Can children break the cycle of disadvantage? Structure and agency in the transmission of education across generations

Research has shown that parents tend to pass educational advantage or disadvantage on to their children. However, little is known about the extent to which the intergenerational transmission of education involves children’s agency. In this study we drew from two traditions in sociological and social psychological theorizing—the theory of cultural and social reproduction and the theory of human agency—to examine whether agency influences children’s educational performance, and if so, whether this influence can be observed among children across social classes. We used data from the Spanish sample of the Program for International Student Assessment (N = 25,003 15-year-olds). Results indicate that the level of child agency was weakly positively related to social class, that child agency impacted on a child’s educational performance, and that the positive effect of agency on educational performance did not vary by social class. This suggests that strategies to enhance disadvantaged children’s agency may prove useful in reducing social gradients in educational performance. More generally, our findings may ignite a debate about the role that social structure and human agency play in shaping social inequality and mobility.     

Affect and the weight of idealistic versus pragmatic concerns in decision situations

Individuals consider abstract values and principles important aspects of their identities. Nonetheless, they often make judgments and decisions that contradict these values and principles for the sake of pragmatic benefits. Assuming that the process of weighting idealistic and pragmatic concerns is context sensitive, the present research argues that affect influences the relative weight of idealistic versus pragmatic concerns in decision situations owing to its influence on the level of abstraction at which individuals represent situations mentally. Studies 1 and 2 demonstrate that more positive affect increases the prominent weighting of idealistic over pragmatic concerns while less positive affect leads to less differentiation between the relevance of idealistic and pragmatic concerns. Studies 3 and 4 test the assumption that affective influences on mental abstraction are crucial for affect‐dependent shifts in the weighting of idealistic and pragmatic concerns. By bringing together theorizing on affect and cognition with recent theorizing on the role of mental abstraction for decision processes, this article highlights a mechanism through which decisions can be influenced by feelings that goes beyond the mechanisms that have typically been discussed in the affect and cognition literature so far.     

How Does More Attention to Subjective Well-Being Affect Subjective Well-Being?

There is an ongoing debate as to whether pursuing happiness is beneficial for people’s subjective well-being (SWB). To address this question, we tested whether attention to SWB – measured by participation in SWB surveys – is related to experienced SWB in two longitudinal studies. The initial study was conducted from November to December 2013 (N?=?129), and the replication study, three years later from November to December 2016 (N?=?120). The studies include two groups: one group (the control group) answered three SWB surveys over 4 weeks, and the other group (the experimental group) followed the same procedure but additionally tracked their SWB in detail using the experience sampling method four times a day and the day reconstruction method once a day using a smartphone application for two weeks to heighten their attention to their SWB. Both studies show higher SWB scores at later measurements compared to the first ones.     

Social Network Sites,Individual Social Capital and Happiness

Can online social contacts replace the importance of real-life social connections in our pursuit of happiness? With the growing use of social network sites (SNSs), attention has been increasingly drawn to this topic. Our study empirically examines the effect of SNS use on happiness for different subgroups of young adults. More specifically, we examine whether the effect of SNSs on happiness is moderated by individual social capital, as measured in terms of frequency of social contacts and feelings of loneliness. Using Dutch data from the Longitudinal Internet Studies for the Social Sciences panel, we provide robust empirical evidence that there is, on average, no relationship between the amount of time spent on SNSs and happiness. However, we find a negative association between the numbers of hours spent on SNS and happiness for SNS users who feel socially disconnected and lonely. The results hold when we control for socio-demographic characteristics, trust, hours spent on other Internet sites and household income. Hence, SNSs are not a substitute for real-life social connections and, at most, complement them.     

Mood and the impact of individuating information on the evaluation of ingroup and outgroup members: The role of mood-based expectancies

This research investigates the role of mood-based expectancies regarding a target's group membership for the impact of individuating information on target judgments. We argue that target judgments in both positive and negative mood may be more or less affected by individuating information depending on whether the target is an ingroup member or an outgroup member. Specifically, in a competitive intergroup setting it should be less congruent with mood-based expectancies when individuals in positive (negative) mood learn that an outgroup (ingroup) member rather than an ingroup (outgroup) member has succeeded. Hence, unexpected (i.e., mood-incongruent) category information should elicit more attention than expected (mood-congruent) category information. More importantly, subsequent individuating information (high vs. low target competence) should be processed more effortful and influence target judgments more strongly given mood-incongruent (vs. mood-congruent) category membership. Findings of an experiment support these predictions. Results are discussed in regard to implications for different research domains.     

The relationship between sex role characteristics,couple satisfaction and couple problem-solving skills

Abstract

This study explored the association between sex roles and relationship adjustment and communication skills. Baucom's (1976) sex role inventory was administered to couples who also reported on their relationship satisfaction and engaged in problem-solving exercises. Stepwise multiple regression analyses showed a significant positive relationship between femininity and satisfaction as well as between femininity and positive problem-solving behavior, and a significant negative relationship between femininity and aversive problem-solving strategies. Additional tests revealed no significant relationship between androgyny and either relationship satisfaction or problem-solving strategies. Results suggest that clinical interests might be better served by studies less focused on attempts to validate Bem's model of androgyny.     

Profile of Mood States Research in Sport and Exercise Psychology: Past,Present, and Future

Abstract

A review was conducted of the sport and exercise literature for the years 1971 to early 1998 in which the Profile of Mood States (POMS) figured prominently. Analyses indicated that there were 258 published articles in which the POMS was used with athletic or exercise samples during this time period. Of these articles, 226 were data-based and the remainder dealt with general, theoretical, or psychometric issues. Prominent journals publishing the data-based research, leading authors, sport samples used, gender issues, and temporal trends in the use of the POMS were noted. Anticipated future developments include: improvements in research methodologies used to study relationships among sport, exercise, and mood; continued validation of abbreviated forms of the scale as well as a form for use with youth samples; and increased utilization of the POMS for mood profiling.     

Sequential difficulty effects during execution of memory strategies in young and older adults

This study aimed at uncovering factors influencing execution of memory strategies and at furthering our understanding of ageing effects on memory performance. To achieve this end, we investigated strategy sequential difficulty (SSD) effects recently demonstrated by Uittenhove and Lemaire in the domain of problem solving. We found that both young and older participants correctly recalled more words using a sentence-construction strategy when this strategy followed an easier strategy (i.e., repetition strategy) or a harder strategy (i.e., mental-image strategy). These SSD effects were of equal magnitude in young and older adults, correlated significantly with Stroop performance in both young and older adults and correlated with N-back performance only in young adults. These findings have important implications for furthering our understanding of memory strategy execution and age-related variations in memory performance, as well for understanding mechanisms underlying SSD effects.