Alternative approaches to equity: Dissonance reduction pro-social motivation and strategic accommodation

Reviews, compares and evaluates a self-justijication and a decision theoretical conceptualization of equity. It is argued that the latter approach reveals an important and often neglected distinction between equity as a goal of social interaction and equity as an interpersonal strategy employed in rhe pursuit of other valued goals. Associated problems of definition and measurement are discussed. After a review of relevant research it is concluded that equity serves predominantly as an accommodative interpersonal strategy, and that future research should focus on analyzing the various functional bases of equity, their relationships, and their eflects on behaviour.     

Dynamic relationships between phonological memory and reading: A five year longitudinal study from age 4 to 9

We reconcile competing theories of the role of phonological memory in reading development, by uncovering their dynamic relationship during the first 5 years of school. Phonological memory, reading and phoneme awareness were assessed in 780 phonics‐educated children at age 4, 5, 6 and 9. Confirmatory factor analyses demonstrated that phonological memory loaded onto two factors: verbal short‐term memory (verbal STM; phonological tasks that loaded primarily on serial order memory) and nonword repetition. Using longitudinal structural equation models, we found that verbal STM directly predicted early word‐level reading from age 4 to 6, reflecting the importance of serial‐order memory for letter‐by‐letter decoding. In contrast, reading had no reciprocal influence on the development of verbal STM. The relationship between nonword repetition and reading was bidirectional across the 5 years of study: nonword repetition and reading predicted each other both directly and indirectly (via phoneme awareness). Indirect effects from nonword repetition (and verbal STM) to reading support the view that phonological memory stimulates phonemically detailed representations through repeated encoding of complex verbal stimuli. Similarly, the indirect influence of reading on nonword repetition suggests that improved reading ability promotes the phoneme‐level specificity of phonological representations. Finally, the direct influence from reading to nonword repetition suggests that better readers use orthographic cues to help them remember and repeat new words accurately. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70LZfTR0BjE .     

Why and for whom does the pressure to help hurt others? Affective and cognitive mechanisms linking helping pressure to workplace deviance

Scholars are paying increasing attention to the “dark side” of citizenship behavior. One aspect of this dark side that has received relatively scant attention is “helping pressure”—an employee's perception that s/he is being encouraged to, or otherwise feels that s/he should, enact helping behavior at work. Drawing from theory associated with work stress, we examine affective and cognitive mechanisms that potentially explain why helping pressure, counterintuitively, may lead employees to engage in deviant behavior instead. Beyond examining these possible mechanisms, we also answer calls to identify a potential buffer to these effects. Drawing from self-determination theory, we examine how an employee's intrinsic motivation for citizenship may lessen the deleterious consequences of helping pressure at work. In two studies (a within-individual experience-sampling study and a two-wave between-individual study), we find consistent evidence that helping pressure has a positive indirect relationship with deviant behavior through increased negative affect. Further, we find evidence that intrinsic motivation for citizenship weakens the positive relationship of helping pressure with negative affect, buffering the indirect effect on subsequent deviant behavior. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings for the study of helping pressure at work are discussed.     

Bullying bystander behaviors: The role of coping effectiveness and the moderating effect of gender

Researchers have suggested that bystander behaviors and victim coping play an important role in counteracting the negative effects of bullying. The current study investigated the relationship between students’ ratings of coping effectiveness when addressing bullying and their behaviors as bystanders when witnessing bullying. Surveys were administered in a Midwestern, suburban school district. Some associations between perceptions of coping effectiveness and bystander behavior supported our hypotheses (e.g., constructive coping associated with defending bystander behaviors, externalizing associated with pro-bullying behaviors). However, some findings did not support hypothesized relationships. For example, higher ratings of effectiveness for cognitive distancing as a coping strategy were associated with increased defending behaviors as a bystander. Gender moderated some of these relationships. Pro-bullying bystander behavior was associated with increased ratings of cognitive distancing and decreased reports of constructive coping effectiveness for girls. Implications for future research and practice are discussed.     

