Protégé-mentor agreement about the provision of psychosocial support: The mentoring relationship, personality, and workload

Protégé-mentor agreement (PMA) about the provision of psychosocial support was examined in relation to job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and work self-esteem. One-hundred and sixty-six junior administrative and information technology (IT) staff at an Australian university and their matched mentors completed a questionnaire that assessed three antecedents to PMA: (1) structural and experience aspects of the mentorship (type and length of relationship, frequency of meetings, previous experience with mentoring, and gender-mix); (2) protégé and mentor personality (agreeableness, openness, extroversion, neuroticism, and conscientiousness); and (3) protégé and mentor workload. Structural Equation Modeling using Partial Least Squares revealed that PMA was predicted by structural and experience aspects of the mentorship (type of mentorship, frequency of meetings, and experience of the mentor), protégé personality (agreeableness, openness, extroversion, and conscientiousness), mentor personality (agreeableness, openness, and extroversion), and mentor workload. Protégé-mentor agreement was positively related to job satisfaction and organizational commitment for protégés and mentors.     

Towards an anthropology of doubt: the case of religious reproduction in Orthodox Judaism

As Israel’s Orthodox Jews struggle to live up to high fertility norms rooted in religious and Zionist ideals, an obscured model of stratified critique has emerged. Based on an ethnography of Israel’s reproductive landscape, I demonstrate how critique of high fertility standards is based on particular social and cultural capital only available to the religious elite. While well-established, knowledgeable and assertive religious members find private ways to bypass the almost unachievable levels of fertility, a veil of secrecy leaves less privileged groups, particularly ba`aley teshuva (returnees) to carry most of the fertility load. Whereas scholars of religious transformation have demonstrated how religious elites act as actors and leaders of resistance, my findings illustrate an opposite pattern. Instead of disseminating this critique publicly, religious elites engage in private strategies of secrecy and creative performances of failure that enable these individuals to diverge from norms without publicly contesting them. I argue that not only is stratified critique based on social and cultural capital, it also reproduces social inequalities. By focusing on doubt, struggles, and failures engendered in “everyday Judaism,” these findings require us to refocus our inquiry on power structures within different sub-groups of Israel’s Orthodox Jews. Further, this unique case study highlights how stratified reproduction takes new shape as social and religious convictions gain and lose their force at a particular moment in history.     

Religious Orthodoxy and the Complexity of Thought about Religious and Nonreligious Issues

Two studies examined the relationship between religious orthodoxy and the complexity of thinking about religious and nonreligious issues. In both studies, participants who were high or low in religious orthodoxy wrote a paragraph outlining their thoughts about a religious issue (life after death in Study 1; existence of God in Study 2) and/or a nonreligious issue (capital punishment in Study 1; free trade between Canada and the U.S. in Study 2). The results of both studies indicated that participants who were high in religious orthodoxy were less complex in their thinking about religious issues than those low in religious orthodoxy, but did not differ in the complexity of their thinking about nonreligious issues. These results do not support the notion that orthodoxly religious individuals are dispositionally inclined to think in simpler or more rigid ways overall, but they do suggest a tendency to think less complexly about religious issues.     

A Secure Base from which to Cooperate: Security,Child and Parent Willing Stance,and Adaptive and Maladaptive Outcomes in two Longitudinal Studies

Early secure attachment plays a key role in socialization by inaugurating a long-term mutual positive, collaborative interpersonal orientation within the parent-child dyad. We report findings from Family Study (community mothers, fathers, and children, from age 2 to 12, N = 102, 51 girls) and Play Study (exclusively low-income mothers and children, from age 3.5 to 7, N = 186, 90 girls). We examined links among observed secure attachment at toddler age, child and parent receptive, willing stance to each other, observed in parent-child contexts at early school age, and developmental outcomes. The developmental outcomes included parent-rated child antisocial behavior problems and observed positive mutuality with regard to conflict issues at age 12 in Family Study, and mother-rated child antisocial behavior problems and observed child regard for rules and moral self at age 7 in Play Study. In mother-child relationships, the child’s willing stance mediated indirect effects of child security on positive mutuality in Family Study and on all outcomes in Play Study. In father-child relationships, both the child’s and the parent’s willing stance mediated indirect effects of child security on both outcomes. Early security initiates an adaptive developmental cascade by enlisting the child and the parent as active, willingly receptive and cooperative agents in the socialization process. Implications for children’s parenting interventions are noted.     

“I May Look 75, but I’m Really a Pioneer”: Concept of Self and Resilience Among Israeli Elder Adults Living in a War Zone

This qualitative study explored concept of self and its connection to resilience among 35 elderly Israeli men and women, who live in a war zone along the border with Gaza. The participants were asked to tell their life stories and to answer questions that dealt with hardships they have faced, including the security threat that characterizes the area. Analyses of the interviews revealed 13 overall themes. The major theme discussed in this article centers on the interviewees’ self concept of being ideological pioneers, who have a strong belonging to the settlements they created in the desert. We conclude that this self-concept relates to resilience among this population, in spite of the hardships they have faced on the personal, familial, communal and social-political levels.     

Working memory deficits in boys with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD): An examination of orthographic coding and episodic buffer processes

The episodic buffer component of working memory was examined in children with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and typically developing peers (TD). Thirty-two children (ADHD = 16, TD = 16) completed three versions of a phonological working memory task that varied with regard to stimulus presentation modality (auditory, visual, or dual auditory and visual), as well as a visuospatial task. Children with ADHD experienced the largest magnitude working memory deficits when phonological stimuli were presented via a unimodal, auditory format. Their performance improved during visual and dual modality conditions but remained significantly below the performance of children in the TD group. In contrast, the TD group did not exhibit performance differences between the auditory- and visual-phonological conditions but recalled significantly more stimuli during the dual-phonological condition. Furthermore, relative to TD children, children with ADHD recalled disproportionately fewer phonological stimuli as set sizes increased, regardless of presentation modality. Finally, an examination of working memory components indicated that the largest magnitude between-group difference was associated with the central executive. Collectively, these findings suggest that ADHD-related working memory deficits reflect a combination of impaired central executive and phonological storage/rehearsal processes, as well as an impaired ability to benefit from bound multimodal information processed by the episodic buffer.     

Minimal spectral contrast of formant peaks for vowel recognition as a function of spectral slope

In four experiments we investigated whether listeners can locate the formants of vowels not only from peaks, but also from spectral “shoulders”—features that give rise to zero crossings in the third, but not the first, differential of the excitation pattern—as hypothesized by Assmann and Summerfield (1989). Stimuli were steady-state approximations to the vowels [a, i, з, u, ?] created by summing the first 45 harmonics of a fundamental of 100 Hz. Thirty-nine harmonics had equal amplitudes; the other 6 formed three pairs that were raised in level to define three “formants.” An adaptive psychophysical procedure determined the minimal difference in level between the 6 harmonics and the remaining 39 at which the vowels were identifiably different from one another. These thresholds were measured through simulated communication channels, giving overall slopes to the excitation patterns of the five vowels that ranged from ?1 dB/erb to +2 dB/erb. Excitation patterns of the threshold stimuli were computed, and the locations of formants were estimated from zero crossings in the first and third differentials. With the more steeply sloping communication channels, some formants of some vowels were represented as shoulders rather than peaks, confirming the predictions of Assmann and Summerfield’s models. We discuss the limitations of the excitation pattern model and the related issue of whether the location of formants can be computed from spectral shoulders in auditory analysis.