Developing networks in disempowered communities: Experiencing hardships while focusing on opportunities

This study aims to present an evaluation and the process steps of a community‐based initiative (CBI) consisting of a group of organizations that work to enhance the lives of boys and men of colour. Using a participatory research model, the researchers collaborated with 14 community stakeholders to develop the questions during two data collection periods and reviewed the reports for accuracy. The findings were separated into two broad categories. The perceived challenges included a lack of clear goals and measurements of success, an absence of leadership and direction, and a shortage of resources. The successes included passion of partners, increased collaboration, and increasing and maintaining social capital within the community. The lessons learned from both data collection periods helped this CBI broaden its reach and collaboration efforts. Overall, this study provides suggestions to other CBIs as they embark on making changes in their own communities.     

Family of Origin Predictors of Marital Outcomes Among Coptic Orthodox Christian Egyptian-American Couples

Despite the importance of family within the Coptic community, the extant literature on Coptic family relationships is remarkably limited. The purpose of this study was to explore parental marital quality and family of origin (FOO) quality as predictors of marital satisfaction and marital stability among Coptic Orthodox Christian Egyptian-American couples. Self-report survey data from 255 married Coptic couples living in the United States were analyzed using an actor-partner interdependence model. Results indicated husband FOO quality predicted both marital satisfaction (β =.51, SE?=?.18, p?=?.005) and marital stability (β?=?.51, SE?=?.22, p?=?.022) among Coptic husbands but not among Coptic wives. Results further indicated wife parental marital quality, wife FOO quality, and husband parental marital quality were not predictive of marital satisfaction or marital stability among Coptic husbands or wives. Clinical implications, limitations, and recommendations for future research are discussed.     

Creating Through Deviancy or Adjustment? The Link between Personality Profile Normativeness and Creativity

Does deviancy or adjustment predict creativity? To address this question, we tested the association between personality profile normativeness (similarity between one's personality profile and the average profile—a proxy for the deviancy–adjustment continuum) and creativity across four different samples (total N = 348 768). We used a wide range of creativity measures, including self‐reported, informant‐reported, behavioural, and occupational creativity, as well as several essential statistical controls (i.e., demographics, socio‐economic background, intelligence, and life satisfaction). Furthermore, we employed both cross‐sectional and longitudinal designs, including samples of college students and representative adult populations. We found that people who had more normative personality profiles were more creative. However, this association only held within modality (i.e. when both personality and creativity were either self‐reported or informant‐reported). We did not find robust associations between personality profile normativeness and laboratory‐based behavioural measures of creativity, occupational creativity, or creative achievements. We discuss alternative explanations for the observed adjustment–creativity link, specifically, implicit theories of creativity and person perception biases (halo effects). Notably, the findings did not support the idea that deviancy breeds creativity, suggesting that the famed ‘mad genius’ hypothesis might not hold among the general population. © 2019 European Association of Personality Psychology     

When Are Tutorial Dialogues More Effective Than Reading?

It is often assumed that engaging in a one-on-one dialogue with a tutor is more effective than listening to a lecture or reading a text. Although earlier experiments have not always supported this hypothesis, this may be due in part to allowing the tutors to cover different content than the noninteractive instruction. In 7 experiments, we tested the interaction hypothesis under the constraint that (a) all students covered the same content during instruction, (b) the task domain was qualitative physics, (c) the instruction was in natural language as opposed to mathematical or other formal languages, and (d) the instruction conformed with a widely observed pattern in human tutoring: Graesser, Person, and Magliano's 5-step frame. In the experiments, we compared 2 kinds of human tutoring (spoken and computer mediated) with 2 kinds of natural-language-based computer tutoring (Why2-Atlas and Why2-AutoTutor) and 3 control conditions that involved studying texts. The results depended on whether the students' preparation matched the content of the instruction. When novices (students who had not taken college physics) studied content that was written for intermediates (students who had taken college physics), then tutorial dialogue was reliably more beneficial than less interactive instruction, with large effect sizes. When novices studied material written for novices or intermediates studied material written for intermediates, then tutorial dialogue was not reliably more effective than the text-based control conditions.     

Workplace emotions: the role of supervision and leadership

In this experience sampling study, the authors examined the role of organizational leaders in employees' emotional experiences. Data were collected from health care workers 4 times a day for 2 weeks. Results indicate supervisors were associated with employee emotions in 3 ways: (a) Employees experienced fewer positive emotions when interacting with their supervisors as compared with interactions with coworkers and customers; (b) employees with supervisors high on transformational leadership experienced more positive emotions throughout the workday, including interactions with coworkers and customers; and (c) employees who regulated their emotions experienced decreased job satisfaction and increased stress, but those with supervisors high on transformational leadership were less likely to experience decreased job satisfaction. The results also suggest that the effects of emotional regulation on stress are long lasting (up to 2 hr) and not easily reduced by leadership behaviors.     

