Spirituality as a 1‐Year Prospective Predictor of Violence Perpetration and Drug Use Among Youth at Continuation High Schools1

This paper presents the results of a 1‐year prospective study of violence perpetration, drug use, and spirituality among continuation high school youth. Spirituality was found to predict later violence perpetration and drug use as a single predictor. However, it failed to predict violence or drug use in models that also entered 6 other variables; particularly, baseline levels of violence and drug use, and morality of drug use. It is possible that current measures of spirituality predict later violence perpetration and drug use as a result of tapping attitudes about morality. Controlling for baseline spirituality, male gender, low morality of drug use, violence perpetration, and drug use predicted later spirituality. Spirituality appears to be affected by drug use and violence, but not the converse. The protective influence of spirituality is not supported, at least as currently measured.     

Back and forth and in between: returning albanian migrants from Greece and Italy

On the basis of findings from a sample of Albanian migrants who have returned to their country of origin from Greece and Italy, we highlight that Greece attracts less skilled and less well off categories of migrants compared to Italy. However, the integration patterns tell a different story. In spite of the fact that Greece does not represent the first choice of Albanians seeking to migrate, and although those who go to Greece are not among the most qualified, nevertheless, they tend to adjust better to their host society and labour market. Furthermore, returning migrants from Greece seem to be better equipped and more likely to utilize the skills and knowledge acquired through migration compared to those returning from Italy.     

Great man or great myth? A quantitative review of the relationship between individual differences and leader effectiveness

This study presents a meta‐analysis of 25 individual differences proposed to be related to effective leadership, with an emphasis on comparing trait‐like (e.g. personality and intelligence) to state‐like individual differences (e.g. knowledge and skills). The results indicate that although both trait‐like (achievement motivation, energy, dominance, honesty/integrity, self‐confidence, creativity, and charisma) and state‐like (interpersonal skills, oral communication, written communication, administrative/management skills, problem‐solving skills, and decision making) individual differences were consistent predictors of effective leadership, the impact of trait‐like and state‐like individual differences was modest overall and did not differ substantially (ρ= .27 and .26, respectively). Finally, organizational level of the leader, method of predictor and criterion measurement, and organization type moderated the relationship between individual differences and effective leadership.     

Tracking talking: dual task costs of planning and producing speech for young versus older adults

A digital pursuit rotor was used to monitor speech planning and production costs by time-locking tracking performance to the auditory wave form produced as young and older adults were describing someone they admire. The speech sample and time-locked tracking record were segmented at utterance boundaries and multilevel modeling was used to determine how utterance-level predictors such as utterance duration or sentence grammatical complexity and person-level predictors such as speaker age or working memory capacity predicted tracking performance. Three models evaluated the costs of speech planning, the costs of speech production, and the costs of speech output monitoring. The results suggest that planning and producing propositionally dense utterances is more costly for older adults and that older adults experience increased costs as a result of having produced a long, informative, or rapid utterance.     

Migrant Entrepreneurship in Greece: Diversity of Pathways for Emerging Ethnic Business Communities in Thessaloniki

This paper examines aspects of immigrants’ entrepreneurship in Greece, focusing on the emergence of distinct ethnic business communities by migrants from China, Nigeria, Albania and the former USSR. Beginning from a literature review, it overviews the policy context and official statistics in Greece and discusses recent fieldwork findings in Thessaloniki. The diversity of entrepreneurial strategies and practises is explained through a typology based on the prevailing characteristics of immigrant businesses. We suggest that the entrepreneurship of migrants is embedded within the dynamics of immigrants’ integration and the broader factors on which this depends. This has important implications, calling for a realistic, coherent, inclusive and long-spanning migratory policy.     

Prior knowledge enhances the category dimensionality effect

A study of the combined influence of prior knowledge and stimulus dimensionality on category learning was conducted. Subjects learned category structures with the same number of necessary dimensions but with more or fewer additional, redundant dimensions and with either knowledge-related or knowledge-unrelated features. Minimal-learning models predict that all subjects, regardless of condition, either should learn the same number of dimensions or should respond more slowly to each dimension. Despite similar learning rates and response times, subjects learned more features in the high-dimensional than in the low-dimensional condition. Furthermore, prior knowledge interacted with dimensionality, increasing what was learned, especially in the high-dimensional case. A second experiment confirmed that the participants did, in fact, learn more features during the training phase, rather than simply inferring them at test. These effects can be explained by direct associations among features (representing prior knowledge), combined with feedback between features and the category label, as was shown by simulations of the knowledge resonance, or KRES, model of category learning.     

Vision for perception and vision for action: normal and unusual development

Evidence suggests that visual processing is divided into the dorsal ('how') and ventral ('what') streams. We examined the normal development of these streams and their breakdown under neurological deficit by comparing performance of normally developing children and Williams syndrome individuals on two tasks: a visually guided action ('how') task, in which participants posted a card into an oriented slot, and a perception ('what') task, in which they matched a card to the slot's orientation. Results showed that all groups performed worse on the action task than the perception task, but the disparity was more pronounced in WS individuals and in normal 3-4-year-olds than in older children. These findings suggest that the 'how' system may be relatively slow to develop and more vulnerable to breakdown than the 'what' system.     

Social and Economic Exchange: Construct Development and Validation

This study examined the economic and social exchanges between employee and employer within a model in which perceived organizational support and affective and continuance commitment served as predictors and performance, altruism citizenship behavior, absence, and lateness served as outcomes. Two samples were used. 384 master of business administration students participated in Study 1, and Study 2 consisted of 181 aerospace employees and their managers, working for a single organization. Both studies supported the distinctiveness between economic and social exchanges. Study 2 showed the overall fit of the proposed model was adequate, though only social exchange, and not economic exchange, directly predicted the performance outcomes. These results suggest the importance of perceived exchanges between employee and employer.     

Psychometric properties of the Spanish version of the Revised Competitive State Anxiety Inventory-2 with athletes

The aim of this work was to develop a Spanish adaptation of the Revised Competitive State Anxiety Inventory-2. The scale was translated and its psychometric properties were analyzed with data from a sample of 149 athletes. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses were performed which supported a 16-item CSAI-2R assessing the three hypothesised dimensions of anxiety: Somatic anxiety, Cognitive anxiety, and Self-confidence. Overall fit of the model was good with a value of .97 for Comparative and Non-Normed Fit Indexes, and .045 for Root Mean Square Error of Approximation. Cronbach alpha coefficients for the factors ranged from .79 to .83. It is concluded that this version shows adequate properties, in terms of its dimensionality and internal consistency. Guidelines are also provided for future research on its validity as a measure of state anxiety in competitive situations.     

The effects of revisionism on remembered emotion: the valence of older,voluntary immigrants' pre‐migration autobiographical memories

Prior research on remembered emotion demonstrates effects of revisionism in memory. The positivity bias describes preferential recall for positive emotions and the fading affect bias describes greater fading of negative versus positive emotion over time. Such effects predict that older adults would remember childhood and youth more positively than later adulthood. However, economic immigrants, whose childhood and youth reflect experiences of poverty and unemployment, may not show the effects of such revisionism. This study examined the remembered emotion of immigrant and non‐immigrant older Puerto Ricans whose early years corresponded to hard times on the island. Multilevel modelling showed that both groups exhibited the effects of the positivity and fading affect biases, but immigrants remembered childhood and youth more negatively than non‐immigrants. This suggests both accurate memory for a more negative past as well the effects of additional revisionism whereby a valued and chosen present is preferentially compared to the past. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.