Do Dispositional Characteristics Influence Reading? Examining the Impact of Personality on Reading Fluency

Previous research demonstrates specific relationships between personality traits and general academic performance. In addition, research studies have demonstrated relationships among personality and variables related to reading fluency (i.e. speed, accuracy, automaticity, and prosody). However, little investigation has examined specific links between personality and reading fluency. The researchers hypothesized that there is a direct relationship between personality and reading fluency when accounting for cognitive ability. Findings indicate that the personality trait of openness is a positive predictor of reading fluency ability even when accounting for variance associated with cognitive ability.     

Do you see what I see? Infants’ reasoning about others’ incomplete perceptions

Twelve‐month‐olds realize that when an agent cannot see an object, her incomplete perceptions still guide her goal‐directed actions. What would happen if the agent had incomplete perceptions because she could see only one part of the object, for example one side of a screen? In the present research, 16‐month‐olds were first shown an agent who always pointed to a red object, as opposed to a black or a yellow object, suggesting that she preferred red over the other colours. Next, two screens were introduced while the agent was absent. The screens were (1) red or green on both sides; (2) red on the front (infants’ side) but green on the back (the agent’s side) or vice versa; or (3) only coloured red or green on the front. During test, the agent, who could see only the back of the screens, pointed to one of the two screens. The results revealed that while infants expected the agent to continue acting on her colour preference and point to the red rather than the green screen during test, they did so in accord with the agent’s perception of the screens, rather than their own perceptions: they expected the agent to point to the red screen in (1), but to the green‐front screen in (2), and they had no prediction of which screen the agent should point to in (3). The implications of the present findings for early psychological reasoning research are discussed.     

Do Emotions after Receiving Test Results Predict Review Activities? An Intra‐Individual Analysis

In the present study, we examined intra‐individual relations among emotions when receiving test results and subsequent test review activities, and the direct and moderating effects of perceptions of test value. The participants, 90 first‐year students at a private girls' secondary school, self‐reported their present emotional state immediately after receiving their test results and their test review activities 1 week after the tests were returned. The same survey was conducted on four occasions. Results of multilevel analyses indicated that emotions experienced when receiving test results did not predict subsequent learning behavior. The results also showed that relations among emotions and review activities differed across students. Although we investigated whether such individual differences in relations might be attributed to perceptions of test value, no moderating effect could be observed. Furthermore, improvement‐oriented test mindsets were found to be positive predictors of review activities by investigating the direct effect of perceptions of test value. These findings suggest that modifying students' perceptions of test value may promote appropriate learning behavior.     

Do Dynamic Facial Expressions Convey Emotions to Children Better Than Do Static Ones?

Past research has shown that children recognize emotions from facial expressions poorly and improve only gradually with age, but the stimuli in such studies have been static faces. Because dynamic faces include more information, it may well be that children more readily recognize emotions from dynamic facial expressions. The current study of children (N = 64, aged 5–10 years old) who freely labeled the emotion conveyed by static and dynamic facial expressions found no advantage of dynamic over static expressions; in fact, reliable differences favored static expressions. An alternative explanation of gradual improvement with age is that children's emotional categories change during development from a small number of broad emotion categories to a larger number of narrower categories—a pattern found here with both static and dynamic expressions.     

Do Community Characteristics Relate to Young Adult College Students’ Credit Card Debt? The Hypothesized Role of Collective Institutional Efficacy

This study examines the extent of emergent, outstanding credit card debt among young adult college students and investigates whether any associations existed between this credit card debt and the characteristics of the communities in which these students grew up or lived. Using data (N = 748) from a longitudinal survey and merging community characteristics measured at the zip code level, we confirmed that a community's unemployment rate, average total debt, average credit score, and number of bank branch offices were associated with a young adult college student's acquisition and accumulation of credit card debt. For example, a community's higher unemployment rate and lower number of bank branches were associated with a young adult college student's greater accumulated debt. Community characteristics had the strongest associations with credit card debt, especially after controlling for individual characteristics (i.e., a young adult college student's race and financial independence) and familial characteristics (i.e., their parents’ income and parents’ discussions of financial matters while growing up at home). The findings may help to understand the unique roles that communities play in shaping children and young adults’ financial capability, and how communities can be better capacitated to support the financial goals of their residents.     

Do I Look Like Someone Who Cares? Recruiters’ Ratings of Applicants’ Paid and Volunteer Experience

Despite the widespread use of resumes, little is known about whether recruiters value applicants’ volunteer experience, and if they value some kinds of volunteer experience more than others. Based on a sample of recruiters (n = 135) who each rated a series of resumes with different amounts and types of paid and volunteer experience, our results suggest that recruiters prefer resumes with relevant experience, and resumes with a combination of volunteer and paid experience. Our results did not suggest significant differences in the ratings given to paid or volunteer experience. We discuss the implications of these findings for researchers and practitioners, with specific advice for human resource professionals and applicants.     

