The Authenticity of Conflict Resolutions Among Adult Couples: Does Women's Other-Oriented Behavior Reflect Their True Selves?

In this study we examined how men and women typically resolve conflicts with relationship partners (by meeting the self's need, the other's need, or through compromise) and the authenticity of resolutions and their relation to psychological health. Data were collected using a questionnaire given to 251 men and 251 women (aged 18–75 yrs) who were in heterosexual relationships. Results showed that most women (but not men) who resolved conflicts by meeting their partners' needs rather than their own thought that this was inauthentic behavior that they adopted to avoid negative repercussions from their partners. For all participants, inauthenticity and a lack of partner validation was linked to poorer psychological health. Results suggest that women's other-oriented relationship behavior does not necessarily stem from the authentic self.     

Digital Irreligion: Christian Deconversion in an Online Community

What is the role of the Internet in a possible trend toward secularization in the United States? This case study seeks to elucidate the process of online deconversion by examining religious exit narratives (called “extimonies” by participants) as posted in a forum for ex‐Christians from 2005 to 2017. Echoing Mauss and Ebaugh, deconverts on the site went through a role exit involving a three‐part, but intertwined, intellectual, emotional, and social process. The online community provided an interactional space for them to construct and practice new secular identities, to explore doubts and process emotions arising from the deconversion process, and to prepare themselves for offline interactions with believers. This case study also suggests that the Internet and online communities may provide spaces for the highly religiously committed to explore deconversion and role alternatives.     

Pick Your Poison: Examining Adolescent Substance Use through Opportunity Theory

The present study examines substance use behaviors of middle and high school students, focusing on how varying influences of opportunity measures impact use of specific types of substances. The data used in the present study come from almost 4,000 students within 89 school contexts from students attending public school in a Southern state. Hierarchical logistic modeling is used to explore the influence of various opportunities at both the student and school levels on the use of different types of substances. Results indicate measures of opportunity at both the student and school levels were significant; however, measures at the individual level were consistently more influential.     

The impact of alcohol intoxication on witness suggestibility immediately and after a delay

Intoxicated witnesses are common, making it important to understand alcohol's impact on witness accuracy and suggestibility. Participants assigned to an immediate retrieval condition encoded and recalled in one of the three intoxication conditions: sober control, placebo, or intoxicated. Participants in the delayed retrieval condition were assigned to encode in one of the three intoxication conditions, returned a week later, and were assigned to retrieve in one of the three intoxication conditions. Intoxication condition at encoding was fully crossed with intoxication condition at retrieval in the delayed condition. Participants encoded a mock crime video and retrieved via a forced‐choice test, with answers already circled (purportedly by a prior participant); half of the precircled responses were incorrect. When recalling after a delay only, intoxication at encoding increased agreement with incorrect suggested answers and decreased accuracy. Results suggest intoxicated witnesses may benefit from being interviewed immediately rather than after a sobering delay.     

The effect of multiple negative,neutral, and positive organizational changes

Organizational change research has largely concluded that employees appraise changes in their workplace negatively and thus respond negatively to greater amounts of change. However, whether this conclusion is warranted remains unclear because previous research has examined single workplace changes in isolation or asked employees to make a global assessment of the changing nature of their workplace. Researchers have not had the means to capture the number of changes employees experience or their appraisals of the many different changes occurring in their workplace. In this study, we developed and validated the Quantity of Change Scale (QCS) to provide a more nuanced understanding of employees’ appraisals of their changing workplace. We found that the negative changes employees experience disproportionately influenced their reactions to the changing work environment. However, we also demonstrated that contrary to popular belief, employees appraised fewer changes as negative than as positive or neutral. Together these findings provide new insight into why assessments of employees’ general reactions to workplace change tend to be negative. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of our empirical examination of employees’ appraisals of the many changes in their workplace.     

