Contradictions in the American dream: High educational aspirations and perceptions of deteriorating institutional support

This study examines contradictions in the “American Dream” during the Great Recession: young adults maintained high educational aspirations, yet perceived little opportunity for their educational achievements to help them fulfil their dreams of financial prosperity and work stability. Based on in‐depth interviews with 85 young college students and recent graduates, this study found that college enrolment was propelled by the recession, as a college degree, and often a graduate or professional degree, was perceived as an increasingly necessary credential. Despite these high educational aspirations, students and recent graduates were fearful about their capacity to find future work and they expressed concerns about the collapse of employment opportunity. Many were also wary of educational institutions, which they viewed as unable to prepare them for a shrinking job market. These perceptions reveal a contradiction in the “American Dream:” although young adults have high aspirations and achievements, they have lost confidence in the educational and work institutions upon which they must depend.     

Visual feature vs. conjunction searches as a robust manipulation of perceptual load

It has previously been suggested that Lavie’s Perceptual Load Theory can be assessed using feature vs. conjunction search tasks. In this study we manipulated load using a novel paradigm which retains the key features of both classic Load Theory and Feature Integration Theory paradigms. This new paradigm has the advantage of an inbuilt manipulation check which is necessary for future research to translate Load Theory to applied contexts. Across five experiments, we demonstrate the robust nature of this paradigm, which functions with extended display times, large, complex stimuli and when conditions are intermixed on a trial-by-trial basis. We also rule out dilution as a possible cause of these results. The results of all five experiments provide evidence that the feature vs. conjunction search dichotomy is an effective means of imposing low and high perceptual load while controlling for working memory load.     

The Problematization of Sexuality among Women Living with HIV and a New Feminist Approach for Understanding and Enhancing Women’s Sexual Lives

In the context of HIV, women’s sexual rights and sexual autonomy are important but frequently overlooked and violated. Guided by community voices, feminist theories, and qualitative empirical research, we reviewed two decades of global quantitative research on sexuality among women living with HIV. In the 32 studies we found, conducted in 25 countries and composed mostly of cis-gender heterosexual women, sexuality was narrowly constructed as sexual behaviours involving risk (namely, penetration) and physiological dysfunctions relating to HIV illness, with far less attention given to the fullness of sexual lives in context, including more positive and rewarding experiences such as satisfaction and pleasure. Findings suggest that women experience declines in sexual activity, function, satisfaction, and pleasure following HIV diagnosis, at least for some period. The extent of such declines, however, is varied, with numerous contextual forces shaping women’s sexual well-being. Clinical markers of HIV (e.g., viral load, CD4 cell count) poorly predicted sexual outcomes, interrupting widely held assumptions about sexuality for women with HIV. Instead, the effects of HIV-related stigma intersecting with inequities related to trauma, violence, intimate relations, substance use, poverty, aging, and other social and cultural conditions primarily influenced the ways in which women experienced and enacted their sexuality. However, studies framed through a medical lens tended to pathologize outcomes as individual “problems,” whereas others driven by a public health agenda remained primarily preoccupied with protecting the public from HIV. In light of these findings, we present a new feminist approach for research, policy, and practice toward understanding and enhancing women’s sexual lives—one that affirms sexual diversity; engages deeply with society, politics, and history; and is grounded in women’s sexual rights.     

Got Resources? A Multi-Sample Constructive Replication of Perceived Resource Availability’s Role in Work Passion–Job Outcomes Relationships

Purpose

The purpose of this study was to investigate the moderating effect of perceived resource availability on the relationship between work passion and employee well-being (i.e., job satisfaction and job tension) and performance (i.e., job performance and citizenship behaviors) using self-determination theory.

Design/Methodology/Approach

Data were obtained through surveys distributed via an online platform (Sample 1) and to employees of three professional organizations: a municipal agency (Sample 2), an engineering firm (Sample 3), and an advertising organization (Sample 4).

Findings

The interaction between employees’ work passion and their perceptions of available resources was associated with employees’ well-being and performance, such that greater work passion was associated with positive outcomes when resources were perceived as available. Conversely, heightened work passion was associated with job tension and fewer positive benefits when perceived available resources were low.

Implications

Work passion is often touted by employers as a valuable characteristic for employees, but, as these findings suggest, there are conditions that must be met in order for employees to experience positive well-being and performance outcomes. This information will likely prove invaluable for those employers seeking to best support their passionate employees.

Originality/Value

Research into the area of work passion is small but growing, and this study provides valuable insight into a key boundary condition for the effectiveness of passion: perceived resource availability. Additionally, this study identifies circumstances in which passionate employees actually experience a negative work outcome. Further, the multiple samples and constructive replication employed help provide confidence and a strong empirical foundation for the results.

     

The Elephant in the Road: Auditory Perceptual Load Affects Driver Perception and Awareness

Summary Perceptual load theory research has shown that the level of perceptual load in a task affects processing of additional information. Less certain are the cross‐modal effects of perceptual load—does load in one modality affect processing in another? The current study assessed the effect of auditory perceptual load on visual attention in a driving simulator task. While driving, participants listened to traffic updates on the radio, which imposed either low or high perceptual load. Awareness for an unexpected animal as well as less novel objects (such as billboards and other vehicles) was markedly reduced under high load. Driver behaviour was also significantly affected, with impaired lateral control, longer reaction times to hazards and more collisions under high load. This study has important implications for load theory and also more general implications for road safety, as it suggests that auditory load may be an important, often overlooked factor in driver attention.Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

“This is. That was.” Examining a Family’s Lived Experiences After a Cancer Diagnosis