Do university students’ thinking styles matter in their preferred teaching approaches?

This study pioneered the research on the role of university students’ thinking styles in their preferred teaching approaches. Three hundred and forty-eight (111 male and 237 female) students from a large comprehensive university in Beijing, P.R. China, responded to the Thinking Styles Inventory (Revised) and the Preferred Teaching Approach Inventory. Results indicated that regardless of age, gender, university class level, and academic discipline, students with different thinking styles had significantly different preferences for particular teaching approaches. It was contended that both conceptual change and information transmission are necessary for effective teaching. Theoretically, the study contributed to the styles literature in general and to the literature on the relationships between styles and approaches of teaching and learning in particular. Practical implications of the present findings are discussed in the context of students’ teaching evaluations, teachers’ teaching, and university administrators’ personnel management.     

Why ‘spiritism’?

Some of the early representatives of psychoanalysis had a lifelong interest in certain ‘occult’ phenomena. Although several theories were born for the purpose of understanding the interest of Sigmund Freud, Carl Gustav Jung or Sándor Ferenczi in spiritualism and related phenomena, interpreters usually ignore the changing cultural meaning and significance of modern occult practices like spiritualism. The aim of the present essay is to outline the cultural and historical aspects of spiritualism and spiritism in Hungary, and thus to shed new light on the involvement of Ferenczi – and other Hungarian psychoanalysts like Géza Róheim, István Hollós, and Mihály Bálint – in spiritualism and spiritism. The connections between spiritualism and the Budapest School of Psychoanalysis will be discussed, highlighting the cultural and scientific significance of Hungarian spiritualism and spiritism in the evolution of psychoanalysis. Taking into account the relative lack of the scientific research in the field of spiritism in Hungary, it can be pointed out that Ferenczi undertook a pioneering role in Hungarian psychical research.     

Are Emotions Natural Kinds?

ABSTRACT— Laypeople and scientists alike believe that they know anger, or sadness, or fear, when they see it. These emotions and a few others are presumed to have specific causal mechanisms in the brain and properties that are observable (on the face, in the voice, in the body, or in experience)—that is, they are assumed to be natural kinds. If a given emotion is a natural kind and can be identified objectively, then it is possible to make discoveries about that emotion. Indeed, the scientific study of emotion is founded on this assumption. In this article, I review the accumulating empirical evidence that is inconsistent with the view that there are kinds of emotion with boundaries that are carved in nature. I then consider what moving beyond a natural-kind view might mean for the scientific understanding of emotion.     

Whither ‘TRS’?

Books reviewed in this article:
Willi Braun and Russell T. McCutcheon (eds), Guide to the Study of Religion
J'annine Jobling and Ian Markham (eds), Theological Liberalism, Creative and Critical     

What Are Emotions About?

This paper discusses the interrelations between three aspects of human emotions: their intentionality, their expressivity and their moral significance. It distinguishes three kinds of philosophical views of emotions: the cognitivist (classically held by the Stoics), the emotivist which reduces emotions to non-intentional bodily sensations and physiological states, and the moral phenomenologist , the latter being held by Annette Baier, whose work is the focus of the discussion. Her view, which represents an original development of ideas found in Descartes and Hume, avoids the reductionism of congitivist and emotivist accounts. The paper gives special attention to her notion of 'deep'objects of emotions and to her account of the expressivity of emotions, arguing that while the first is problematic, the second is a significant contribution to our understanding of the role of emotions in our moral lives.     

Predicting Objectification: Do Provocative Clothing and Observer Characteristics Matter?

This study provides empirical evidence for the objectification of women and unearths factors that increase objectification. Objectification theory (Fredrickson and Roberts 1997) suggests that women from Western cultures are the targets of male gaze. Although this seems self-evident from a look at the media, little empirical evidence exists to document the phenomenon or unravel underlying processes. Undergraduate female participants (N = 82) from the Midwestern part of the United States rated three photographs of well-known female Olympic athletes shown either provocatively dressed or in sport-appropriate outfits. Results showed that when shown provocatively attired the women were objectified. Furthermore, participants’ own levels of social physique anxiety were significant predictors of objectification. Sexism and trait objectification were not significantly related to ratings. This research was funded in part by a grant from the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay Research Council.     

