Coping with transphobia in employment: Strategies used by transgender and gender-diverse people in the United States

Background: Transgender and gender-diverse (TGD) individuals face stigma in the general public and in the workplace. Research has suggested that TGD individuals may demonstrate unique coping strategies in the workplace in order to manage transphobia in that setting; however, further research is needed to identify the specific strategies that transgender individuals use to deal with transphobia at work.

Method: The present qualitative study utilized the grounded theory methodology to identify the specific coping strategies utilized to deal with transphobia at work. Participants included 45 TGD participants from the northeastern United States.

Results: The results of the study include the identification of eight coping-strategy themes including gender-presentation strategies, gender detachment, relationship navigating, resource utilization, job-performance strategies, maladaptive coping strategies, structural strategies, and power-acquisition strategies.

Conclusions: Implications of the present study suggest the resilience and diverse coping strategies that mental health providers can help TGD workers draw from in dealing with transphobia at work. In addition, there is a need for greater remediation and prevention of employment-related transphobia, including leadership within employment settings, greater legal protections, and enforcement of these laws in the United States.     

Defensive Responding on the MMPI-2 in Pre-Surgical Candidates

The MMPI-2 is frequently used for a variety of pre-surgical evaluations that can have life changing consequences for the patient being examined. While it intuitively makes sense that a proportion of examinees will attempt to downplay distress in order to avoid any perceived questions about their surgical candidacy, this hypothesis has received scant research attention. This study cluster analyzed the MMPI-2 L, F, & K validity scales for 890 pre-surgical candidates. Depending on the standard utilized, between one-third and two-thirds of our sample displayed some degree of defensive responding. These results suggest that traditional markers of test validity may need to be adjusted in populations with high base rates for defensiveness. The difficulty in ascribing personality characteristics based on validity scale scores and directions for further research are also discussed.     

Gritting their teeth to close the sale: the positive effect of salesperson grit on job satisfaction and performance

This research is the first to examine the effect of “grit” – defined here as perseverance in pursuit of long-term goals – on salesperson performance and job satisfaction in a business-to-business (B2B) sales context. While more commonly studied in the psychology and education literatures, grit has heretofore been underexplored in sales research, a notable omission given its importance in predicting performance outcomes across multiple domains. In response, we demonstrate that gritty salespeople perform better and enjoy greater job satisfaction than their less gritty counterparts. Moreover, we show that competitiveness and self-efficacy help to develop grit and reveal important moderating effects; grit is highest when salespeople are self-efficacious and socially astute. Moreover, the results also suggest that need for power attenuates the positive effect of grit on performance, revealing a potential “dark side” of grit. We then provide some future research ideas involving grit in an effort to encourage further exploration of this construct in sales research. Finally, we conclude by offering cautions to future researchers as they decide whether to examine this interesting construct in a sales context.     

Chaos in Human Rhythmic Movement

Rhythmic movements typical of locomotory actions are usually modeled as limit cycle dynamics, and their deviations from pure periodicity are attributed to stochastic physiological noise. In the present study, the dynamics of human rhythmic movements were found to contain more than the 2 dynamically active variables expected from limit cycle dynamics; the number depended upon the size of the limb oscillator. Observed positive Lyapunov exponents and fractal attractor dimensions indicated that the gross variability of human rhythmic movements may stem largely from low-dimensional chaotic motion on strange attractors.     

Postural stabilization for the control of touching

We attempted to distinguish between task-related (supra-postural) and perceptual influences on postural motions. Two groups of participants had to make very light tactile contact with an adjacent pliable surface while standing with their eyes closed. In the absence of vision, such light touching with a finger is known to reduce sway. For one group, tactile contact with the surface was merely the result of extending the right forearm. For the other group, variability in the point of tactile contact had to be kept to a minimum. Touching reduced postural sway relative to non-touching only for participants in the latter group. The present results, in combination with others addressing similar task differences, question the assumption that information detected haptically and/or visually is used solely to reduce postural fluctuations. It seems that postural fluctuations are modulated to facilitate performance of tasks over and above the task of standing upright and still.     

Altered grooming responses to stress in rats exposed prenatally to ethanol

The effects of prenatal alcohol exposure on grooming, locomotion, and rearing in response to stress were examined in adult rats whose mothers consumed a liquid diet containing 35% ethanol-derived calories (EDC). Offspring of both pair-fed 0% EDC mothers and ad libitum chow-fed mothers were included as controls. In Experiment 1, females groomed more than males following placement into a novel test chamber, but no differences due to prenatal treatment were observed. Ethanol-exposed animals groomed more than controls following the stress of a forced 1-min swim (Experiment 2), but when rats tested in Experiment 1 were observed again after forced swim stress (Experiment 3), no differences due to prenatal treatment or sex were observed. Experiment 4 examined the effects of pretreatment with 1 mg/kg naloxone on novelty-induced grooming and as in Experiment 1 prenatal treatment did not affect grooming responses. Females again groomed significantly more than males and naloxone reduced grooming equally for all groups. The results suggest that novelty-induced grooming is a sex-influenced behavior, with females grooming more than males, and that animals exposed prenatally to alcohol and tested as adults may have altered responses to certain stressors (i.e., forced swim) under specific conditions. The altered grooming response of alcohol-exposed rats to swim stress can be eliminated by preexposing them to novelty stress.     

Children's relationships with nonparental adults: Sex-specific connections to early school success

This report asks, Do the social networks of six-year-old girls and boys differ? It then extends previously reported findings by asking, Do different groups of nonparental adults affect the early school success of boys vs girls? Data were collected from the mothers of 162 six-year-olds, using a standard procedure. The networks of boys and girls in one-parent and two-parent households are contrasted throughout the presentation of results. The composition of networks was quite similar for boys and girls, except that each group had more same-sex than opposite-sex peers. In analyses predicting early school success, the number of adult male relatives who took the child on outings away from home was positively related to the child's report card score. This effect, however, was restricted to the subgroup of one-parent (mother-only) boys. This had been predicted, based on knowledge that single-parent boys are the most at-risk subgroup in the sample, the effect of social network resources are known to be accentuated by environmental press, and male adults represent the most salient models for young boys.     

A component model for diagnosing and treating children who stutter

Nine components of stuttering and their distribution among 54 children who stutter are described. The components are arranged into a model that includes four neurologic components (attending disorder, auditory-processing disorder, sentence-formulation disorder, and oral-motor disorder) and five traditional components (high self-expectations, manipulative stuttering, disruptive communication environment, unrealistic parental expectations, and abnormal parental need for the child to stutter). Diagnostic and treatment usefulness of the model are discussed. Thirty-two of the children have been followed through component-based treatment and 12 mo post termination. Results indicate that treatment was successful with 27 (84%) of the 32 children. Only one child regressed during the 12 mo after treatment ended. These results suggest that treating the neurologic and traditional factors which disrupt fluency improves maintenance and carry-over.