Differential incidence of procrastination between blue and white-collar workers

The present study compared chronic procrastination tendencies claimed by “whitecollar” working adults (n = 141) with rates reported by Harriott and Ferrari ( 1996) of “blue-collar” working adults (n - 211). Participants completed reliable and valid measures of everyday procrastination tendencies (decisional, arousal, and avoidant), and socio-demographic items at one of several public forums. Results showed no significant difference between classes of working adults on age, gender, marital status, or the number of children, although “white-collar” workers claimed higher levels of education than “blue-collar” workers. “White-collar” workers also reported significantly higher scores on all three forms of chronic procrastination than “blue-collar” workers. It seems that professional employees report procrastination more frequently than unskilled workers. Further research is needed to explore the causes and consequences associated with differences in chronic procrastination by occupational group.     

Differential incidence of procrastination between blue and white-collar workers

The present study compared chronic procrastination tendencies claimed by “whitecollar” working adults (n = 141) with rates reported by Harriott and Ferrari ( 1996) of “blue-collar” working adults (n - 211). Participants completed reliable and valid measures of everyday procrastination tendencies (decisional, arousal, and avoidant), and socio-demographic items at one of several public forums. Results showed no significant difference between classes of working adults on age, gender, marital status, or the number of children, although “white-collar” workers claimed higher levels of education than “blue-collar” workers. “White-collar” workers also reported significantly higher scores on all three forms of chronic procrastination than “blue-collar” workers. It seems that professional employees report procrastination more frequently than unskilled workers. Further research is needed to explore the causes and consequences associated with differences in chronic procrastination by occupational group.     

A consequence of school grade labels: preservice teachers’ interpretations and recall of children’s classroom behavior

This study investigated whether preservice teachers’ attitudes surrounding school grade labels influenced interpretations and recall of children’s classroom behavior using the automatic attitude activation model (Fazio, In R. M. Sorrentino & E. T. Higgins (Eds.), Handbook of motivation and cognition: Foundations of social behavior, 1986) as a theoretical framework. Participants were randomly assigned to one of three conditions: The expectation of viewing a video of children in schools labeled as “A,” “F,” or “typical” as a result of the school’s aggregated student performance on standardized tests. Results indicated that participants who believed that they were viewing a video of an “F” classroom recalled more negative and fewer positive behaviors compared to the “typical” classroom. Likewise, there was a trend for participants to recall more negative and fewer positive behaviors when viewing a video of an “F” compared to an “A” school. Therefore, negative attitudes about a school label of “F” biased preservice teachers’ perceptions and memories of children’s classroom behaviors.

The Influence of Language Form and Conventional Wording on Judgments of Illness

Prior research indicates that category labels influence category judgments, but little is known regarding the effects for familiar categories with significant social consequences. The present studies address this issue by examining the effect of linguistic form on judgments of illnesses. Both mental and physical illnesses were presented in each of three linguistic forms: noun, adjective, and possessive phrase. In Study 1, participants were asked to judge the permanence of a set of novel illnesses that differed in wording (e.g., “He is a baxtermic”; “He is baxtermic”; “He has baxtermia”). In Studies 2 and 3, participants were asked to judge which forms of wording were most familiar for actual mental illnesses (e.g., schizophrenia) and physical illnesses (e.g., diabetes). In Study 4, participants were asked to judge the permanence of a set of familiar illnesses that differed in wording. The results indicated that for novel illnesses, nouns (“is a”) imply greatest permanence and possessive nouns (“has”) imply least permanence. However, for familiar illnesses, permanence judgments are also influenced by how frequently each form appears in ordinary language use. Mental illnesses are more often expressed with relatively permanent forms (“is” and “is a”) , whereas physical illnesses are more often expressed with relatively transient forms (“has”). The results demonstrate the importance of both linguistic form and conventional wording patterns on how categories are interpreted.     

Parental Monitoring During Early Adolescence Deters Adolescent Sexual Initiation: Discrete-Time Survival Mixture Analysis

We used discrete-time survival mixture modeling to examine 5,305 adolescents from the 1997 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth regarding the impact of parental monitoring during early adolescence (ages 14–16) on initiation of sexual intercourse and problem behavior engagement (ages 14–23). Four distinctive parental-monitoring groups were identified and labeled as “High,” “Increasing,” “Decreasing,” and “Low”. About 68% of adolescents received a high level of parental monitoring from ages 14 to 16 (High), 6 and 9% respectively exhibited an accelerated (Increasing) and a decelerated trajectory (Decreasing), and 17% had consistently low parental monitoring (Low). Relative to participants in the Low group, adolescents in the High group delayed sexual initiation by 1.5 years. Males, relative to females, were more likely to have had a low trajectory of parental monitoring, and were more likely to initiate sexual intercourse before age 14. In contrast to White Adolescents, Hispanics and Blacks were less likely to receive High parental monitoring, and had a higher rate of early sexual initiation before age 14. The study demonstrates the temporal relationship of parental monitoring with adolescent sexual initiation from a longitudinal perspective. An increase of parental monitoring across ages is accompanied with a decrease of sexual risk. The continual high level of parental monitoring from ages 14 to 16 also mitigated the risk of engagement in substance use and delinquent behaviors from ages 14 to 23.     

