Consequences of fathers' participation in family work: parents' role strain and well-being

The relation of fathers' participation in family work (child care and home chores) to parents' role strain and well-being was examined in an interview study of 160 Caucasian middle-class fathers and mothers of kindergarten and fourth-grade children. In half of the families, mothers were employed. Four forms of paternal participation were examined. Role-strain items referred to immediate and specific problems such as time and energy constraints and role conflicts. Well-being measures assessed self-esteem, life satisfaction, and quality of experience in the parental and marital roles. Regression analyses, carried out separately for fathers and for mothers, indicated that, contrary to expectation, when the level of fathers' participation was controlled maternal employment did not condition the relation between participation and the outcome variables. Findings varied for the different forms of participation. For fathers, higher levels of participation were associated with feeling more involved and competent as a parent and with being more critical of wives' patterns and parenting. For mothers, those whose husbands were more participant praised their husbands' parenting, but they were lower in life satisfaction and were more self-critical about their balance of work and family responsibilities.     

Evaluating "baby think it over" infant simulators: a comparison group study

To test the efficacy of Baby-Think-It-Over (BTIO) infant simulators, two versions of a sexuality education program were compared. While the program was designed to include BTIO as an important teaching technique, two schools (49 students) opted not to use them. These students completed all elements of the program except the BTIO activities. Their results were compared to students from three similar, neighboring schools that completed the regular program (including BTIO). Knowledge about sex, attitudes toward teen sex, parent-adolescent communication, and sexual behavior were measured on self-report instruments at the beginning and end of the three-week program. No significant differences were found between the two groups on any of the four measures on the pretest or posttest. This study and similar recent reports call into question the educational value of expensive infant simulators.     

Perceived organizational support and perceived external prestige: predicting organizational attachment for university faculty, staff, and administrators

The present article introduces a social-exchange model of organizational attachment incorporating both direct exchange and indirect exchange. Participants were 325 university employees. The present results indicated that perceived organizational support (POS) and perceived external prestige (PEP) both contribute to organizational attachment. Further, the results showed that the extent to which POS and PEP are related to organizational attachment is moderated by occupational proxies of cosmopolitan-local role orientation. POS was more strongly related to the affective commitment and withdrawal cognitions of staff and administrators than to those of faculty. PEP was more strongly related to affective commitment and withdrawal cognitions of university faculty than to those of university staff and administrators. The authors discussed the need to incorporate relational variables such as PEP into other social-exchange frameworks.     

Use of the adolescent SASSI in a juvenile correctional setting

The Substance Abuse Subtle Screening Inventory-Adolescent (SASSI-A) is used in evaluation and treatment planning for incarcerated juveniles. Validity of the SASSI-A in a juvenile correctional facility was examined using archival data. Findings generally support the validity of SASSI-A substance use scales. However, there is concern regarding the potential for ethnic bias in this setting. Cut-scores suggest that the SASSI-A may best be used for detecting problematic alcohol consumption using the Face Valid Alcohol Scale > or = 3. Future studies should more closely investigate whether the three underlying dimensions of the SASSI-A are useful in treatment planning. Results are presented in light of the relatively new SASSI-A2.     

Black students' experiences of “acceptable” racism at a UK university

Our research, conducted with 30 Black students at a predominantly White institution, used mixed qualitative methods to investigate Black students' sense-making of experiences that signalled their non-belonging. All participants experienced both overt and covert racism including the n-word, racist humour, and negative stereotyping; and this occurred in public and intimate spaces. Our reflexive thematic analysis centred on interactional dynamics that can explain how racism on campus is rendered acceptable; and how and why this is consequential for how Black students can act. We found that White students' practices of “acceptable” racism entailed the denial of responsibility and the privileging of White experiences to deflect responsibility. Importantly, these devices signal that the use of racist discourses does not always arise from unconscious bias or naivety. The perceived power dynamics whereby White students decide who belongs and what is acceptable contributed to Black students' inability to act on their own terms.     