Evolved navigation theory and the descent illusion

Researchers often assume that height perception results from all of the same mechanisms as does other distance perception. Evolved navigation theory (ENT) proposes that natural selection has differentiated some psychological processes, including height perception, in response to the navigational outcome of falling. We tested predictions from three theories in two experiments. Only ENT predicted greater height perceived from the top than from the bottom of a vertical surface (because descent results in falls more often than does ascent). Participants across experiments perceived an average of 32% greater vertical distance when viewing from the top than when viewing from the bottom. We discuss selected implications and suggest ENT for uniting isolated findings, including the vertical-horizontal illusion.     

Stress administered prior to encoding impairs neutral but enhances emotional long-term episodic memories

Stressful events frequently comprise both neutral and emotionally arousing information, yet the impact of stress on emotional and neutral events is still not fully understood. The hippocampus and frontal cortex have dense concentrations of receptors for stress hormones, such as cortisol, which at high levels can impair performance on hippocampally dependent memory tasks. Yet, the same stress hormones can facilitate memory for emotional information, which involves interactions between the hippocampus and amygdala. Here, we induced psychosocial stress prior to encoding and examined its long-term effects on memory for emotional and neutral episodes. The stress manipulation disrupted long-term memory for a neutral episode, but facilitated long-term memory for an equivalent emotional episode compared with a control condition. The stress manipulation also increased salivary cortisol, catecholamines as indicated by the presence of alpha-amylase, heart rate, and subjectively reported stress. Stressed subjects reported more false memories than nonstressed control subjects, and these false memories correlated positively with cortisol levels, providing evidence for a relationship between stress and false memory formation. Our results demonstrate that stress, when administered prior to encoding, produces different patterns of long-term remembering for neutral and emotional episodes. These differences likely emerge from differential actions of stress hormones on memory-relevant regions of the brain.     

What children do on the Internet: domains visited and their relationship to socio-demographic characteristics and academic performance.

HomeNetToo is a longitudinal field study designed to examine the antecedents and consequences of home Internet use in low-income families. Participants included 140 children, mostly 13-year-old African American (83%) boys (58%), living in single-parent households (75%) where the median annual income was $15,000 (USD). This report focuses on children's Internet activities, socio-demographic characteristics related to their Internet activities, and the relationship between academic performance and Internet activities. Overall, findings indicate that low-income children initially use the Internet primarily for entertainment. As home Internet use loses its novelty children become more focused in their Internet activities, reducing the number of websites they visit and visiting more websites targeted to their specific interests. Pornography websites are popular initially, especially among boys, but their popularity decreases dramatically after 3 months. Age, race, and sex have little influence on which websites are most popular. Academic performance predicts subsequent Internet activities, and Internet activities predict subsequent academic performance. Directions for future research to identify mechanisms that mediate the relationship between Internet activities and academic performance and implications for the digital divide are discussed.     

Adolescents' Conceptualization of Adult Roles: Relationships with Age,Gender, Work Goal,and Maternal Employment

This study concerns the construction of thepersonal stereotypes of “adult” andadulthood roles and the influence of gender, maternalemployment, and employment goals of adolescents informulating a concept of “adult” during twoperiods in adolescence. A sample of 237 adolescents, 12%non-Caucasian, responded to statements reflectinginterpersonal expectations and gender responsibilities attributed to adults. Exploratory factoranalysis indicated a four-factor structure in attitudestoward familial and career roles, ideology of fairness,social status, and rational characteristics, which were gender differentiated by contexts and normreferences. Analyses of variance on the factor scoreindicated girls' and young boys' conceptualizations of“adult” were related to maternal employment status and their career goals; older adolescentboys structured the roles ofparent,worker,and spouse astraditionally gender typed.     

Autobiographical Misremembering: John Dean is not Alone

Survey respondents were asked to provide knowledge responses to public events and names that occurred as long ago as the 1930s and as recently as the 1980s. Respondents made errors that reflect the use of semantic and lexical memory systems, and reconstructive processes based on a semantic theme. Errors, as well as correct responses, are affected by whether the events originally occurred during the transition phase (early teens to mid-twenties). Responses indicate that events that occur during the transition phase are remembered better than events that occur during other life phases (in contradiction to the differential sampling hypothesis), but that events that occur during the transition phase can also promote error-prone reporting by interfering with other events or by promoting inaccurate reconstructions. The evidence suggests that the transition phase is not a monolithic entity, but that young adolescence differs from older transition phase ages by having a greater concentration on determining general properties of the world. Support is strongest for cognitive accounts of transition phase effects such as the first experience hypothesis, and results challenge physiological and evolutionary accounts that are tied to the transition phase promoting better memory. Finally, the more dramatic observed errors (such as inverting the subject and object of an event) point to possible undocumented instances of autobiographical misremembering. © 1997 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.