The Influence of Social Status on Token Women Leaders' Expectations About Leading Male-Dominated Groups

Prior research has shown that women report mostly negative expectations about being a gender-token in male-dominated work groups. We speculate that this is partially caused by the socially ascribed status devaluation of women. In this study we investigated the degree to which elevated social status may lessen negative expectations of gender-token women assigned to leadership positions. Sixty-three undergraduate women participated in 1 of 3 tokenism conditions: (1) nontoken, (2) gender-token, and (3) high-status gender-token. In all conditions participants were led to believe that they would be leading a group of men in a decision-making exercise. Leader expectations were then assessed. The results suggest that increased social status may help prevent gender-token women from developing negative expectations about interactions with male-dominated work groups.     

Attention Problems as a Mediator of the Relation between Executive Function and Social Problems in a Child and Adolescent Outpatient Sample

Social functioning is critical for the successful navigation of everyday life for children, adolescents, and adults. Recent theories have postulated a neuropsychological basis for social functioning with particularly strong links with the executive functioning (EF) system. The current study examined attention problems as a mediator between EF (e.g., working memory, planning, and response inhibition) and social functioning in a child and adolescent outpatient sample. Participants were 218 children ages 6–16 (M = 10.23; SD = 2.52; 68.8 % males) who were referred to an outpatient clinic for psychoeducational assessment. Bias-corrected bootstrapping mediation analyses were used to examine the hypothesized models. The effects of working memory and planning (but not response inhibition) on social problems were mediated by attention problems in both teacher- and mother-reported models. These findings also held up in cross-source models (e.g., mother-reported attention problems as a mediator in a model predicting teacher-reported social problems). These findings have implications for dimensional models of social functioning and conceptual models for specific clinical populations (e.g., attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder).     

Effects of variation in teacher organization on classroom functioning

This study examined effects of variation in teacher organization on how time is spent in classrooms, focusing on time spent in transitions and instruction, including child skill by teacher organization interactions. Forty-four first-grade classrooms were observed three times over the school year. Timed narratives of each activity were recorded. “Orient-organize” referred to time teachers spent orienting students to classroom procedures or organizing the class for specific assignments, and included instructional clarity, where teachers described objectives of activities to students. Using hierarchical linear modeling, substantial variation across teachers in orient-organize was observed. Overall, classrooms spent less time in organization as the school year progressed. In addition, spending more time in organization was related to less time spent in transition. Students in classrooms that spent more time in organization in the fall also experienced greater amounts of time in child-managed activities in the spring. There was also an interaction between child vocabulary and amount of orient-organize in the winter. Students with lower vocabulary scores were more likely to be in classrooms that spent more time in spring child-managed activities if they continued to receive substantial amounts of orient-organize in the winter. The opposite was the case for students with high vocabulary skills.     

Consumer spaces as political spaces: A critical review of social,environmental, and psychogeographical research

The purpose of this review is to critique the social and environmental psychology literature on spaces and places with a focus on consumer culture and neoliberalism. By drawing on social theory and the Continental philosophical literature, the review argues that an alternative approach to knowledge production is required. To this end, recommendations are provided for what a psychogeographical approach in social and environmental psychology could look like. It argues that such work could be of benefit to academic and local communities by exposing the social costs and consequences associated with consumer culture and neoliberalism.     

The Holy,Catholic Theater: Exegesis of Life on the Stage

This article explores the theological/philosophical resonances of the theater. “Holy” and “catholic” are the key terms that shape the reflection. The holy is masked in the ordinary details of plays and musicals. Thus, it is fitting to say that the theater is “God-haunted,” a place of transcendence and transformation. The catholicity of the theater is found in acknowledging its inherent commitment to telling the whole truth, or at least endeavoring to tell what is true, about human existence. We are by nature story-telling creatures, and the narratives embodied in the theater aid in interpreting and reflecting on mystery and truth, in the exegesis of our lives and of our way of being in the world. Two plays and a musical are representative anecdotes that flesh out the ideas advanced in the essay—Equus, Auntie Mame, and A Chorus Line.     

Hemispheric asymmetries in the split-fovea model of semantic processing

We report a series of neural network models of semantic processing of single English words in the left and the right hemispheres of the brain. We implement the foveal splitting of the visual field and assess the influence of this splitting on a mapping from orthography to semantic representations in single word reading. The models were trained on English four-letter words, presented according to their frequency in all positions encountered during normal reading. The architecture of the model interacted with the training set to produce processing asymmetries comparable to those found in behavioral studies. First, the cueing effects of dominant and subordinate meanings of ambiguous words were different for words presented to the left or to the right of the input layer. Second, priming effects of groups of related words were stronger in the left input than the right input of the model. These effects were caused by coarser-coding in the right half compared with the left half of the model, an emergent effect of the split model interacting with informational asymmetries in the left and right parts of words in the lexicon of English. Some or all of the behavioral data for reading single words in English may have a similar origin.     

Principles and practice in reporting structural equation analyses

Principles for reporting analyses using structural equation modeling are reviewed, with the goal of supplying readers with complete and accurate information. It is recommended that every report give a detailed justification of the model used, along with plausible alternatives and an account of identifiability. Nonnormality and missing data problems should also be addressed. A complete set of parameters and their standard errors is desirable, and it will often be convenient to supply the correlation matrix and discrepancies, as well as goodness-of-fit indices, so that readers can exercise independent critical judgment. A survey of fairly representative studies compares recent practice with the principles of reporting recommended here.     

Involuntary listening aids seeing: evidence from human electrophysiology

It is well known that sensory events of one modality can influence judgments of sensory events in other modalities. For example, people respond more quickly to a target appearing at the location of a previous cue than to a target appearing at another location, even when the two stimuli are from different modalities. Such cross-modal interactions suggest that involuntary spatial attention mechanisms are not entirely modality-specific. In the present study, event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded to elucidate the neural basis and timing of involuntary, cross-modal spatial attention effects. We found that orienting spatial attention to an irrelevant sound modulates the ERP to a subsequent visual target over modality-specific, extrastriate visual cortex, but only after the initial stages of sensory processing are completed. These findings are consistent with the proposal that involuntary spatial attention orienting to auditory and visual stimuli involves shared, or at least linked, brain mechanisms.