Reward history modulates visual attention in an avian model

Animal Cognition - Attention can be biased towards previously reward-associated stimuli even when they are task-irrelevant and physically non-salient, although studies of reward-modulated attention...     

Perceptions of self-oriented and other-oriented help-providers

Two studies were conducted to assess the relationship between an individual's self-described motivation for being a help-provider (i.e., a lawyer in Study 1 and a physi-cian in Study 2) and college undergraduates' perceptions of, and desire to seek assis-tance from, that help-provider. The major findings were incongruent with the notion inferred from the helping literature that altruistically motivated help-providers would be consistently evaluated more favorably than, and preferred over, egoistically moti-vated help-providers. Specifically, whereas the other-oriented help-providers were rated as more likable, honest, and less devious than the self-oriented help-providers, the self-oriented help-providers were rated as more ambitious, competent, and as earning more money than the other-oriented help-providers. Moreover, although the participants' “desire to hire” a particular help-provider was found to be associated with: (1) their perceptions of the help-provider's characteristics (Studies 1 and 2), (2) their own self-reported characteristics (Study 1), and (3) their anticipated affective state prior to seeking assistance (Studies 1 and 2), no clear relation was found in either study between the help-provider's motivation and the participants' desire to seek assistance from that help-provider. In contrast to the ambivalence demonstrated in response to the altruistically and egoistically motivated professional help-providers in Studies 1 and 2, participants in a preliminary study of perceptions of “everyday” helpers demonstrated a clear preference for altruistically motivated assistance (al-though these participants' evaluations were found to be influenced by the closeness of the relationship between the helper and recipient, the type of help provided, the participants' gender, and the gender of the helper-recipient dyad). Considered to-gether, the pattern of results suggests the broad range of situational and individual difference variables that may affect perceptions of, and reactions to, self-oriented and other-oriented help-providers.     

Further evidence concerning motivational distortion on the Sixteen Personality Factor primaries by male felons

A multiple regression analysis was used to determine the susceptibility of the 16 Personality Factor Test (16PF) to faking for a sample of male felons. The study is a replication of an earlier study of a similar sample. Motivational distortion (MD) correlated significantly with the 16PF primary scores. The relationship was most evident when the structure coefficients rather than the beta weights were analyzed. The findings were consistent with the previous results which indicated a fairly high degree of support for the MD corrections provided in the manual. An important exception was that Dominance (E) was suppressed by individuals from both samples when MD was present.     

Grade, pubertal status, and gender-related variations in conflictual issues among adolescents

The purpose of this study was to describe adolescent perceptions of conflictual family issues, and to ascertain if the intensity of these issues is associated with adolescent grade in school, pubertal status, and gender. The sample was comprised of 279 junior high and senior high school students. Each participant completed a self-report measure of pubertal status, a demographic questionnaire, and the Issues Checklist. Principal factor analysis with varimax rotation of the Issues Checklist resulted in the retention of four factors accounting for 71.59% of the variance. Stepwise regression analyses were conducted for each emergent factor with grade in school, pubertal status, and gender serving as predictors. The results of these analyses indicated that the intensity of School Issues and Household Behavior Issues is greater among seventh and ninth graders than among eleventh graders. Self-Responsibility Issues were perceived as being most intense among transpubertal adolescents. Finally, boys perceived more intense conflict over Persistent Issues and Concerns than did girls.     

Comparing 16 PF scores for two groups of offenders

The 16 PF scores for 678 male offenders in a diagnostic and receiving center were compared with scores for 891 male offenders in penal institutions by t tests for independent means. Significant differences were obtained for 13 of the 16 primaries included in the 16 PF. The Penitentiary group scored significantly higher than the Reception Center group on the primaries, A, I, L, M, O, Q1, and Q4. Conversely, the Reception Center group scored significantly higher than the Penitentiary group on the primaries, B, C, F, G, N, and Q3.