Perceptions of personal Web usage in the workplace: AQ-methodology approach.

An important aspect to managing Personal Web Usage (PWU) at the workplace lies in understanding and reshaping the perceptions of the users. The study contends that the outward manifestation of PWU behaviors at the workplace is but one consequence of the actors' attitudes which in turn are determinants of their ingrained beliefs. This study explores user perceptions about PWU using a web-based Q-methodology. Q-methodology used in this study is suitable for exploratory research, to obtain a deeper and first-hand understanding about the underlying phenomena about an under-explored concept. Twenty-five participants were asked to sort 38 statements according to their relative importance. The results uncover three distinct factors PWU: (1) cyber-bureaucrat, (2) cyber-humanist, and (3) cyber-adventurer. This indicates that PWU maybe a multidimensional construct instead of a uni-dimensional one as previously thought. The findings of this study can help managers understand, and shape the perceptions of the users rather than the outwardly manifested behaviors.     

Preventing Violence Against Women: Engaging the Fathers of Today and Tomorrow

Although fathers play a key role in helping their children develop ideas about gender relations and close relationships, they have been largely overlooked as a resource to help prevent violence against women. This paper explores some of the reasons why fathers have not been successfully engaged in violence prevention. Engaging fathers to promote wider definitions of masculinity for themselves and their children is presented as a major mechanism by which fathers could help prevent violence against women. The information-motivation-behavior model of change, developed for preventing high-risk sexual behavior, is applied to the area to provide structure for understanding previous and current attempts to engage fathers. Examples of innovative programs are used to highlight the application of this model.     

Personal and Political Emotions in the Mind of the Diplomat

Despite growing research on the role of emotions in international relations, little work has analyzed how diplomats and decision‐makers themselves make sense of feelings generated by relationships that have both individual and state‐level implications. Do diplomats consciously experience feelings on behalf of the state? If so, how? How might individual embodied emotions affect how diplomats carry out their roles during negotiations? In the first systematic effort to address and conceptualize these questions empirically, with Henry Kissinger as a case study, we investigate the interplay between the experience of being an individual with personal emotions, on the one hand, and the practice of evaluating performative emotional cues relevant to the state, on the other. We suggest that diplomats recognize some emotional inputs as accruing not to them as individuals but to the state they represent, typically in connection with traditional diplomatic protocols and rituals that are firmly established as state‐level performances. At the same time, however, especially but not exclusively in high‐stakes negotiations involving strong personal relationships, individually embodied feelings with little‐to‐no state relevance can have significant influence on how diplomats define and pursue the national interest.     

Developing Clear and Useful Scoring Procedures for Goal Attainment Scaling in Longitudinal Case Studies

This article examines scoring procedures for Goal Attainment Scaling (GAS) and suggests a new scoring procedure to communicate GAS outcomes in longitudinal studies. Analysis is based on longitudinal case studies that evaluate transitioning from psychiatric institutions to independent living. Five scoring methods are identified: raw scores; sum of score differences; mean scores; T-scores; and graphing raw scores. Graphing raw scores is presented as an alternative method of expressing GAS scores for studies with few participants and multiple time points. This enables easy interpretation of goal attainment, and allows for fluctuation in performance as is typical in clinical practice.     

Does Executive Function Matter for Preschoolers’ Problem Behaviors?

Early problem behaviors are associated with a variety of cognitive deficits: in verbal ability, executive function (EF) and theory of mind (ToM). Previous studies with different age-groups yield contrasting results: for 2-year-olds, ToM skills appear particularly salient (Hughes & Ensor, 2006), but for 4-year-olds EF appears more important (Hughes, White, Sharpen, & Dunn, 2000). To examine this apparent developmental change in the relative salience of cognitive deficits we followed 122 children from Hughes and Ensor’s (2006) sample at ages 3 and 4. Tests of ToM, EF and verbal ability were included at each time-point and multi-informant, multi-measure, multi-setting ratings provided aggregate measures of problem behaviors. ToM and verbal ability showed non-specific associations with problem behaviors, but associations between EF and problem behaviors were strong and specific. In addition, age-3 EF mediated relations between age-2 verbal ability and age-4 problem behaviors.     

On emotional innumeracy: Predicted and actual affective responses to grand-scale tragedies

The present research demonstrates that people overestimate the intensity of their emotional responses to grand-scale tragedies. Participants predicted that they would feel significantly worse if thousands of people were killed in a disaster than if only a few people were killed, and yet they exhibited an “emotional flatline,” feeling equally sad regardless of the number of people killed. This unforeseeable emotional flatline was demonstrated in response to deaths stemming from human violence and natural disasters, both close to home and far away (including hurricanes in the United States, a forest fire in Spain, and the Iraq War). Participants’ actual emotional responses were calibrated with fatalities only when abstract death tolls were translated into concrete images. We argue that affective forecasts and emotional experiences may arise from separate systems, leading to reliable forecasting errors, as well as influencing subsequent judgments.     

A comparison of preschoolers' recall of experienced versus non‐experienced events across multiple interviews

Preschool children's recall of both experienced and non‐experienced activities was examined across three interviews. One hundred and six children aged 4 to 5 years (58 males, 48 females) from both low and high socioeconomic status areas participated in an event called the Deakin Activities, which consisted of two experienced activities. One or two days later, the children were asked to recall what happened in the two activities and an activity they had not experienced which was suggested to have occurred along with the experienced activities. Next, children were given false suggestions about one of the experienced (true‐biased) activities and the non‐experienced (false) activity. For the remaining experienced (true‐unbiased) activity, no questions were asked. Three and eight days after the activities were presented, children were again required to recall all three activities in their own words while a variety of suggestive techniques were used as encouragers. The results revealed that irrespective of the SES group, assent rates across the true and false activities became more similar after the first interview. Furthermore, children's narratives about the false activity became more similar in detail, structure and quality to their narratives about the true activities across interviews. However, the rate of fantastic/improbable details was higher for the false activity compared to the true activities, children reported more interviewer suggestions about the false activity than the true‐biased activity, and there were fewer confabulation errors reported about the false activity compared to the true activities. The implications of the results are discussed. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.