Teachers’ perceptions of middle schoolers’ social concerns: strategies and barriers to supporting students’ social success

Social Psychology of Education - Teachers are often at the forefront of efforts to help students struggling socially at school and their support may be particularly critical during the early...     

Tracking the continuity of language comprehension: computer mouse trajectories suggest parallel syntactic processing

Although several theories of online syntactic processing assume the parallel activation of multiple syntactic representations, evidence supporting simultaneous activation has been inconclusive. Here, the continuous and non-ballistic properties of computer mouse movements are exploited, by recording their streaming x, y coordinates to procure evidence regarding parallel versus serial processing. Participants heard structurally ambiguous sentences while viewing scenes with properties either supporting or not supporting the difficult modifier interpretation. The curvatures of the elicited trajectories revealed both an effect of visual context and graded competition between simultaneously active syntactic representations. The results are discussed in the context of 3 major groups of theories within the domain of sentence processing.     

Youth Departing from Residential Care: A Gender Comparison

Although females represent almost half of all youth involved in residential care in the US, very little is known about this population. In order to examine differences in characteristics of male (n = 308) and female (n = 180) youth departing from residential care, data were collected on 488 youth from a large residential treatment facility in the Midwest. Gender differences were assessed on 16 variables measured at the time of departure across family, education, behavior, and departure domains. Overall, male and female youth departing from residential care were very similar for measures collected at the time of departure. Only three variables (GPA at departure, number of school referrals during the previous 8 weeks, and planned departure) were found to be significantly different between males and females. Implications for future research and the provision of aftercare services are discussed.     

Four Brief Studies of Relations Between Postformal Thought and Non-Cognitive Factors: Personality, Concepts of God, Political Opinions, and Social Attitudes

This is a report of four studies extending research on Complex Postformal Thought using the Postformal Thought Scale (PTS) (Sinnott 1998a, b). In Study I PTS was studied in relation to personality as conceptualized in the NEO Five Factor Model. Data from 82 participants indicated that PTS is significantly related to the Openness to Experience and the Conscientiousness factors of the NEO. In Study II PTS was examined in relation to the Concept of God Scale to answer the question whether postformal and non-postformal respondents were likely to hold different god concepts. Data from 50 participants indicated no relationship between the two measures. In Study III PTS was examined in relation to political opinions using the newly created Political Opinion Survey. Data from 50 participants demonstrated no relation between the two tests. In Study IV PTS was studied in relation to the Attitudes Toward Lesbians and Gay Men Scale. Data from 112 participants indicated that PTS was related to positive attitudes toward lesbians and gay men. Current conceptualizations of PTS development are used to interpret these findings.     

Visual laterality in the domestic horse (Equus caballus) interacting with humans

Most horses have a side on which they are easier to handle and a direction they favour when working on a circle, and recent studies have suggested a correlation between emotion and visual laterality when horses observe inanimate objects. As such lateralisation could provide important clues regarding the horse’s cognitive processes, we investigated whether horses also show laterality in association with people. We gave horses the choice of entering a chute to left or right, with and without the passive, non-interactive presence of a person unknown to them. The left eye was preferred for scanning under both conditions, but significantly more so when a person was present. Traditionally, riders handle horses only from the left, so we repeated the experiment with horses specifically trained on both sides. Again, there was a consistent preference for left eye scanning in the presence of a person, whether known to the horses or not. We also examined horses interacting with a person, using both traditionally and bilaterally trained horses. Both groups showed left eye preference for viewing the person, regardless of training and test procedure. For those horses tested under both passive and interactive conditions, the left eye was preferred significantly more during interaction. We suggest that most horses prefer to use their left eye for assessment and evaluation, and that there is an emotional aspect to the choice which may be positive or negative, depending on the circumstances. We believe these results have important practical implications and that emotional laterality should be taken into account in training methods.     

Power that Builds Others and Power that Breaks: Effects of Power and Humility on Altruism and Incivility in Female Employees

Building on the approach/inhibition theory of power and the situated focus theory of power, we examine the roles of positional and personal power on altruism and incivility in workplace dyads. Results from a field study in daycare centers showed that legitimate power (a dimension of positional power) was positively associated with incivility. In contrast, personal power—referent power and expert power—was positively associated altruism and was negatively associated with incivility. Referent power was a stronger predictor of both altruism and incivility for individuals with low humility than those with high humility. Coercive power was a stronger predictor of incivility for individuals with high humility than those with low humility.     

Sensory laterality in affiliative interactions in domestic horses and ponies (<Emphasis Type="Italic">Equus caballus</Emphasis>)

Many studies have been carried out into both motor and sensory laterality of horses in agonistic and stressful situations. Here we examine sensory laterality in affiliative interactions within four groups of domestic horses and ponies (N?=?31), living in stable social groups, housed at a single complex close to Vienna, Austria, and demonstrate for the first time a significant population preference for the left side in affiliative approaches and interactions. No effects were observed for gender, rank, sociability, phenotype, group, or age. Our results suggest that right hemisphere specialization in horses is not limited to the processing of stressful or agonistic situations, but rather appears to be the norm for processing in all social interactions, as has been demonstrated in other species including chicks and a range of vertebrates. In domestic horses, hemispheric specialization for sensory input appears not to be based on a designation of positive versus negative, but more on the perceived need to respond quickly and appropriately in any given situation.     

Dividing Attention Between Tasks: Testing Whether Explicit Payoff Functions Elicit Optimal Dual‐Task Performance

We test people's ability to optimize performance across two concurrent tasks. Participants performed a number entry task while controlling a randomly moving cursor with a joystick. Participants received explicit feedback on their performance on these tasks in the form of a single combined score. This payoff function was varied between conditions to change the value of one task relative to the other. We found that participants adapted their strategy for interleaving the two tasks, by varying how long they spent on one task before switching to the other, in order to achieve the near maximum payoff available in each condition. In a second experiment, we show that this behavior is learned quickly (within 2–3 min over several discrete trials) and remained stable for as long as the payoff function did not change. The results of this work show that people are adaptive and flexible in how they prioritize and allocate attention in a dual‐task setting. However, it also demonstrates some of the limits regarding people's ability to optimize payoff functions.     

Organizational Moral Identity Centrality: Relationships with Citizenship Behaviors and Unethical Prosocial Behaviors

This article examines the influence of both individual and organizational moral identity centrality on prosocial behaviors. Furthermore, we hypothesize that the centrality of these two offer a substitute effect on these behavioral outcomes. Validated measures of organizational moral identity centrality and unethical prosocial behavior are introduced. Data were collected via two separate samples, University Greek Life organization members (n = 499) and restaurant workers (n = 137). Regression results supporting that individuals who claim centrality of moral identity and see their organizations to also embrace the centrality are more likely to engage in citizenship behaviors and less likely to commit unethical prosocial acts. Furthermore, results support that both forms of centrality of moral identity were substitutes in terms of affecting these two outcomes. Research that contributes to understanding how individuals within an organization consciously choose to act on behalf of the organization even when these very actions conflict with generally accepted morals of right and wrong within their society is valuable to academics and practitioners alike. This study contributes to this body of knowledge. Despite extensive attention to topics of ethics and identity, previous studies have largely overlooked the impact of an organizational moral identity. Our results provide a framework for understanding the role of moral identity and the prediction of organizational citizenship and unethical prosocial behaviors.