the understanding of political parties’ perspectives on the Kurdish conflict in Turkey by representing each political party’s priorities and concerns. The meaning of these priorities and concerns, implications for conflict resolution and the usefulness of the Q methodology for exploring conflict understandings are also discussed.

Though violence is very much prevalent in modern organizations, unfortunately, researchers and practitioners have given very little attention in creating an organizational culture based on nonviolence. The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationship between individual spirituality and non-violence work behaviour. It also investigates the mediating role of four constructs of psychological capital (hope, optimism, resilience and self-efficacy).

Collected data is subjected to rigorous reliability, validity and common method biasness tests. Further mediation is analyzed with the help of hierarchical regression, Sobel test and bootstrapping estimates.

The results show that all four dimensions of psychological capital partially mediate the relationship of individual spirituality and non-violent behaviour at the workplace. The practical and theoretical implications of the study are also discussed.

Although the study produces significant results, it has certain limitations, too, which can be addressed in future research. Firstly, as psychological capital is a state like construct, the responses of the participants may vary from time to time, leading to biases. Secondly, the study is confined only to manufacturing, IT/ITES and financial institutions. It can be duplicated to other sectors as well to assess its generality. Future researchers may adopt both quantitative and qualitative methodology to explore the field. Even experimental research may help to understand these work behaviours. Although the study has been conducted in business organization the purpose is not to limit it to the workplace context. It is relevant to all sectors and across all domains.

The findings have revealed individual spirituality as a significant predictor of nonviolence behaviour at the workplace. Thus managers, leaders, policymakers or organizational development practitioners need to facilitate spirituality at the workplace and introduce spiritual-based interventions such as meditation, yoga and several other mindfulness practices. Even organizational training, which is considered to be essential to human resource development, needs to develop a spiritual development program and also to examine the impact of such programs on organizational outcomes (Dent et al., 2005). Organizational interventions that facilitate mindfulness practices, yoga and meditation will enhance nonviolence communication through empathy and compassion-based listening, meaningful dialogues, through connecting employees with universal human values/needs.

The primary objective of the study is to foster conflict prevention in society rather than conflict resolution. With the help of the study, the authors understand the importance of spiritual intervention and its impact on the elevation of people's values, beliefs and attitudes. Major organisations such as Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Facebook have already started to develop spiritual interventions at their workplace. It is an excellent time to capitalize on India's rich spiritual tradition that honours unity in diversity. Besides, an organization's facilitation to connect to employee’s actions with spiritual values can overcome cultural conditioning that triggers violence and help in making a more meaningful place to work. Thus, impacting the society from a macro perspective.

This is one of the pioneer studies that tried to unlock the “black-box” of mechanism through which individual spirituality impacts non-violent work behaviour.

A wide range of variables, including cognitive, emotional and relational factors, could affect the level of peacefulness. The purpose of this paper is to examine key variables (theory of mind (ToM) and harmony) that mediate the personality trait of peacefulness.

The participants were 182 university students recruited from three universities in Isfahan, Iran. Some different scales were applied in order to measure the intended peace variables.

The findings demonstrate that ToM, as the ability to attribute mental states, significantly mediates the association between interpersonal peacefulness and inhibition skill, interpersonal peacefulness and conflict resolution abilities, and interpersonal peacefulness and level of aggression. In addition, harmony mediates the relationship between intrapersonal peacefulness, hope, intrapersonal peacefulness and self-compassionate competency.

These findings indicate that peaceful feelings enable a person to provide more attention to the concerns of others and to relationship issues.

This an original type of study in the field of peace psychology.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between major personality dimensions and attitudes towards peace and war.

Three samples – two consisting of British psychology students (n=64 and 121) and one of Israeli students (n=80), responded to measures of some or all of: five-factor inventory, SYMLOG trait form, general survey including authoritarianism; attitudes towards peace and war; specific attitudes towards peace and war policy.

