The Long Arm of Mentoring: A Counterfactual Analysis of Natural Youth Mentoring and Employment Outcomes in Early Careers

Young people often develop natural mentoring relationships with nonparental adults during adolescence and young adulthood. While much has been learned about the benefits of natural mentoring for more proximate outcomes such as mental health and education, relatively little is known about the causal impact of youth mentoring relationships on career opportunities. This study uses data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) survey to explore the effects of different kinds of natural mentoring relationships on employment outcomes during the early career years (when workers are in their late twenties and early thirties). Whereas traditional methods of causal conditioning show a broad range of employment benefits from being mentored, results from counterfactual analysis using propensity score matching reveal that the benefits of mentoring are confined to intrinsic job rewards. The findings imply that mentors help steer youth toward intrinsically rewarding careers.     

On the very concept of free will

Determinism seems to rule out a robust sense of options but also prevent our choices from being a matter of luck. In this way, free will seems to require both the truth and falsity of determinism. If the concept of free will is coherent, something must have gone wrong. I offer a diagnosis on which this puzzle is due at least in part to a tension already present in the very idea of free will. I provide various lines of support for this hypothesis, including some experimental data gathered by probing the judgments of non-specialists.     

Psychological Entitlement and Ambivalent Sexism: Understanding the Role of Entitlement in Predicting Two Forms of Sexism

Recent research has shown that narcissistic men in the United States express more ambivalent sexism than their non-narcissistic counterparts. The present study sought to extend these findings by hypothesizing that psychological entitlement would be a predictor of ambivalent sexism but that that this relationship may vary by gender. Given entitlement’s associations with hostility and aggression and the previously established link between narcissism and sexism in men, we hypothesized that entitlement would predict hostile sexism in men. Given that entitlement is characterized by a pervasive sense of deservingness for special treatment and goods, we expected that entitled women would endorse attitudes of benevolent sexism. These hypotheses were tested using two cross-sectional samples in the U.S.—a sample of undergraduates from a private university in the Midwest (N?=?333) and a web-based sample of adults across the U.S. (N?=?437). Results from regression analyses confirmed that psychological entitlement is a robust predictor of ambivalent sexism, above and beyond known predictors of sexism such as low openness and relevant covariates such as impression management. In addition, entitlement was a consistent predictor of benevolent sexism in women, but not in men, and a consistent predictor of hostile sexism in men, but not in women. These relationships were largely robust, persisting even when relevant covariates (e.g., socially desirable responding, trait openness) were controlled statistically, although in one sample the link between entitlement and hostile sexism in men was reduced to non-significance when benevolent sexism was controlled for statistically. Implications of these findings are discussed.     

Strategies for the Control of Unwanted Thoughts in Adolescents: The Adolescent Thought Control Questionnaire (TCQ-A)

A paucity of research on thought suppression exists among adolescents. The present study describes the preliminary psychometrics of the Adolescent Thought Control Questionnaire (TCQ-A) and its relationships with internalizing symptomatology in adolescents. Adolescents between 12 and 18 years of age completed the TCQ-A and other self-report instruments. Principal components analysis yielded five-factors theoretically derived from an adult measure: distraction, social, re-appraisal, worry, and punishment control strategies. The five-factor structure was well fitted to the data in a confirmatory factor analysis. Adequate evidence of reliability was obtained; however, internal consistency of the punishment factor was not adequate in the sample. The TCQ-A evidenced convergent and divergent validity with internalizing and externalizing symptomatology respectively. Future research applications of the TCQ-A, suggestions for further analyses, and refinement of the instrument are also discussed.     

An internet survey of emotional health,treatment seeking and barriers to accessing mental health treatment among Chinese-speaking international students in Australia

The present internet survey examined the demographic characteristics of Chinese-speaking international students in Australia, psychological distress levels as measured by the Kessler-10 (K-10) Item scale, help-seeking history and preferences, as well as treatment barriers. Of the 144 respondents, 54% reported high psychological distress (mean K-10 score?=?23.96; SD?=?9.03). However, only 9% of those who were highly distressed reported they had sought mental health services in the past year. While the majority preferred help from informal social networks, they tended to favour mental health services over traditional culture-specific forms of help. Common barriers to accessing mental health services reported by respondents with high psychological distress included costs or transportation concerns, limited knowledge of available services, time constraints, the perception that symptoms were not severe enough to warrant treatment, language difficulties and lack of knowledge of symptoms of psychological distress. Although the majority preferred face-to-face treatments over internet treatments, a considerable percentage of respondents were willing to try either treatment modality. Chinese-speaking international students are a high risk group for developing psychological distress, yet they tend to underuse mental health services. Education about the effectiveness of face-to-face and online treatments may increase treatment seeking by this population.     