Do you believe in magic? Infants’ social looking during violations of expectations

Young infants tend to look longer at physical events that have unexpected outcomes than those that have expected outcomes, suggesting that they have knowledge of physical principles such as numerosity and occlusion (Baillargeon & Graber, 1987; Wynn, 1992). Although infants are typically tested in the presence of a caregiver, the social component of violations of expectations has received little attention. The present study investigated social looking during presumably expected and unexpected cognitive/perceptual events. Two experiments replicated the results of well-known physical knowledge experiments on addition/subtraction and occlusion in 6- (Experiments 1 and 2) and 9-month-old infants (Experiment 1), in that infants at both ages looked longer at unexpected than at expected events. Furthermore, infants at both ages initiated more looks at their caregivers' faces during unexpected than expected events. These findings are interpreted as suggesting that infants as young as 6 months of age actively seek to embed their experiences of unexpected physical/cognitive events in a social context.     

Do Extenuating Circumstances Influence African American Women's Attitudes Toward Suicide?

African American women commit suicide less than other U.S. women and men, perhaps partly due to strong, anti-suicide attitudes. To see if suicide attitudes might be softened by extenuating circumstances such as terminal illness, 192 African American and European American women imagined themselves in one of four extenuating circumstances, then completed measures of suicide acceptability and religiosity. Both ethnic groups reported a greater likelihood of suicide when imagining depression, regardless of religiosity. Religiosity, but not extenuating circumstances, corresponded with negative attitudes toward suicide and physician assisted suicide. These African American and European American young women remained steadfastly against suicide, regardless of circumstance.     

Do “Womanist” Identity Attitudes Influence College Women's Self-Esteem and Perceptions of Environmental Bias?

Helms (1990) proposed a four-stage model of womanist identity in which she hypothesized that development of healthy identity in women involves movement from external standards of gender identity to internal standards. Attitudes derived from her model were used to predict undergraduate women's self-esteem and perceptions of sex bias in the campus environment. Female undergraduates (N = 659), freshmen through seniors, were surveyed in classes at a large eastern university. Results indicated that Encounter (characterized by questioning of previously held stereotypical views about gender and dawning awareness of alternative perspectives) and Immersion-Emersion (characterized by an active rejection of male supremacist values and beliefs and the search for a positive self-affirming definition of womanhood) attitudes were inversely related to perceptions of environmental gender bias and positively related to self-esteem. Implications for counseling and future research are discussed.     

Do Work Values Predict the Use of Intraorganizational Influence Strategies?

It was the purpose of this paper to analyze the relationships between work values and the use of intraorganizational influence strategies. Given sufficient discretional space, it was assumed that work values either function as higher order goals or as individual constraints A prediction study with a I-year time interval was executed. At the first wave, work values were measured with the Work Values Inventory (Super, 1970). At the second wave, 4 intraorganizational influence strategies (rational persuasion, ingratiation, pressure. upward appeals) of 137 job beginners were measured. The data support the idea that work values function both as higher order goals and as individual constraints of influence behavior. The implications for the vocational career are discussed.     

‘Who am I?’

The dreams and existential questions of those, who came into being in order to replace a dead person, pivot around a central cry: ‘Who am I?’ If conceived, born or designated as a replacement child, such an individual may suffer—even as an adult—from a rarely recognized unconscious confusion of identity, compounded by grief and survivors’ guilt. From before the child is born, the archetypal forces of death and life are joined in a fateful constellation; the soul of the replacement child bears the shadow of death from the very beginning of life. Hope for the replacement child lies in an emergence of true self as soul recreates original life. Analysis can help the replacement child experience a ‘rebirth into true life’, not as ‘the one who returned’, but as a psychologically newborn individual; the path of individuation countering the replacement child‘s identification with the dead. Jungian analysis offers unique concepts for understanding and healing the replacement child; C.G. Jung himself was born after two stillborn babies and an infant that lived only five days.     

How Do Organizations and Social Policies ‘Acculturate’ to Immigrants? Accommodating Skilled Immigrants in Canada

While the idea of acculturation (Berry 1997) was originally proposed as the mutual change of both parties (e.g., immigrants and the host society), the change processes of host societies are neglected in research. A grounded theory study explored the efforts of human service organizations to 'acculturate' to an increasingly diverse immigrant population, through interviews conducted with service providers serving Mainland Chinese immigrants. Acculturation efforts of human service organizations (mezzo-level acculturation) were often needs-driven and affected by the political will and resultant funding programs (macro-level forces). Even with limitations, human service organizations commonly focused on hiring Mainland Chinese immigrants to reflect the changing demographics of their clientele and creating new programs to meet the language and cultural backgrounds of the clients. To contextualize these organizational efforts, an analysis of how policy changes (macro-level acculturation) interact with organizational practice is presented. Finally, the meaning of acculturation for the host society is discussed.