The general attitude measures were associated with the specific attitudes. Both were associated with authoritarianism but not consistently with other personality dimensions.

Descriptive findings might not generalize and need contextualization. Authoritarianism should be measured in any studies of attitudes related to peace, war, conflict, and structural violence.

Practitioners of peace education may first need to address high authoritarianism and low integrative complexity. Also, countering structural violence related, for instance, to poverty or prejudice/discrimination may require a comprehensive approach including collaborative work with clinical psychologists applying both implicit and explicit assessment tools.

Documenting links (and lack of them) among personality variables and attitudes towards peace and war has practical and theoretical value – and may contribute to organizational schemes shaped by personality structure and bearing implications for negotiations. In terms of a paradigm by Morton Deutsch, our results show individual differences in, and associations among, variables relating to the remediable likelihood of parties being differentially likely to find themselves in negatively vs. positively interdependent situations; and carrying out effective instead of “bungling” actions.

This study provides insight into the proportion of the variation across countries in the desirable outcomes of freedom and peace that can be accounted for using a set of national characteristics which are difficult, if not impossible, to change. The majority of prior studies in this area have utilized bivariate (correlational) analysis. While these studies have made important contributions to the field, they have not been able to disentangle the effects of other important national characteristics from the effect of culture on freedom and peace. Through our multivariate framework, we are able to shed light on the relative importance of these national characteristics in explaining the variation in freedom and peace across countries.

The purpose of this paper is to present the state-of-the-art in empirical research on constructive controversy in the context of business organizations and to outline strategic implications both for research and practical application.

Literature search on constructive controversy in relevant databases identified 33 empirical publications from 1980 to 2009. The paper analyzes and summarizes characteristics of the studies, methodological approaches, and empirical findings.

The literature review reveals that most studies are conducted in the industrial and service sector. Authors mostly apply a quantitative approach using interviews, experiments, and surveys. Empirical findings show that constructive controversy supports decision making, learning, interpersonal relationships, and productivity. In most cases goal interdependence is taken as independent variable.

There is a need for further consolidating the findings either by experimental verification or by field studies. A processual and longitudinal approach should be emphasized and the methodical repertory should be expanded by applying qualitative methods like observation. There is a need for expanding the scope of constructs and analyzing post-modern collaboration forms. Linking controversy to organizational processes like organizational learning would lead to a deeper understanding of innovation processes in organizations.

The implementation of the controversy procedure can support organizational processes like decision making, problem solving, learning, and innovation. This offers opportunities to expand the research field.

This article provides a systematic review on constructive controversy in the business context for the first time.

The purpose of the chapter is to explore peace economics in the perspective of an organic worldview. Peace economics are discussed on two levels – the level of individual economic actor and the macro level related to the systemic interplay between economic actors. The main argument is that a change from shallow authenticity and competition towards deep authenticity and cooperation presupposes a paradigmatic shift from a mechanical to an organic worldview. Such a change in mindset should be supported by introducing peace economics in the curriculum on different levels of education. In an education for peace-building there should be a focus on what constitutes true personal development in the sense of obtaining more ‘inner’ peace as well as more peaceful interpersonal interactions. On the ‘outer’ spheres, the need for equity and joint projects is fundamental. The concept of equity emphasizes mutuality, equality and co-creative responsibility.

The purpose of this paper is to review psychology‐based programmes, which were developed to bring together children and young people from Protestant and Catholic backgrounds following the outbreak of the conflict in Northern Ireland.

The authors focused on reporting findings from early research papers and reviews as well as more recent studies. They examined the role of holiday schemes and then the development and evaluation of inter‐school contact schemes.

The findings highlight the strengths and weaknesses associated with peace programmes for youth in Northern Ireland. The paper argues the importance of these programmes for conflicted societies, provided that they are based on current research.

The authors believe the work from Northern Ireland reviewed here has important implications for activities aimed at improving intergroup relations in other societies. These findings will be of interest to researchers, policy makers and practitioners alike.