Compassion Predictors in Undergraduates: A Catholic College Example

Compassion is sorely needed in contemporary society, including within faith-based colleges. Past research has examined the prevention of compassion fatigue in healthcare professions, but relatively little research exists on the predictors of compassion, particularly among student populations. This study examines the factors associated with higher compassion levels in graduating college seniors, revealing demographic, experiential, and belief-related factors contributing to compassion. Results suggest that the general profile of a highly compassionate graduating college senior is a student who is female, politically liberal, religious, studying the natural or social sciences, actively involved in community service or volunteering, and who has undergone workshops on racial/cultural awareness and sensitivity.     

Sensitive Topics,Missing Data,and Refusal in Social Network Studies: An Ethical Examination

We describe our ethics‐driven process of addressing missing data within a social network study about accountability for racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, cis‐sexism, ableism, and other forms of oppression among social justice union organizers. During data collection, some would‐be participants did not return emails and others explicitly refused to engage in the research. All refusals came from women of color. We faced an ethical dilemma: Should we continue to seek participation from those who had not yet responded, with the hopes of recruiting more women of color from within the network so their perspectives would not be tokenized? Or, should we stop asking those who had been contacted multiple times, which would compromise the social network data and analysis? We delineate ways in which current discussions of the ethics of social network studies fell short, given our framework and our community psychology (CP ) values. We outline literature that was helpful in thinking through this challenge; we looked outside of CP to the decolonization literature on refusal. Lessons learned include listening for the possible meanings of refusals and considering the level of engagement and the labor required of participants when designing research studies.     

Perceptions of Perfection: The Influence of Social Media on Interpersonal Evaluations

Through social network sites such as Facebook, people gain information about acquaintances that they would not gain from everyday life. This information typically highlights the most positive aspects of people’s personalities and lives. The goal of this investigation was to determine whether looking at another user’s Facebook profile influences perceptions of that individual’s socially desirable characteristics (e.g., intelligence, attractiveness). One group of participants viewed an acquaintance’s Facebook profile before providing evaluations, and the other evaluated the person without viewing Facebook. Results revealed that participants who viewed another person’s Facebook profile evaluated that person more favorably than those who completed a control task (Study 1) or wrote about the person from memory (Study 2). Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.     

Stuck like glue: the formation and consequences of brand attachments among salespeople

Although managers and researchers put utmost importance on uncovering factors that affect effort and performance of sales representatives, they have largely overlooked a key factor. This research aims to remedy this neglect by shedding light on salesperson brand attachment. A qualitative study first examines the prevalence of attachment and uncovers several potential antecedents. Two follow-up empirical studies show that identification and psychological ownership are significant predictors of salesperson brand attachment. Informed by this research, managers can encourage brand attachment, with the end goal of increasing salesperson effort and ultimately performance, by increasing feelings of identification and psychological ownership among salespeople. This impact is particularly notable among brands with low market share, which are often a key concern of managers. The findings provide novel insights into how attachment affects sales representatives, as well as potential methods to cultivate such an attachment.     

Categories of Large Numbers in Line Estimation

How do people stretch their understanding of magnitude from the experiential range to the very large quantities and ranges important in science, geopolitics, and mathematics? This paper empirically evaluates how and whether people make use of numerical categories when estimating relative magnitudes of numbers across many orders of magnitude. We hypothesize that people use scale words—thousand, million, billion—to carve the large number line into categories, stretching linear responses across items within each category. If so, discontinuities in position and response time are expected near the boundaries between categories. In contrast to previous work (Landy, Silbert, & Goldin, 2013) that suggested only that a minority of college undergraduates employed categorical boundaries, we find that discontinuities near category boundaries occur in most or all participants, but that accurate and inaccurate participants respond in opposite ways to category boundaries. Accurate participants highlight contrasts within a category, whereas inaccurate participants adjust their responses toward category centers.     

Mother-Child Interactions and Preschoolers’ Emotion Regulation Outcomes: Nurturing Autonomous Emotion Regulation

Emotion regulation is a complex process that begins in infancy and continues through childhood with parents’ support. Early parent-child interactions shape the way children learn emotion management. We took a sociocultural and social learning approach to exploring the specific components of mother-child interactions that are related to mothers’ perceptions of her child’s regulatory ability and the child’s observed emotion regulation. Thirty mothers and their preschool children were recruited from two New England urban areas: one community sample and one head start sample. Dyads engaged in a free play session, children completed an observed compliance task, and mothers completed a set of questionnaires assessing their perceptions of their child’s regulation. Regression analyses revealed that maternal behaviors during free play predicted child’s observed hostility (F _(2,29)?=?3.137, p?<?.05) and mothers’ perceptions of her child’s regulatory ability predicted observed child compliance (F _{(2, 17)}?=?4.990, p?<?.05). Child behaviors during play significantly predicted child’s compliance (F _(3,20)?=?4.722, p?<?.05) and child’s hostility (F _{(1, 26)}?=?9.220, p?<?.001). Maternal modeling and intentional scaffolding as well as perceptions of her child’s regulatory capacity have a powerful impact on her child’s observed regulation. Results indicate that it is particularly important for mothers of preschoolers to support autonomy while guiding socially appropriate behavior. Interventions that target improving mothers’ negative perceptions of their children, educating on appropriate preschool expectations, and facilitating preschoolers’ mature play may help mothers interact with their children in the ways that foster children’s autonomous emotion regulation.     

Divorce Stress,Stepfamily Stress,and Depression among Emerging Adult Stepchildren

Several decades of research have shown that parental divorce can be a stressful experience for children and may lead to depression and other negative outcomes. Similarly, research has highlighted the stressors often induced by stepfamily formation and their effects on children. Although singular family transitions can exert influence, few studies explore how the combined stress from two family transitions may interact to influence long-term outcomes. Our study addresses this gap by using national data from 1142 respondents who experienced parental divorce and a subsequent transition to stepfamily life. Congruent with prior research, we find that retrospective reports of divorce and stepfamily stress is associated with higher depressive symptoms in emerging adults (18–30 years of age). We also find that stress induced by parental divorce and subsequent stepfamily formation significantly interact to increase depressive symptoms in this population. The research and clinical implications of our findings are discussed.     

Career specialty choice: A combined research-intervention project

This research describes and evaluates a workshop aimed at promoting career specialty choice and examines relationships between measured career specialty interests, work values, and personality type. Three consecutive classes of second-year medical students (N = 161) participated in a two-session specialty choice workshop. All participants in the study rated the usefulness of the workshop and reported their level of specialty choice certainty and satisfaction. They also responded to measures of medical specialty preference, work values, and personality type. Results indicated two distinct student subgroups of career-specialty-decided and -undecided students. The former subgroup evidenced more stability and certainty of specialty choice as well satisfaction with their choice. Both groups of students reported having benefited from the workshop. Significant gender differences in the relationships between scores on a measure of medical specialty preference and scores on measures of work values and personality emerged. Implications are discussed in terms of the differential career counseling needs of students either decided or undecided about their career specialty choices.