Perceptions of the Concept of Mutation among Family Members of Patients Receiving Outpatient Genetic Services and University Students

Our objectives were to investigate: (1) relationships between perceptions of various terms regarding mutation and the depth of knowledge regarding mutation among family members of patients receiving genetic outpatient services, and (2) differences in perceptions of the term “gene mutation” for family members versus university students. Fifty-eight family members and 178 university students responded to two questionnaires: Impressions regarding the term, and Knowledge about the concept of mutation. Factor analyses were conducted to determine the factor structure of ratings of the terms, and two-way analyses of variance [(1)Term, (2)Group × Knowledge] were conducted to examine differences in perceptions of the terms as measured by scores for each extracted factor. Family members had a significantly more negative perception of the term “gene mutation” than “gene change” and a less negative perception of the term “gene mutation” than “gene lesion”; they had significantly more negative perceptions of the term “gene mutation” than did university students.     

Individual differences in the acceptance of stereotyping

Previous research has documented individual differences in a range of constructs relating to social stereotyping, prejudice, and intergroup attitudes. However, research has not sought specifically to measure a general acceptance of social stereotyping. In the present research, we explored attitudinal, cognitive, emotional, and personality correlates of a person’s self-reported willingness to rely on stereotypical information when interacting with people of different social and cultural groups. In six studies (N = 1080) we found that more acceptance of stereotyping was associated with more explicit and implicit stereotyping of particular groups, less liberal gender-role values, more authoritarian attitudes, preference for hierarchies, higher social dominance orientation, less universal outlook, less complexity in describing others’ emotions, less utilization of emotional information, and more utilization of social categories (gender and race) when rating the similarity of faces, less agreeable and more agentic personality, and more rigid and simplistic cognitive style (all independent of one’s gender). Female and African-American participants were less accepting of stereotyping than male and Caucasian participants. The general tendency to accept stereotyping in daily life is a measurable individual difference that may prove useful in social-personality research.     

The gender-congruency effect in picture-word tasks

In Dutch noun phrases like “het boek” (the book) or “de kat” (the cat), the definite article (het or de) depends on the noun's grammatical gender (neuter or non-neuter). Schriefers reported that the production of a noun phrase like “het rode bed” (“the red bed”) in response to a colored picture takes less time when the picture is accompanied by a distractor word of congruent gender (e.g., “huis,” a het-word) than when it is accompanied by a word of incongruent gender (e.g., “hand,” a de-word). In three experiments we explored the characteristics of this gender-congruency effect. The following conclusions were reached. First, the gender-congruency effect is a rather robust phenomenon. Second, with the exception of a small effect in Exp. 2, no evidence was obtained for a gender-congruency effect when subjects were required to produce a single noun in response to a picture (e.g., “bed”). Third, the gender-congruency effect decreases with a decreasing familiarity of the distractor word. Implications for models of word production are discussed. Received: 20 May 1997 / Accepted: 25 September 1997     

Imagining human enhancement: whose future,which rationality?

This article critically evaluates bettering human life. Because this involves lives that do not exist yet, the article investigates human eugenics and enhancement through the social prism of ‘the imaginary’ (defined ‘as a set of assumptions and concepts for thinking and speaking about human enhancement and its future direction’) [1]. “Exploring basic assumptions underlying the idea of human enhancement” investigates underlying assumptions and claims for human enhancement. Firstly, human eugenics and enhancement entangles a factual as well as a normative claim about what improvement/betterment maybe constitutive of. Secondly, claims about what a better life is, is often a future orientated claim about whether certain kinds of life that do not exist yet should ever exist. Moral images of thought are introduced and how they work to make normative judgments about lives that do not exist. This implicates the moral problem of difference, where an image of a ‘better’ life—classically expressed in eugenics as a ‘superior’ and/or ‘normal’ life—necessarily entails inferiority and/or deviance from a norm. “Moral imagination in contemporary fiction and the history of old eugenics”, introduces moral images in history of eugenics and demonstrates how examples fall foul of the problem. “The new (liberal) eugenics and the moral image of therapy” examines progress in contemporary debates, the move from authoritarian to non-authoritarian eugenics (human enhancement), and how, to some extent, this has solved the problem of difference, through liberal defence of personal choice. “The heart of the eugenic issue” suggests that personal choice in liberal non-authoritarian eugenics is not immune to basic drive behind all eugenic arguments; desire as lack which is expressed as the continual dissatisfaction of not having our future expectations met.

