Boys Don’t Work? On the Psychological Benefits of Showing Low Effort in High School

Male students show less academic effort and lower academic achievement than do female students. The present study aimed to shed more light on the reasons for why male students show low academic effort despite the finding that this undermines their academic achievement. We explored whether students experience psychological benefits from showing low effort or “effortless” achievement in school and whether these benefits are greater for male than for female students. In two experimental vignette studies with independent samples of German ninth graders (N?=?210) and teachers (N?=?176), we systematically varied student targets’ gender, effort, and achievement and tested for effects on targets’ ascribed intelligence, popularity, likeability, masculinity, femininity, and gender-typicality. The “effortless” achiever was rated as more popular than students showing high effort. Teachers perceived the effortless achiever as the most intelligent target. Academic effort further increased students’ ratings of a low-achieving target’s likeability and students’ and teachers’ ratings of all targets’ femininity as well as decreased students’ ratings of all targets’ masculinity. Students and teachers perceived targets showing low (vs. high) effort as more similar to a typical boy, whereas teachers perceived targets showing high (vs. low) effort as more similar to a typical girl. Results indicate a need to understand the psychological benefits of low academic engagement, especially for male students, and to address the feminine stereotyping of (academic) effort.     

Task set determines the amount of crowding

The present study deals with the question of how crowding effects, which are interactions among adjacent features or characters, emerges automatically or by so-called higher level controlled processing. Two experiments are presented comparing performances during detecting, localizing, and identifying a flanked target in same strings when the target was defined on the basis of either its form or its category. Detection and localization performances were better for form- relative to category-defined targets whereas the reverse was observed for identification performance. This shows that the interacting information is indeed high level in that it is affected by task settings like the defining target feature and the observers’ task set. The results suggest that crowding effects do not emerge due to processes depending on the parameters of stimulus presentation, but due to processes activated by certain task sets.     

Questions versus statements: challenging an assumption about semantic illusions

In previous semantic-illusion research the tacit assumption has been that questions and statements-to-be-verified of similar semantic content lead to a similar proportion of semantic illusions. This assumption was made despite the fact that questions are thought to have different processing demands from those of statements. This paper presents empirical evidence that questions tend to lead to more semantic illusions than do statements-to-be-verified. Two experiments were carried out to provide a direct comparison between the semantic-illusion rates for statements and for questions. In Experiment 1, open-ended questions led to significantly more semantic illusions than did true/false statements. Experiment 2 replicated this effect using multiple-choice response options in the question condition. It is concluded that the syntactic form of a sentence affects the way in which semantic information is processed, and the implications of the findings are discussed.     

Life Satisfaction and Confidence in National Institutions: Evidence from South America

Applied Research in Quality of Life - A number of South American countries experienced turbulent democratic, political and economic upheaval over the last 40 years in the form of coup...     

The Importance of PRI Therapy for the Pastoral Counsellor

It is not always easy for pastoral counsellors to help people change. Often people have become stuck in their ways. Recent developments in the field of brain research help explain why change is difficult. This article discusses Past Reality Integration Therapy (PRI), a psychotherapeutic method that integrates recent findings of brain research and offers an important addition to the work of (pastoral) counsellors and psychotherapists. The use of this approach with Dutch students in their pastoral training is presented. Furthermore the importance of this new method for counsellors themselves, their clients and their work is discussed and some overall conclusions about the method and its practical application are presented.     

Patient personality and mortality: a 4-year prospective examination of chronic renal insufficiency.

The present study examined the role of personality as a predictor of mortality among patients with chronic renal insufficiency. A prospective evaluation of the influence of personality on patient survival was conducted over an average 49-month period. Cox regression was used to evaluate the effects of 5 dimensions of personality in a sample of 174 patients (100 male and 74 female). At follow-up, 49 patients had died. Significant demographic and clinical predictors of survival included age, diabetic status, and hemoglobin level. After these predictors were controlled for, 2 personality traits, conscientiousness and neuroticism, predicted patient mortality. Patients with high neuroticism scores had a 37.5% higher estimated mortality rate. Patients with low conscientiousness scores had a 36.4% increased mortality rate.     

Prospective associations between social status and social anxiety in early adolescence

This study examined the transactional longitudinal association between social status (likeability and popularity) and social anxiety symptoms (fear of negative evaluation and social avoidance and distress), and explored gender differences in this association. Participants included 274 adolescents (136 boys, M_age = 12.55). Data were collected at two waves with a 6-month interval. Likeability and popularity were measured with peer nominations and social anxiety symptoms with self-reports. Autoregressive cross-lagged path models showed relative stability of social status and social anxiety. Girls who were seen as less popular by their classmates avoided social situations more frequently and experienced more distress during such situations over time. These results highlight the importance of distinguishing between different social status components and social anxiety symptoms and to take gender into account. Early support for less popular girls seems important to prevent more severe consequences of avoidance and distress, such as social exclusion and victimization.     

Given What I Know: Seeing the Past as a Portal to an Intentional Future

Dr. Terrence Roberts is our second guest for the Hearing Our Elders series. Dr. Roberts is one of the Little Rock Nine, the first group of African American students to attend Little Rock Central High School in 1957. Interview segments are woven into the article, providing a historical and political context from which to understand the current national climate with regard to social justice and multicultural responsiveness. Dr. Roberts's interview revealed 6 critical themes: resilience, understanding context in the face of the status quo, reimagining language, choice as key to good mental health, use of the self as an intervention tool, and the importance of being historical in one's thinking. Intentionality is identified as a metatheme that asks the question of where one falls on the status quo versus change agent continuum. Dr. Terrence Roberts es nuestro segundo invitado en la serie Escuchar a Nuestros Mayores. El Dr. Roberts es uno de los Little Rock Nine, el primer grupo de estudiantes afroamericanos que estudiaron en la escuela Little Rock Central High School en 1957. Se insertan fragmentos de la entrevista en el artículo, lo que proporciona un contexto histórico y político desde el que se puede comprender el clima nacional actual respecto a la justicia social y la sensibilidad multicultural. La entrevista con el Dr. Roberts reveló 6 temas críticos: la resiliencia, comprender el contexto frente al status quo, reimaginar el lenguaje, la capacidad de elección como clave para una buena salud mental, el uso del autoconcepto como herramienta de intervención y la importancia de ser histórico en el pensamiento personal. La intencionalidad se identifica como un metatema que formula la pregunta de dónde se sitúa uno mismo a lo largo del continuo entre status quo y agente de cambio.