Trait Depression and Subjective Well-Being: The Chain Mediating Role of Community Feeling and Self-Compassion.

Although subjective well-being has been widely discussed as being one of the important indicators of clinical depression, few studies have explored how it relates to trait depression. In particular, increasing the number of positive experiences has long been a potential goal for depression-related clinical interventions, but the mechanisms by which such interventions work in countering depression have been poorly studied. Grounded in the cognitive theory of depression, the current study aimed to address this specific gap by testing the mediating effects of community feeling and self-compassion between trait depression and subjective well-being. A survey of 783 college students found that trait depression was not only able to directly and negatively predict individual subjective well-being but also indirectly predict individual subjective well-being through the mediating role of community feeling and self-compassion alone and through the chain mediating role of self-compassion from community feeling. These findings reveal the internal mechanisms of trait depression that, to some extent, impede subjective well-being and offer certain guiding significance for the self-regulation of interventions for clinical and non-clinical individuals with trait depression.

The correspondence between Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud in "Why War" and the socio-political perspective of Alfred Adler.

This paper discusses the correspondence between Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud, published in the Standard Edition of Freud's writings under the title of "Why War". Freud's answers to some of Einstein's questions are compared to Alfred Adler's ideas on the role of "striving for power" versus "community feeling" and the role of these two forces in the development of war. Adler had begun to develop an object relations line of thinking in his early papers on the aggressive drive and the need for affection (Adler 1908a and 1908b). It is suggested that if Freud and Adler had been able to continue working together, they might have been able to bring their differing perspectives on the issue of war together to address both the role of power and loss of power, as well as the role of narcissistic defences in the development of war. As it is, this was left to later psychoanalytic thinkers, in particular the Kleinian analysts, who underlined the role of reverting to paranoid-schizoid thinking in the face of humiliation, rather than facing depression and the work of mourning. The work of mourning is illustrated using excerpts from Benjamin Britten's "War Requiem".

Community Feeling and Narcissism as Two Opposite Phenomena.

The objective of the current study was to examine the relations between narcissism and Adler's community feeling. Based on theoretical considerations, we claim that community feeling can be treated as an opposite pole of narcissism and we expected that: (1) both grandiose and vulnerable narcissism would be negatively related to community feeling and that (2) grandiose and vulnerable narcissism would be positively related to anti-community domination and isolation. A sample of 520 university students (Mage = 21.37, SDage = 4.31) completed the Community Feeling Questionnaire (CFQ), the Narcissistic Admiration and Rivalry Questionnaire (NARQ) and the Hypersensitive Narcissism Scale (HSNS). Structural equation modeling largely confirmed our expectations. These results suggest that narcissism can be understood in terms of a deficit in community feeling. It turned out that community feeling and narcissism are related constructs but they are not reducible to each other.