An empirical test of five prominent explanations for the black–white academic performance gap

The viability of five prominent explanations for the black–white performance gap (“academic engagement,” “cultural capital,” “social capital,” “school quality” and “biased treatment”) is examined using NELS data and a LISREL model that adjusts for clustering of students within schools. Empirical models have typically assessed these factors individually—a practice that probably fosters overestimation of their explanatory power. School quality and biased treatment emerge as the primary explanations for black–white high school test performance differentials. Access to better-quality schools and receipt of more stimulating interpersonal “signals” from gatekeepers ensue from racial (and socioeconomic) privilege. Enhanced test performance in turn ensues from these resources. In essence, the explanations for the racial gap that place more emphasis on what black and white students “bring to” high school (i.e., specific levels of engagement, cultural and social capital), seem less consequential to performance differentials than “what happens to” them when they get there (i.e., quality of education provided, and race-contingent treatment received).     

Rawls and Research on Cognitively Impaired Patients: A Reply to Maio

In his paper, “The Relevance of Rawls’ Principle of Justice for Research on Cognitively Impaired Patients” (Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 23 (2002):45–53), Giovanni Maio has developed athought-provoking argument for the permissibility of non-therapeutic research on cognitively impaired patients. Maio argues that his conclusion follows from the acceptance of John Rawls’s principles of justice, specifically, Rawls’s “liberty principle” Maio has misinterpreted Rawls’s “libertyprinciple” – correctly interpreted it does notsupport non-therapeutic research on cognitivelyimpaired patients. Three other ‘Rawlsian’ arguments are suggested by Maio’s discussion –two “self-respect” arguments and a “presumed consent” argument – but none of them are convincing. However, an alternative argument developed from Rawls’s discussion of “justice in health care” in his most recent book, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, may justify certain kinds of non-therapeutic research on some cognitively impaired patients in special circumstances. We should not expect anything more permissive from a liberal theory of justice. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Understanding the Subjective Point of View: Methodological Implications of the Schutz-Parsons Debate

The bone of contention that divides Alfred Schutz and Talcott Parsons in their 1940–1941 debate is that Schutz acknowledges an ontological break between the commonsense and scientific worlds whereas Parsons only considers it “a matter of refinement.” Schutz’s ontological distancing that disconnects the “world of consociates” where social reality is directly experienced in face-to-face contacts, and the “world of contemporaries” where the Other is experienced in terms of “types” has been crucial to social scientists. Implicated in the break is that all intellectual attempts to understand experiences of Others must be based on the “models” constructed in the “world of contemporaries” (or “predecessors”); hence, epistemologically, to grasp the subjective point of view with a here-and-now understanding is an outright impossibility. Based on a Schutzian perspective, the author suggests that the sociologist must objectivize the Thou-orientations involved in his/her analysis in order that s/he can possibility grasp the subjective point of view in objective terms.

The Milwaukee Inventory for Subtypes of Trichotillomania-Adult Version (MIST-A): Development of an Instrument for the Assessment of “Focused” and “Automatic” Hair Pulling

This article describes the development of the Milwaukee Inventory for Subtypes of Trichotillomania-Adult Version (MIST-A), which was designed to assess “automatic” and “focused” pulling subtypes of trichotillomania (TTM). Participants reporting symptoms of TTM (n = 1,697) completed an internet survey; participants were later randomly assigned to either Exploratory (n = 848) or Confirmatory (n = 849) Analyses. Exploratory Analyses examined the development and psychometric properties of the MIST-A. Results of an exploratory factor analysis revealed a two-factor solution. Factor 1 (“focused” pulling scale) and 2 (“automatic” pulling scale) consisted of ten and five items respectively, with both scales demonstrating adequate internal consistency and good construct and discriminant validity. Subsequent confirmatory factor analysis demonstrated support for the scale’s underlying factor structure. The MIST-A provides researchers with a reliable and valid assessment of “automatic” and “focused” pulling, although replication using a clinically ascertained sample is necessary.

Social science as dialogue: narcissism, individualist and collectivist values, and religious interest in iran and the united states

This investigation most importantly sought to illustrate the use of social science to promote cross-cultural dialogue. Fukuyama (1992) explained contemporary cultural trends in terms of a triumphant individualism that would overcome all other forms of social life, including what he described as the “fundamentalist resentment” of Iran. Lasch (1979) more pessimistically diagnosed Western social arrangements in terms of an emerging “culture of narcissism.” In this study, Iranian and American university students responded to measures of narcissism, individualist and collectivist values, religious interest, and psychological adjustment (identity, self-actualization, and self-consciousness). Variables related to a sense of community (collectivist values, religious interest, and identity) correlated negatively with narcissism in both societies, as did self-actualization. These data supported a moderate position between the polarized extremes of Fukuyama and Lasch and more importantly demonstrated how social scientific methods might be useful in creating a “space” for conducting a “dialogue between civilizations.”     