A meta-analytic review of work-family conflict and its antecedents

This meta-analytic review combines the results of more than 60 studies to help determine the relative effects of work, nonwork, and demographic and individual factors on work interference with family (WIF) and family interference with work (FIW). As expected, work factors related more strongly to WIF, and some nonwork factors were more strongly related to FIW. Demographic factors, such as an employee’s sex and marital status, tended to relate weakly to WIF and FIW. Overall the analysis supports the notion that WIF and FIW have unique antecedents, and therefore, may require different interventions or solutions to prevent or reduce their occurrence. Lastly, the analysis suggests that demographic variables, such as sex and marital status, are alone poor predictors of work-family conflict. Researchers are advised to attend to more finely grained variables that may more fully capture employees’ likelihood of experiencing work-family conflict.     

Respiratory symptoms and panic in the National Comorbidity Survey: a test of Klein's suffocation false alarm theory

According to suffocation false alarm theory (Arch. Gen. Psychiatry 50 (1993) 31), respiratory symptoms are the symptoms that best distinguish the panic attacks of individuals with panic disorder (PD) from those of individuals without PD. Using National Comorbidity Survey data from those 609 respondents who had lifetime histories of panic attacks or PD, we tested this prediction. Neither respiratory symptom (smothering; dyspnea) strongly differentiated between respondents with PD and those with only panic attacks. Respiratory symptom endorsement was unrelated to PD when the number of other symptoms endorsed was controlled; furthermore, respiratory symptoms had slight effect sizes and were not included in a multivariate context. In contrast, fear of dying had the largest effect size, an association with PD that persisted after control for other symptom endorsement, and a continuing importance in multivariate analyses. Strikingly, panic attack respondents who reported having had only one panic attack were as likely as PD respondents to report respiratory symptoms during panic. These findings, although based on retrospective self-report and thus subject to recall bias, are inconsistent with the hypothesis that respiratory symptoms during panic have diagnostic significance.     

Radiobiology and gray science: Flaws in landmark new radiation protections

The International Commission on Radiological Protection — whose regularly updated recommendations are routinely adopted as law throughout the globe — recently issued the first-ever ICRP protections for the environment. These draft 2005 proposals are significant both because they offer the commission’s first radiation protections for any non-human parts of the planet and because they will influence both the quality of radiation risk assessment and environmental protection, as well as the global costs of nuclear-weapons cleanup, reactor decommissioning and radioactive waste management. This piece argues that the 2005 recommendations are scientifically and ethically flawed, or gray, in at least three respects: first, in largely ignoring scientific journals while employing mainly “gray literature;” second, in relying on non-transparent dose estimates and models, rather than on actual radiation measurements; and third, in ignoring classical ethical constraints on acceptable radiation risk.     

Recognizing cognates and interlingual homographs: Effects of code similarity in language-specific and generalized lexical decision

In four experiments, we investigated how cross-linguistic overlap in semantics, orthography, and phonology affects bilingual word recognition in different variants of the lexical decision task. Dutch-English bilinguals performed a language-specific or a generalized lexical decision task including words that are spelled and/or pronounced the same in English and in Dutch and that matched one-language control words from both languages. In Experiments 1 and 3, "false friends" with different meanings in the two languages (e.g., spot) were presented, whereas in Experiments 2 and 4 cognates with the same meanings across languages (e.g., film) were presented. The language-specific Experiments 1 and 2 replicated and qualified an earlier study (Dijkstra, Grainger, & Van Heuven, 1999). In the generalized Experiment 3, participants reacted equally quickly on Dutch-English homographs and Dutch control words, indicating that their response was based primarily on the fastest available orthographic code (i.e., Dutch). In Experiment 4, cognates were recognized faster than English and Dutch controls, suggesting coactivation of the cognates' semantics. The nonword results indicate that the bilingual rejection procedure can, to some extent, be language specific. All results are discussed within the BIA+ (bilingual interactive activation) model for bilingual word recognition.