Making AI meaningful again

Synthese - Artificial intelligence (AI) research enjoyed an initial period of enthusiasm in the 1970s and 80s, but this enthusiasm was tempered by a long interlude of frustration when genuinely...     

Perceived Parameters of Christian Pharmacy Students’ Faith-Sharing in Clinical Settings

Journal of Religion and Health - Our interdisciplinary team (which included professionals from nursing, pharmacy, allied health, and psychology) conducted in-depth, semi-structured interviews with...     

Social value orientations and negotiator outcomes

Social value orientations (SVOs) are known to influence individual behaviour in outcome interdependent settings. By extending these findings to negotiation, this research investigates the relationship between own and partners' SVOs, negotiator strategies and outcomes. Results showed that cooperators, competitors and individualists could be distinguished in terms of initial demands and concessions. Competitors made higher initial demands and larger concessions than individualists or cooperators, suggesting that their ability to maximize outcome differences rests on whether structural features are congruent with this goal. The principal finding of this research was the demonstration that own and partners' SVO interact to determine outcomes. Results showed that the three SVO groups differed in terms of context sensitivity: competitor outcomes were invariant across partners; individualists achieved poor outcomes in negotiations with cooperators and, reciprocally, cooperators attained high outcomes in negotiations with individualists. Additionally, individualist outcomes worsened in their last negotiation, while those of cooperators differed as a function of role and partner's SVO. These results suggest that although the information used by individualists and cooperators differs, for both groups the cognitive representation of negotiations is a further factor influencing their outcomes.     

Justice and power: when will justice concerns encourage the advantaged to support policies which redistribute economic resources and the disadvantaged to willingly obey the law?

Two studies are presented which test whether justice can motivate support for government policies and authorities even when such support is not in people's obvious personal or group interest. In the first study, White San Francisco Bay area residents' attitudes toward Congressionally-authored affirmative action policies and anti-discrimination laws were investigated. In the second study, African-American San Francisco Bay area residents' feelings of obligation to obey the law were investigated. The results from both studies show a significant relationship between evaluations of social justice and respondents' political attitudes. More importantly, a significant relationship between relational evaluations of Congress and political attitudes is found in both studies. This relationship suggests how justice can motivate policy and government support even if such support does not yield direct personal or group benefits. Finally, the results from both studies indicate when instrumental and relational concerns will be related to political attitudes. If people identified with their particular advantaged or disadvantaged group, instrumental concerns were more strongly related to their political attitudes, but if people identified with a superordinate category that included both potential outgroup members and relevant superordinate authorities, relational concerns were more strongly related to their political attitudes.     

Showing-off behaviour of nursery children

Assertive behaviours like showing-off have an important role for a child in getting attention from other children in a class without being aggressive. This study presented the showing-off behaviour in an English nursery school, and later it was discussed in comparison with that in the German kindergartens reported by Hold-Cavell. As a result, the English children performed showing-off behaviours at only one-half the frequency of German children. No sex difference was seen in either showing-off or physical aggression in the nursery class. The frequency of showing-off did not correlate with that of physical aggression; this result is discussed in terms of Hinde's motivational postulate. Showing-off behaviour is deserving of the further studies cross-culturally and onto-genetically.     

Factor analysis of the heterosexist harassment,rejection, and discrimination scale in lesbian,gay, bisexual,transgender, and queer people of colour

The factor structure of the Heterosexist Harassment, Rejection, and Discrimination Scale (HHRDS) was examined in lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) people of colour. Two hundred participants completed a survey with the HHRDS and several mental health scales. A confirmatory factor analysis suggested the original HHRDS structure fit the data poorly. Exploratory factor analyses found a different 2-factor structure, consisting of harassment/rejection and family discrimination. Convergent validity analyses demonstrated that family discrimination had the largest association with depression and anxiety, indicating that family discrimination may be particularly salient among LGBTQ people of colour. This study supports the use of the HHRDS in racially/ethnically diverse samples, but with a slightly different factor structure. Examining discriminatory experiences from family members is an important direction for future research in LGBTQ people of colour.     

Self-Compassion and Need Frustration Moderate the Effects of Upward Appearance Comparisons on Body Image Discrepancies

Abstract

Drawing from diverse theoretical frameworks, we examined predictors of discrepancy between current and ideal body image in a sample of 396 Greek adolescents. The participants completed assessments of the frequency of comparing oneself with someone of perceived better appearance, appearance evaluations, frustration of basic psychological needs, and appearance self-compassion. We found that upward appearance comparisons negatively predicted appearance evaluation, which in turn was a negative predictor of body image discrepancy. Moderated mediation analyses showed that appearance self-compassion buffered, whereas psychological need frustration augmented the negative effects of upward comparisons on appearance evaluation. Our findings contribute to the growing literature on body image discrepancies in adolescence by examining moderating factors that amplify or buffer such discrepancies, hence identifying viable intervention pathways.     

How prevalent is contextual information in research on school bullying?

Empirical articles on school bullying need to give contextual details of the study, including on participants (number, age, gender), the country in which data was gathered, and the year in which it was gathered. We argue that these are important aspects of information, and that country and year of data collection cannot be inferred unambiguously unless they are explicitly stated. We report an analysis of contextual information on a sample of 201 articles, from 1976 to 2015, on school bullying. The great majority of studies gave information on number and age of participants, and most on gender balance. Most also gave explicit information on the country in which data was gathered. However only about one quarter of articles gave information on the date (year) in which data was gathered. For those that did, the average gap from data gathering to publication was 4 years, with a range of 1 to 11 years. We argue that the date of data collection is an important historical aspect, as many societal changes, even over a period of a few years, can impact on prevalence and nature of bullying. We recommend that besides participant and country information, year of data collection is routinely given in empirical articles on school bullying.     

Recruiting (Dis)Advantage: Men’s Versus Women’s Evaluations of Gender-Based Targeted Recruitment

Sex Roles - Organizations use targeted recruitment to attract applicants with specific demographic characteristics to diversify the workforce. Research reports mixed findings regarding the extent...