Friendships,Subjective Age,and Life Satisfaction of Women in Midlife

The authors conducted a study of 422 women, ages 31 to 77 years, to explore the relationships among friendship networks, subjective age, and life satisfaction. Friendship network size was related to lower subjective age but not to chronological age. More frequent visits with friends were related to lower subjective age and to higher life satisfaction. Satisfaction with the number of friends and a larger number of friends were related to higher levels of life satisfaction. Subjective age, group belonging, and being someone's best friend were significant predictors of life satisfaction.     

Measuring Androgyny in Adulthood

A critique is presented of trends in sex differences studies over the past few years. Such studies have failed to study possible integration of sex role identity as a developmental process, and have often neglected self-definitions in favor of stereotypes. A new approach for measuring androgynous competencies is suggested which utilizes Bakan's (1966) concepts of agency and communion. Adult women high on both agentic and communion competencies seem to have many advantages over those who are low on both competencies or who are competent in only one area.     

Buying and building success: Perceptions of organizational strategies for improvement

What makes people like a team? We suggest and test here whether people’s perceptions of teams and organizations differ as a function of the strategy the teams pick on their way to success. Two main strategies are compared: (1) Development is a strategy focused on building and enhancing the abilities of current team members; and (2) Acquisition is a strategy focused on buying talent from outside the organization. Does the way to success matter? In other words, will the strategy a team endorse affects how much people like the team? In five studies (N = 1,672) we tested whether people prefer teams that were successful by being (a) built through long-term development of team members or (b) bought by acquiring expensive personal developed elsewhere. Across the five studies, people preferred built teams over bought teams, including sport teams and law firms. Effort and group cohesion were more attributed to build than to bought teams. In a “mediators contest,” effort attributions proved most robust. People like built teams more than bought ones, mostly because they value the effort and hard work that built teams represent.     

The Hard Problem Isn’t Getting any Easier: Thoughts on Chalmers’ “Meta-Problem”

Philosophia - Chalmers’ meta-problem of consciousness is the problem of explaining “problem reports”; i.e. reports to the effect that phenomenal consciousness has the various...     

Reentry as Experienced by Women in Jail: Advocating for Change

We conducted a phenomenological study with 35 women in a substance abuse treatment jail program about their lived experiences in preparing for reentry. The women addressed their past, the needs of their families, and education of criminal justice personnel, providers, and the whole citizenry. The women advocated for effective reentry practices.