To be me or not to be me: About alienation

This article is about the experiential side of the concept of alienation and its relations to the stress process in the context of work and organization. We distinguish two kinds of alienation: primary alienation, the experience or feeling that something is different from normal, and secondary alienation, the absence of an experience of or feeling about something abnormal. After having gone into everyday reality and how it can be so disturbed that alienation ensues, we go further into the experiences involved in both kinds of alienation and their positive and negative consequences. Secondary alienation is described as a common final path in the second stage of a human stress process. In the discussion, we pay attention to the social scientific tradition of alienation as result of an evil societal influence, which has turned out to be an unfortunate approach. Instead, we advocate an approach that conceives alienation as the outcome of a personal choice. Lastly we indicate shortly what can be done about secondary alienation.     

Pathways of Religious Assimilation: Second‐Generation Asian Americans’ Religious Retention and Religiosity

We explore the religious assimilation of different Asian American second‐generation religious groups by examining their rates of religious retention and levels of religiosity relative to the first generation and the general American population. In general, Asian Americans exhibit a pattern of generational religious decline: the second generation tend to have lower levels of both religious retention and religiosity compared to the immigrant generation. The second generation do not necessarily conform to the religious patterns of the general population. Rather, they follow different trajectories of retention and religiosity depending on the religion. We identify four different pathways of religious change among the second generation, and discuss how racial and religious differences mediate assimilation into American religion.     

Motivations for Political Discussion: Antecedents and Consequences on Civic Engagement

Scholarship on informal discussion of politics and current events has mainly focused on its cognitive, attitudinal, and behavioral effects. In comparison, fewer studies have addressed the antecedents of political talk. Using 2‐wave U.S. panel survey data, this study sheds light over 2 sets of motivations people may have for engaging in political conversation: civic‐oriented and social‐oriented goals; and their effects over civic participation. Using structural equation modeling, results suggest that both civic and social motivations are positive predictors of frequency of political discussion, and indirectly associated with civic engagement. From a theoretical perspective, these findings cast political talk as a more complex phenomenon than what deliberative theory suggests, and point to social motivations as an additional path to civic life.     

A framework for Bayesian optimality of psychophysical laws

The Weber–Fechner law states that perceived intensity is proportional to physical stimuli on a logarithmic scale. In this work, we formulate a Bayesian framework for the scaling of perception and find logarithmic and related scalings are optimal under expected relative error fidelity. Therefore, the Weber–Fechner law arises as being information theoretically efficient under the constraint of limited representability. An even stronger connection is drawn between the Weber–Fechner law and a Bayesian framework when neural storage or communication is the dominant concern, such as for numerosity. Theoretical results and experimental verification for perception of sound intensity are both presented.     

Doll Play Narratives About Starting School in Children of Socially Anxious Mothers, and Their Relation to Subsequent Child School-Based Anxiety

Child social anxiety is common, and predicts later emotional and academic impairment. Offspring of socially anxious mothers are at increased risk. It is important to establish whether individual vulnerability to disorder can be identified in young children. The responses of 4.5?year-old children of mothers with social phobia (N?=?62) and non-anxious mothers (N?=?60) were compared, two months before school entry, using a Doll Play (DP) procedure focused on the social challenge of starting school. DP responses were examined in relation to teacher reports of anxious-depressed symptoms and social worries at the end of the child’s first school term. The role of earlier child behavioral inhibition and attachment, assessed at 14?months, was also considered. Compared to children of non-anxious mothers, children of mothers with social phobia were significantly more likely to give anxiously negative responses in their school DP (OR?=?2.57). In turn, negative DP predicted teacher reported anxious-depressed and social worry problems. There were no effects of infant behavioral inhibition or attachment. Vulnerability in young children at risk of anxiety can be identified using Doll Play narratives.     

Unmixing the mixing cost: contributions from dimensional relevance and stimulus-response suppression

When participants repeat the same task in a context in which the task may also switch (a mixed block), performance deteriorates compared to when there is only one task repeating (a pure block). Three experiments were designed to assess how perceptual and motor transitions influenced this mixing cost. Experiment 1 provided three pure block baselines for perceptual and motor transitions. Experiments 2 and 3 examined these transitions in a mixed block. Results show that most of the mixing cost comes from two factors: (a) episodic interference in the mixed block when the stimulus changes and the response repeats, and (b) increased suppression in mixed blocks affecting trials where stimulus-response mappings repeat. We propose that these mechanisms are strategically applied when adopting a sustained "switching set" in mixed blocks. The purpose of this set would be to avoid perseveration errors in the most demanding trials (the task-switching trials), but remaining active during task-repetitions. Results regarding the mixing cost are thus relevant to the assessment of models of task-switching, which at present mainly rely on data from task switch trials.     

Assessing Measurement Invariance of the Children's Depression Inventory in Chinese and Italian Primary School Student Samples

This study tested the measurement invariance of Children's Depression Inventory (CDI) and compared its factorial variance/covariance and latent means among Chinese and Italian children. Multigroup confirmatory factor analysis of the original five factors identified by Kovacs revealed that full measurement invariance did not hold. Further analysis showed that 4 of 21 factor loadings, 14 of 26 intercepts, and 12 of 26 item errors were noninvariant. Factor variance and covariance invariant tests revealed significant differences between Chinese and Italian samples. The latent factor mean comparison suggested no significant difference across the two groups. Nevertheless, the finding of partial metric and scalar invariance suggested that observed mean differences on the CDI items cannot be fully explained by the mean differences in the latent factor. These results suggest that researchers and practitioners exercise caution when gauging the size of the true national population differences in depressive symptoms among Italian and Chinese children when assessed via CDI. In addition to providing needed evidence on the use of the CDI in Italian and Chinese children specifically, the methods used in this research can serve more generally as an example for other cross-cultural assessment research to test structural equivalence and measurement invariance of scales and to determine why it is important to do so.