Crossing the Picket Line: A Brief Faculty Memoir of the Historic University of Bridgeport Strike

This memoir provides the personal story of a tenured poet who initially walked the picket line during the 1990 University of Bridgeport faculty strike. During the strike's second week, he made the difficult decision to cross the picket line of a union he helped create seventeen years earlier. He continually relives his strike experience.     

Secular Tolerance? Anti‐Muslim Sentiment in Western Europe

The literature about secularization proposes two distinct explanations of anti‐Muslim sentiment in secularized societies. The first theory understands it in terms of religious competition between Muslims and the remaining minority of orthodox Protestants; the second understands it as resulting from value conflicts between Muslims and the nonreligious majority. The two theories are tested by means of a multilevel analysis of the European Values Study 2008. Our findings indicate that, although more secularized countries are on average more tolerant towards Muslims and Islam, strongest anti‐Muslim attitudes are nonetheless found among the nonreligious in these countries.     

Women's meta-perceptions of attractiveness and their relations to body image

The present study examined meta-perceptions of attractiveness among women. More specifically, ratings were collected about how women thought their partner, family and friends, and strangers would view their physical attractiveness. In an online survey, 1287 Dutch women (aged 19-80 years) answered questions concerning meta-perceptions of attractiveness, demographic data, body mass index (BMI), body image (Body Areas Satisfaction Scale, self-rated general physical attractiveness, and actual-ideal weight discrepancy), and self-esteem. Results showed that women's meta-perceptions of attractiveness reflected the level of closeness of the relationship with the other person, with the most positive meta-perceptions reported for the partner, followed by those for family and friends, and the least positive meta-perceptions for strangers. Meta-perceptions were strongly related to body image, self-esteem and BMI. Self-ratings of attractiveness appeared to be lower than all meta-perceptions of attractiveness, suggesting that women are aware of their own negative self-bias and/or other people's positive bias.     

Exploring attentional disruption in fibromyalgia using the attentional blink

Disrupted attentional function in individuals with fibromyalgia syndrome (FMS) has been noted in a number of previous studies. The cognitive mechanisms related to this disruption are not well-understood. This study sought to identify whether differences exist in early attentional processing and attentional capacity in individuals with FMS measuring the attentional blink (AB). Early attentional function was assessed in 16 females with FMS and compared with 16 healthy age-matched females without FMS. Simple early visual stimulus target detection accuracy was not significantly different between groups. However, as target detection difficulty increased, individuals in the FMS group showed significantly poorer performance compared to healthy participants. Our findings suggest that attentional disruption in individuals with FMS is associated with deficits in the early allocation of attentional resources during the completion of tasks with higher attentional demand.     

Beyond one work day? A daily diary study on causal and reverse effects between experienced workplace incivility and behaving rude towards others

In this diary study with N = 348 employees, we examine whether the contagion effect of workplace incivility transfers beyond one work day that is whether the experience of workplace incivility is related to showing rude behaviours towards others the next day. Additionally, we examine whether ruminating in the evening of a work day and building an intention for revenge behaviour mediate this relationship, and explore whether a serial mediation process exists where experienced incivility triggers ruminative thoughts, which, in turn, increase the likelihood of intending to act, which transfers into actual rude behaviour the next day. Using a multilevel path analysis, our results confirmed a lagged relationship between workplace incivility one day and rude behaviours towards others the next day. Between-persons’ workplace incivility was also related to showing rude behaviour towards others. Neither rumination nor revenge behaviour intent proved to be mediators of this relationship. Additionally, the serial mediation process was not confirmed; however, parts of the process—namely the relationship between experienced workplace incivility and ruminating about work in the evening—received support. Importantly, the reverse relationship (i.e., showing rude behaviour one day leads to experiencing workplace incivility the next) was not supported in our analysis. By adding a new, daily time perspective, our study suggests that participants do not intentionally provoke episodes of incivility, but rather react to others’ incivility.     

The development of complex sentence interpretation in typically developing children compared with children with specific language impairments or early unilateral focal lesions

This study compared sentence comprehension skills in typically developing children 5-17 years of age, children with language impairment (LI) and children with focal brain injuries (FL) acquired in the pre/perinatal period. Participants were asked to process sentences 'on-line', choosing the agent in sentences that varied in syntactic complexity (actives, passives, subject clefts and object clefts), and in the presence or absence of a subject-verb agreement contrast. Results revealed that accuracy and processing speeds vary with syntactic complexity in all groups, reflecting the frequency and regularity of sentence types. Developmental changes continued throughout childhood, as children became faster and more accurate at processing more complex sentence structures. Children with LI and children with FL were quite profoundly delayed, displaying profiles similar to, or more impaired than those of younger children, but there was no evidence in the FL group for a disadvantage in left- vs. right-hemisphere-damaged children. Children with LI showed one unique pattern: higher than normal costs (reflected in reaction times) in using converging information from subject-verb agreement, in line with studies suggesting special vulnerabilities in grammatical morphology in this group. Results are discussed in terms of the Competition Model, a theory of language processing designed to account for the statistical changes in performance that are observed during development, and the probabilistic deficits in children with language impairments.     

Pubertal timing and substance use: associations between and within families across late adolescence

In the present study, between-family analyses of data from adolescent twin girls offer new evidence that early menarche is associated with earlier initiation and greater frequency of smoking and drinking. The role of personality factors and peer relationships in that association was investigated, and little support was found for their involvement. Novel within-family analyses replicating associations of substance use with pubertal timing in contrasts of twin sisters selected for extreme discordance for age at menarche are reported. Within-family replications demonstrated that the association of pubertal timing with substance use cannot be explained solely by between-family confounds. Within-family analyses demonstrated contextual modulation of the influence of pubertal timing: Its impact on drinking frequency is apparent only among girls in urban settings. Sibling comparisons illustrate a promising analytic tool for studying diverse developmental outcomes.     

Spectral and temporal degradation of speech as a simulation of morphosyntactic deficits in English and German

Spectral and temporal degradation of the speech stream is increasingly used to model receptive language deficits such as aphasia and developmental language disorders. As with results from patient studies, the specific pattern of receptive deficits can reveal underlying structural and processing characteristics of different languages. Here, we test English- and German-speaking college students' auditory comprehension of complex morphosyntactic structures under normal and 'dual-degradation' conditions. The resulting profiles of strength and vulnerability in the two languages highlight the cross-linguistic differences in reliability of syntactic and morphological cues, and closely resemble the deficits observed in previous studies of receptive aphasia.