In 2015, 231,840 American women were diagnosed with invasive breast cancer. This figure represents mothers, wives, or sisters diagnosed with cancer, a diagnosis which has the potential to affect those closest to them, especially their immediate family. This research aimed to examine the lived experience of a family unit that lost their spouse/mother/sister-in-law to invasive breast cancer. A phenomenological case study was utilized to guide this research. One family unit, consisting of a spouse, daughter, son, and sister-in-law to the deceased were recruited from Southern Ontario, Canada. Background questionnaires and one-on-one semi-structured interviews were conducted. The following themes emerged: (1) negatives, describing struggles with balancing care, faith, and living after a death in the family and (2) silver linings, depicting the strength that Nancy, the deceased, maintained during her illness, and the family’s hope and optimism for the future. This paper only addresses the theme “Negatives,” while the last theme is addressed in Part II of this research. Within the theme “Negatives,” there were four sub-themes: (1) What About the Kids? (2) The Balancing Act, (3) Why Would He Do This? and (4) Life After Mom. Each will be discussed in turn. This research study provides valuable information regarding the lived experiences of families coping with a parental/spousal cancer diagnosis. It may assist other individuals in similar situations by providing comfort knowing that they are not the only ones encountering this journey. The participants’ voices may also allow others to develop strength by understanding the effect of cancer on a family.     

Global bias reliability in dogs (<Emphasis Type="Italic">Canis familiaris</Emphasis>)

Dogs enrolled in a previous study were assessed two years later for reliability of their local/global preference in a discrimination test with the same hierarchical stimuli used in the previous study (Experiment 1) and with a novel stimulus (Experiment 2). In Experiment 1, dogs easily re-learned to discriminate the positive stimulus; their individual global/local choices were stable compared to the previous study; and an overall clear global bias was found. In Experiment 2, dogs were slower in acquiring the initial discrimination task; the overall global bias disappeared; and, individually, dogs tended to make inverse choices compared to the original study. Spontaneous attention toward the test stimulus resembling the global features of the probe stimulus was the main factor affecting the likeliness of a global choice of our dogs, regardless of the type of experiment. However, attention to task-irrelevant elements increased at the expense of attention to the stimuli in the test phase of Experiment 2. Overall, the results suggest that the stability of global bias in dogs depends on the characteristics of the assessment contingencies, likely including the learning requirements of the tasks. Our results also clearly indicate that attention processes have a prominent role on dogs’ global bias, in agreement with previous findings in humans and other species.     

The Role of Teachers' Social-Emotional Competence in Their Beliefs About Peer Victimization

One hundred fifty preservice teachers and 25 in-service teachers were surveyed to examine whether mental representations of relationships, confidence about managing bullying, empathy toward victims, and emotional expressiveness were associated with their peer victimization-related beliefs. Teachers' confidence about managing bullying was positively associated with their prosocial peer beliefs. In addition, the belief that the distress that children experience as a result of being victimized should be dismissed was negatively related to teachers' positive representations. Teachers' reports of positive emotional expressiveness were negatively related to normative, assertive, avoidance, and dismissive victimization-related beliefs and positively related to prosocial peer beliefs. In contrast, teachers' reports of negative emotional expressiveness were negatively related to prosocial peer beliefs and avoidance victimization-related beliefs. In-service teachers reported slightly higher positive expressiveness than preservice teachers did. Minority teachers reported higher scores for positive expressiveness, empathy, and lower negative classroom expressiveness than nonminority teachers did. Implications of these findings for practice are discussed.     

Assessing Biobehavioural Self‐Regulation and Coregulation in Early Childhood: The Parent‐Child Challenge Task

Researchers have argued for more dynamic and contextually relevant measures of regulatory processes in interpersonal interactions. In response, we introduce and examine the effectiveness of a new task, the Parent–Child Challenge Task, designed to assess the self‐regulation and coregulation of affect, goal‐directed behaviour, and physiology in parents and their preschoolers in response to an experimental perturbation. Concurrent and predictive validity was examined via relations with children's externalizing behaviours. Mothers used only their words to guide their 3‐year‐old children to complete increasingly difficult puzzles in order to win a prize (N = 96). A challenge condition was initiated midway through the task with a newly introduced time limit. The challenge produced decreases in parental teaching and dyadic behavioural variability and increases in child negative affect and dyadic affective variability, measured by dynamic systems‐based methods. Children rated lower on externalizing showed respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) suppression in response to challenge, whereas those rated higher on externalizing showed RSA augmentation. Additionally, select task changes in affect, behaviour, and physiology predicted teacher‐rated externalizing behaviours four months later. Findings indicate that the Parent–Child Challenge Task was effective in producing regulatory changes and suggest its utility in assessing biobehavioural self‐regulation and coregulation in parents and their preschoolers. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Risk for separation anxiety disorder among girls: paternal absence, socioeconomic disadvantage, and genetic vulnerability

The authors examined genetic and environmental influences, including the contributions of 2 measured aspects of the shared environment of twins (paternal absence, socioeconomic disadvantage) on the development of mother-reported separation anxiety disorder (SAD) history in a sample of 1,887 female twin pairs. Four different symptom categories of SAD were considered. Results revealed that all 4 SAD symptom categories were significantly heritable, whereas the contribution of shared environmental influences to the variation in risk was significant for only 2 of the 4 SAD categories. Paternal absence was found to have an important influence in vulnerability for SAD, whereas the effect of socioeconomic disadvantage was less robust. Evidence for race differences in the etiology of SAD was not found.