Altering the Shape of Punishment Distributions Affects Decision Making in a Modified Iowa Gambling Task

Neuroeconomics research has shown that preference for gambling is altered by the statistical moments (mean, variance, and skew) of reward and punishment distributions. Although it has been shown that altered means can affect feedback‐based decision making tasks, little is known if the variance and skew will have an effect on these tasks. To investigate, we systematically controlled the variance (high, medium, and low) and skew (negative, zero, and positive) of the punishment distributions in a modified version of the Iowa Gambling Task. The Iowa Gambling Task has been used extensively in both academic and clinical domains to understand decision making and diagnose decision making impairments. Our results show that decision making can be altered by an interaction of variance and skew. We found a significant decrease over trials in choices from the decks with high variance and asymmetrically skewed punishments and from the decks with low variance and zero skew punishments. These results indicate that punishment distribution shape alone can change human perception of what is optimal (i.e., mean expected outcome) and may help explain what guides our day‐to‐day decisions. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The moral behavior of ethics professors: Relationships among self-reported behavior,expressed normative attitude,and directly observed behavior

Do philosophy professors specializing in ethics behave, on average, any morally better than do other professors? If not, do they at least behave more consistently with their expressed values? These questions have never been systematically studied. We examine the self-reported moral attitudes and moral behavior of 198 ethics professors, 208 non-ethicist philosophers, and 167 professors in departments other than philosophy on eight moral issues: academic society membership, voting, staying in touch with one's mother, vegetarianism, organ and blood donation, responsiveness to student emails, charitable giving, and honesty in responding to survey questionnaires. On some issues, we also had direct behavioral measures that we could compare with the self-reports. Ethicists expressed somewhat more stringent normative attitudes on some issues, such as vegetarianism and charitable donation. However, on no issue did ethicists show unequivocally better behavior than the two comparison groups. Our findings on attitude-behavior consistency were mixed: ethicists showed the strongest relationship between behavior and expressed moral attitude regarding voting but the weakest regarding charitable donation. We discuss implications for several models of the relationship between philosophical reflection and real-world moral behavior.     

Evidence for a fixed capacity limit in attending multiple locations

A classic question concerns whether humans can attend multiple locations or objects at once. Although it is generally agreed that the answer to this question is “yes,” the limits on this ability are subject to extensive debate. According to one view, attentional resources can be flexibly allocated to a variable number of locations, with an inverse relationship between the number of selected locations and the quality of information processing at each location. Alternatively, these resources might be quantized in a “discrete” fashion that enables concurrent access to a small number of locations. Here, we report a series of experiments comparing these alternatives. In each experiment, we cued participants to attend a variable number of spatial locations and asked them to report the orientation of a single, briefly presented target. In all experiments, participants’ orientation report errors were well-described by a model that assumes a fixed upper limit in the number of locations that can be attended. Conversely, report errors were poorly described by a flexible-resource model that assumes no fixed limit on the number of locations that can be attended. Critically, we showed that these discrete limits were predicted by cue-evoked neural activity elicited before the onset of the target array, suggesting that performance was limited by selection processes that began prior to subsequent encoding and memory storage. Together, these findings constitute novel evidence supporting the hypothesis that human observers can attend only a small number of discrete locations at an instant.     

Need to train your rat? There is an App for that: A touchscreen behavioral evaluation system

The increasing demand for highly automated and flexible tasks capable of assessing visual learning and memory in nonhuman animals has led to the exciting development of a wide array of prefabricated touchscreen-equipped systems. However, the high cost of these prefabricated systems has led many researchers to develop or modify their own preexisting equipment. We developed a freely downloadable App, the Touchscreeen Behavioral Evaluation System (TBES) for use in conjunction with an iPad (Apple, Cupertino, California) as an alternative to prefabricated touchscreen systems. TBES allows for stimulus presentation and data collection on an iPad. The touchscreen technology offered by the iPad is attractive to researchers due to its affordability, reliability, and resistance to false inputs. We highlight these, as well as the feasibility and procedural flexibility of TBES, in an effort to promote our system as a competitive alternative to those currently available.     

Impact of Sluggish Cognitive Tempo and Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder Symptoms on Adults’ Quality of Life

The symptoms of Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) have been linked to dysfunction in numerous life domains for both children and adults. As such, it is likely that individuals with these and other related symptoms (e.g., sluggish cognitive tempo, SCT) may also experience impaired quality of life. The current study examines the association between ADHD and SCT symptoms and quality of life (QOL) in a community sample of adults. Quality of life data collected from 983 participants (M age = 45.6 years) were analyzed primarily through a series of hierarchical multiple regressions employing SCT and ADHD symptom clusters, demographic, and anxiety and depression scale variables as predictors. Results generally supported the hypothesis that ADHD and SCT symptoms would negatively associate with QOL. Amongst the indicators, inattention and SCT emerged as the strongest predictors of low QOL. These findings underscore the negative impact of ADHD symptoms in adulthood, the independent contribution of SCT, and the importance of considering QOL in prospective research and intervention.