Governors in the Legislative Arena: The Importance of Personality in Shaping Success

Research on the leadership of executives in the United States typically follows one of two traditions, emphasizing either characteristics of the incumbent or features of the office. This article brings together these traditions. It draws upon the work of Winter to develop measures of three aspects of personality—the power, achievement, and affiliation drives—and hypothesizes that the power and achievement motives are exhibited in conjunction by successful chief executives. It then tests this hypothesis within the contexts of the American states, thus accounting for both the leaders as individuals and the features of the political and economic environments in which they lead. The primary hypothesis is affirmed. Governors who exhibit high levels of the power and achievement motives in tandem are substantially more likely to achieve their policy goals. In addition, governors who emphasize affiliation are less successful.     

Examining the role of the fixation cue in inhibition of return.

To clarify the role of the fixation cue in inhibition of return (IOR), the present study compared four conditions: fixation cue immediately after the peripheral cue, in the middle of the stimulus-onset asynchrony (SOA), immediately before the onset of the target, or no fixation cue. With a 200-ms SOA, less IOR was found when the fixation cue was either absent or occurred immediately after the peripheral cue. No differences between the four conditions were found with 400-ms and 800-ms SOAs. These findings suggest that there is a brief period of time in which attention cannot be withdrawn from the peripherally cued location. Once attention has been withdrawn from the peripherally cued location, IOR can be found at short SOAs.     

Alfred Schutz: Transcendence, Symbolic Intersubjectivity, and Moral Value

This article uses the writings of Alfred Schutz as catalysts to analyze three distinctive modes of transcendences operative in human experience. Particular attention is given to the role symbolic awareness plays in the formation and embodiment of moral value. I argue that Schutz's theory of symbols is helpful in illuminating the way shared horizons of value meaning and collective moral purpose can occur in relation to cultural and geographical anonymity. I then draw upon the moral theory of H. Richard Niebuhr to highlight the positive role that symbolic value horizons play in preventing ethnocentric world-views and in promoting common centers of discourse and visions of wholeness.     

Laboring to Make Sex “Safe”: Sexual Vigilance in Young U.S. College Women

Sex Roles - Definitions of “safe sex” often focus on the use of condoms and contraception, but largely ignore other dimensions of safety, such as efforts to feel emotionally or...     

Physical Disability and Suicidal Ideation: A Community‐Based Study of Risk/Protective Factors for Suicidal Thoughts

Although the significance of poor physical health for suicide risk is well established, the potential relevance of physical disability, as distinct from diseases and traumas that give rise to disability, has received little attention. Prior evidence suggests the possible utility of the stress process theoretical model for understanding variations in risk for suicide ideation and the contribution of physical disability to such risk. In this article, we examine the independent and joint explanatory significance of physical disability and components of the stress process model for risk of suicide ideation. Data from an ethnically diverse and representative sample of disabled and nondisabled adults (n = 1,768) reveal that physical disability is associated with a greater risk of lifetime suicidal ideation.     

Recalling more childhood events leads to judgments of poorer memory: Implications for the recovered/false memory debate

Dissociative disorders that are believed to develop from childhood sexual abuse are often considered to include amnesia for childhood events, particularly the events that involve the abuse itself. One unresolved issue is the extent to which memory recovery attempts can contribute to claims of having amnestic symptoms. Experiments with undergraduate subjects reveal that requiring more reports of childhood events will increase judgments of having poorer memory of one’s childhood. The results are consistent with the use of heuristics when one is reasoning under conditions of uncertainty, as experienced difficulty in remembering more experiences is attributed to the incompleteness of childhood memory. The findings challenge the validity of reports of childhood amnesia that follow memory recovery attempts.     

Fixation point offsets facilitate endogenous saccades

Subjects produced saccades to continuously visible targets that were signaled by the pitch, not the location, of an auditory signal. Such endogenous saccades were initiated more quickly when the visual fixation point disappeared 200 msec before the signal (thus producing a “gap”), even though the alerting benefits of such a warning were eliminated by an earlier warning tone. The presence of the gap effect under these circumstances shows that the effect is more general than was previously believed: Visual fixation point offsets facilitate saccades by affecting oculomotor processes related to both visually elicited (exogenous) and centrally produced (endogenous) saccades. In addition, the magnitude of the gap effect for endogenous saccades was significantly smaller than that for exogenous saccades, suggesting that at least some of the effect arises in relatively early processes, such as those involved in the processing of sensory signals, and not exclusively in later processes, such as those involved in the preparation and production of saccades.     

Was the Soviet Union Totalitarian? The View of Soviet Dissidents and the Reformers of the Gorbachev Era

The article explains why Soviet dissidents and the reformers of the Gorbachev era chose to characterize the Soviet system as totalitarian. The dissidents and the reformers strongly disagreed among themselves about the origins of Soviet totalitarianism. But both groups stressed the effects of totalitarianism on the individual personality; in doing so, they revealed themselves to be the heirs of the tsarist intelligentsia. Although the concept of totalitarianism probably obscures more than it clarifies when it is applied to regimes like the Nazi and the Soviet, the decision of the dissidents and the reformers to use the term enabled them to clarify their own values and the reasons they felt compelled to criticize the Soviet Union and to call for its radical reform.