Equality,Bias, and the Right to an Equal Say

Philosophia - Thomas Christiano argues that democracies acquire a right to rule by being the unique embodiment of publicly accessible rules. Justice requires the equal advancement of the interests...     

Clinical research on behavioral activation as treatment for post‐traumatic stress disorder: A brief review and meta‐analysis

Behavioral activation (BA), an effective treatment for depression, has recently been receiving attention as a possible intervention for PTSD. BA interventions could be particularly useful in treating underserved populations (i.e., individuals with lower socioeconomic status). A literature search was conducted, which identified seven outcome studies that examined the effectiveness of stand‐alone BA treatment for individuals with PTSD. All studies identified for this brief review demonstrated clinically significant reductions in PTSD symptoms using BA as an intervention. A meta‐analysis of these few studies revealed a nonsignificant effect (Cohen's d = 0.713, p = .512) despite reporting an average symptom reduction of 25.8%. Other studies utilizing BA treatment for PTSD do so in tandem with other interventions and were excluded from analysis. This brief review summarizes the literature on the use of BA as a stand‐alone treatment for PTSD and suggests that future research seek to confirm the usefulness of BA as a potential treatment modality for mental health‐care providers treating individuals with PTSD.     

Recognition memory for source and occurrence: The importance of recollection

Previous recognition memory studies indicate that when both recollection and familiarity are expected to contribute to recognition performance (e.g., discriminating studied items from nonstudied items) the dual-process and the unequal-variance signal detection models provide comparable accounts of performance. When familiarity is not expected to be useful (e.g., when items from two equally familiar sources are discriminated between), the dual-process model provides a significantly better account of performance. In the present study, source recognition was tested under conditions in which familiarity could have been used to perform a list-discrimination task; participants were required to discriminate between strong studied items, weak studied items, and new items. The dual-process model provided a better account of performance than did the unequal-variance model. Moreover, the results indicated that the unequal-variance assumption in a single-process signal detection model was not a valid substitution for recollection and that recollection was used to make recognition judgments even when assessments of familiarity were useful.     

The relationship between social anxiety and social support in adolescents: a test of competing causal models

This study compared the strength of competing causal models in explaining the relationship between perceived support, enacted support, and social anxiety in adolescents. The social causation hypothesis postulates that social support causes social anxiety, whereas the social selection hypothesis postulates that social anxiety causes social support. The reciprocal model combines the two hypotheses by arguing that the causal relationship between social support and social anxiety is largely reciprocal. This study tests a modification of the reciprocal model by specifying perceptions of support as a mediating construct. Two waves of data with an interval of three months were collected on 357 college students. Structural equation modeling was used to compare the reciprocal and mediated reciprocal causal models. The study found some support for the mediated reciprocal model, but the magnitude of the relationships were weaker than expected. Limitations and suggestion for future research are discussed.     

Accuracy of self-reports of alcohol offenders in a rural midwestern county

Self-reports of drinking are of doubtful accuracy as heavy drinkers tend to underreport consistently amounts drunk as well as other alcohol-related data. A sample of 60 people cited for DWI in a rural midwestern county in southeast Nebraska during routine alcohol-dependency evaluations indicated that 10% underreported their Breath Alcohol Content at the time of arrest and 38% their previous number of DWI citations. Subjects were grouped by age (over and under 30) and by accuracy (accurate and inaccurate reporters). A 2 x 2 analysis of variance of later DWI arrests was significant as younger subjects showed greater risk. Those who underreported number of past DWI citations were significantly lower on their self-reported BAC at the time of arrest than accurate reporters. Age and underreporting alcohol-related data are as important for practitioners to attend to as scores on the Michigan Alcoholism Screening Test or SCID measuring alcoholic tendencies.     

Outcome and epidemiological research on personality disorders: implications for classification

The construct of personality disorder has an overall definition that describes chronicity. However, the findings of outcome research indicate that while many patients stop meeting criteria for specific categories of disorder over time, they often continue to suffer from dysfunctional traits. One can also interpret epidemiological findings on personality disorders as overestimating disorders due to a failure to distinguish them from traits. Taken together, these findings point to the need for a revision of the classification of personality disorders that would separate enduring traits from reversible symptoms.