Issue Information

The December issue of PsyCh Journal opens with the second installment of our special collection on “Chronobiology—Circadian Oscillators in Neuroscience” (following the initial publication in Volume 6, Number 4). It begins with an assessment of a head‐mounted light therapy device emitting blue‐enriched light as a possible effective alternative to standard light boxes for suppressing melatonin secretion in the late evening hours. Next is an examination of how the human circadian system may become misaligned under modern conditions such as non‐standard working schedules, and some of the associated health consequences. This is followed by a review of evidence for the therapeutic use of medicinal plants against three clock‐related human diseases, which hints at the development of future chronobiological applications. Next are a pair of opinion papers, one endeavoring a definition of sleep applicable to all animal life which might help explain the ubiquity of the phenomenon, and another challenging traditional models of entrainment, defined as the stable synchronization of internal biological rhythms to external physical ones, by teasing the notion of stable. The chronobiology collection closes with a short communication on a nonparametric method for extracting noise‐masked oscillatory processes, offering among other advantages its applicability to short time series. A number of regular contributions round out the issue, beginning with one original article reporting a pilot study on the utility of psychodrama for increasing the empathy and other counseling skills of undergraduate students majoring in psychological counseling and guidance, and another study of the neural mechanism of future‐oriented coping which used resting‐state functional connectivity analysis to find that cooperation between the parahippocampal cortex and the claustrum/insula may play an important role. Next is a meta‐analytic review of how differences in national cultures and economic settings influence the effects of work–family conflict (WFC) and work–family enrichment (WFE) on worker satisfaction and well‐being. Finally, a short communication reports a comparative study of privacy consciousness among high school students in Japan versus Taiwan, suggesting that a greater emphasis on moral education regarding Internet use in the Taiwanese curriculum contributes to significantly higher levels in Taiwan of consciousness and behaviors regarding privacy of the self and others.