Work Personality,Work Engagement,and Academic Effort in a Group of College Students

The authors investigated the relationship between the variables of work engagement, developmental work personality, and academic effort in a sample of college students. This study provides evidence for the hypothesized positive relationship between academic effort, engagement, and work personality. When gender was controlled, the Work Tasks subscale of the Developmental Work Personality Scale ( Strauser & Keim, 2002 ) made the largest contribution to predicting academic effort. Engagement also made a significant contribution to the model. For men, work personality seems to be more relevant concerning academic effort, whereas for women, engagement may be more important. A discussion of the constructs of work engagement and developmental work personality is included.     

How Do Body Diagrams Affect the Accuracy and Consistency of Children's Reports of Bodily Touch Across Repeated Interviews?

We examined the amount, accuracy, and consistency of information reported by 58 5‐ to 7‐year‐old children about a staged event that included physical contact/touching. Both 1 and 7 months following the event, children were asked both open and yes/no questions about touch [i] when provided with human body diagrams (HBDs), [ii] following instruction and practice using the HBDs, or [iii] without HBDs. Children interviewed with HBDs reported more information at 7 months, but a high proportion of inaccurate touches. Children seldom repeated touch‐related information across the two interviews and did not incorporate errors made in the 1‐month interview into their open‐ended accounts 6 months later. Asking children to talk about innocuous touch may lead them to report unreliable information, especially when HBDs are used as aids and repeated interviews are conducted across delays that resemble those typical of forensic contexts. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Medical Settings as a Context for Research on Cognitive Development

Medical contexts provide a rich opportunity to study important theoretical questions in cognitive development and to investigate the influence of a range of interacting factors relating to the child, the experience, and the broader social context on children's cognition. In the context of examples of research investigating these issues, we consider several specific advantages of conducting research in medical settings: the diverse range of participants, experiences, and potential research paradigms and the opportunities for student training. We discuss the benefits and challenges of conducting research within medical contexts and consider ways of attempting to maximize the former and of addressing the latter.     

Visual laterality in belugas (Delphinapterus leucas) and Pacific white-sided dolphins (Lagenorhynchus obliquidens) when viewing familiar and unfamiliar humans

Lateralization of cognitive processes and motor functions has been demonstrated in a number of species, including humans, elephants, and cetaceans. For example, bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) have exhibited preferential eye use during a variety of cognitive tasks. The present study investigated the possibility of visual lateralization in 12 belugas (Delphinapterus leucas) and six Pacific white-sided dolphins (Lagenorhynchus obliquidens) located at two separate marine mammal facilities. During free swim periods, the belugas and Pacific white-sided dolphins were presented a familiar human, an unfamiliar human, or no human during 10–15 min sessions. Session videos were coded for gaze duration, eye presentation at approach, and eye preference while viewing each stimulus. Although we did not find any clear group level lateralization, we found individual left eye lateralized preferences related to social stimuli for most belugas and some Pacific white-sided dolphins. Differences in gaze durations were also observed. The majority of individual belugas had longer gaze durations for unfamiliar rather than familiar stimuli. These results suggest that lateralization occurs during visual processing of human stimuli in belugas and Pacific white-sided dolphins and that these species can distinguish between familiar and unfamiliar humans.     

Decision-Making by Children and Young People in the Home: The Nurture of Trust,Participation and Independence

This article presents the findings of a qualitative research study of children and young people (aged 7–17 years) in Ireland. It seeks to investigate whether, for the children and young people involved, the home is a space where supportive, trusting family relationships can be nurtured; where independence grows with age; and where parents listen, discuss and explain decisions made. It furthermore outlines the views and experiences of parents with regard to children and young people’s participation in the home and will focus on relational and spatial aspects of child participation within the home. The study recognizes children and young people as social actors and is also informed by a relational and spatial approach to children’s participation which recognizes the respective roles and positions of children in facilitating child participation. The results indicate that age and issues of trust and tokenism were significant barriers in young people’s participation and decision making at home. Key enablers of children and young people’s participation included spaces where discussion can happen at home, good family relationships, being listened to by parents, trust and growing levels of independence with age, seeing decisions as fair and having the rationale for decisions explained to them by parents. Among suggestions for improvements the most important were designated family spaces for discussion, encouragement of active listening by parents, and promotion of explanation by adults of their decisions.     

The effect of viewing fitness imagery on body dissatisfaction: sex and physical activity differences

Exposure to cultural bodily ideals featuring thinness and muscularity can have deleterious effects on body satisfaction. The current study explores the effect of exposure to such imagery on body dissatisfaction and the influence of internalisation of cultural and athletic ideals. 188 (97 male) adults (18–25yrs; M = 20.97) were grouped according to a 2 × 2 × 2 mixed between-within subjects design (male/female; high/low physical activity; intervention/control). Participants were exposed to images of idealised physiques or neutral images. Internalisation-general, sex, physical activity levels, and Body Mass Index were associated with baseline levels of body dissatisfaction. Internalisation of cultural ideals appears to be an important factor for the prediction of body dissatisfaction. Exposure to idealised images resulted in increases in body dissatisfaction across all groups compared to controls. Neither sex nor physical activity levels buffer young adults from the negative effects of viewing images featuring idealised bodies.     

An expanded model of careers professional identity: time for change?

ABSTRACT

The careers profession is challenged significantly by government, employers and potential consumers to articulate its added value to society. Neoliberal discourses such as privatisation, deregulation, flexicurity and a self-help culture are impacting upon arrangements for the design and delivery of all-age careers provision across the UK. In this article, a UK-wide alliance designed to reconceptualise professional formation and identity is examined and critiqued. Findings from experiences in England illuminate the necessity for credible and authentic professional reconstruction. This is challenging work, where boundary maintenance is contested and disconnect with employer networks is prevalent. The article concludes that there is a need for strong leadership and more collective efforts to harness and secure careers professionals’ identity and impact.     

The Public Policy Pedagogy of Corporate and Alternative News Media

This paper argues for seeing in-depth news coverage of political, social, and economic issues as “public policy pedagogy.” To develop my argument, I draw on Nancy Fraser’s democratic theory, which attends to social differences and does not assume that unity is a starting point or an end goal of public dialogue. Alongside the formation of “subaltern counterpublics” (Fraser), alternative media outlets sometimes develop. There, members of alternative publics debate their interests and strategize about how to be heard in wider, mass-mediated public arenas. I address the normative implications of this non-unitary, multiple-publics model for news journalism, analyzing how current conventions in mainstream news journalism (e.g., “balance” defined as “airing two extremes”) can restrict public debate and impoverish the public policy pedagogy on offer. I illustrate my arguments with a case study of media coverage of the creation and implementation of a social justice curriculum in British Columbia, Canada.     

Constructing the “Good Mother”: The Experience of Mothering Ideologies by Work Status

The purpose of this study was to explore how mothers construct their worker–parent identity within a cultural context of competing mothering ideologies. We used narrative data from interviews with 95 married mothers with at least 1 child under the age of 5 to compare the construction of intensive mothering expectations by middle-class full-time employed mothers, part-time employed mothers, and at-home mothers. Although previous research has shown that mothers alter work status to live up to intensive mothering expectations, our results show that mothers also alter their construction of intensive mothering expectations to reconcile these demands with their work status choices. The results also suggest that mothers with different employment decisions differ in their construction of Y. Elvin-Nowak and H. Thomsson's (2001) 3 discursive positions—accessibility, happy mother/happy child, and separation of work and home.