Kinesis and Energeia—and What Follows. Outline of a Typology of Human Actions

This paper presents a typology of human actions, based on Aristotle’s kinesis–energeia dichotomy and on a formal elaboration (with some refinement) of the Vendler–Kenny classificatory schemes for action types (or action verbs). The types introduced are defined throughout by inferential criteria, in terms of what here are referred to as “modal-temporal expressions” (‘MT-terms’). Examples of familiar categories analysed in this way are production and maintenance, but the procedure is meant to offer a basis for defining various other commonsense categories. Among the more theoretical categories introduced are “Aristotelian projects”, i.e. actions defined in terms of Aristotle’s conceptions of movement/change, as well as “abstract projects”, in which the agent ensures that something changes from not being a fact to being a fact, and “conditional agency”, which involves actions that are to be performed when/if certain conditions come to be fulfilled. A category like “starting an action” is itself inferentially defined here in MT-terms, and so, inter alia, are proceeding with, finishing, stopping and interrupting an action. There is also a demonstration of how actions of one type may be converted into those of other types, where this is a matter of the way they are “seen” or described. There is also an implication to the effect that some of these distinctions may be useful for formulating certain critical insights regarding modern life.

Social science as dialogue: narcissism,individualist and collectivist values,and religious interest in iran and the united states

This investigation most importantly sought to illustrate the use of social science to promote cross-cultural dialogue. Fukuyama (1992) explained contemporary cultural trends in terms of a triumphant individualism that would overcome all other forms of social life, including what he described as the “fundamentalist resentment” of Iran. Lasch (1979) more pessimistically diagnosed Western social arrangements in terms of an emerging “culture of narcissism.” In this study, Iranian and American university students responded to measures of narcissism, individualist and collectivist values, religious interest, and psychological adjustment (identity, self-actualization, and self-consciousness). Variables related to a sense of community (collectivist values, religious interest, and identity) correlated negatively with narcissism in both societies, as did self-actualization. These data supported a moderate position between the polarized extremes of Fukuyama and Lasch and more importantly demonstrated how social scientific methods might be useful in creating a “space” for conducting a “dialogue between civilizations.”     

Political Screenings as Trials of Strength: Making the Communist Power/lessness Real

In this paper, we discuss the problem of communist power in so called totalitarian regimes. Inspired by strategies of explanation in contemporary science studies and by the ethnomethodological conception of social order, we suggest that the power of communists is not to be taken as an unproblematic source of explanation; rather, we take this power as something that is itself in need of being explained. We study personal narratives on political screenings that took place in Czechoslovakia in 1970 and analyze how the power of communists obtained its strength from ordinary and “unremarkable” interactions between participants. The screenings are interpreted, in the terms of Bruno Latour, as “trials of strength.” We show that it was crucial for all the participants that associations, translations or mobilizations involved in making the regime real, remained partial and multiple, and not exclusive and “total” as is often assumed within dominant discourses on totalitarianism.     

Some Considerations on the Limitations Confronting the Cross-cultural Field of Sex Research

Through the use of intentional sampling this non-probabilistic study reports the incidence of self-reported occasional same-sex behavior among supposed “straight” males and the methodological issues involved in the fieldwork of three different cities from Brazil, Turkey and Thailand. The social criteria used as the control for the males interviewed between 20 and 30 years of age in this study are the levels of education and the items consumed. These variables are here considered to be socially influenced and determinable by class. There is a notable difference due to the greater number of casual same-sex experiences found among heterosexual males in the working classes of Turkey and Thailand. This could mean that the professional middle class sexual ideology is more disseminated among Brazilian participants than among Turk and Thai participants. Another difference was that the highest number of same-sex experiences was found amongst the Turkish middle class where women are much more socially unavailable. Although it is not a representative research from these three countries, each particular fieldwork situation illustrates how different social factors can easily influence the occurrence of casual same-sex experiences among young urban males.     

On A Proportionality Analysis of Syllogistic Private Reasoning

Syllogisms like Barbara, “If all S is M and all M is P, then all S is P”, are here analyzed not in terms of the truth of their categorical constituents, “all S is M”, etc., but rather in terms of the corresponding proportions, e.g., of Ss that are Ms. This allows us to consider the inferences’ approximate validity, and whether the fact that most Ss are Ms and most Ms are Ps guarantees that most Ss are Ps. It turns out that no standard syllogism is universally valid in this sense, but special ‘default rules’ govern approximate reasoning of this kind. Special attention is paid to inferences involving existential propositions of the “Some S is M” form, where it is does not make sense to say “Almost some S is M”, but where it is important that in everyday speech, “Some” does not mean “At least one”, but rather “A not insignificant number”.