Global Self-Esteem in Technical/Vocational Versus General Secondary School Tracks: A Matter of Gender?

This article examines the consequences of being in a technical/vocational track for the global self-esteem of adolescents, with special attention to gender. The t-tests and multilevel analyses were performed with data from 3,720 Flemish fifth-year pupils—2,404 boys and 1,316 girls—in 33 secondary schools: 19 technical/vocational schools and 14 general schools. The analyses show that girls have significantly lower self-esteem than boys and that this gender effect suppresses a track effect. Analyses performed separately for boys and girls demonstrate that boys in technical/vocational schools have a significantly lower self-esteem than boys in general schools, but the analyses for girls show no difference for school type. Theoretical possibilities offer explanations for this gender difference in the consequences of being in a technical/vocational versus general track.     

The Relationships of Teacher Ethnic Discrimination,Ethnic Identification,and Host National Identification to School Misconduct of Turkish and Moroccan Immigrant Adolescents in Belgium

We focus on school misconduct and how ethnic teacher discrimination, ethnic identification, and host national identification are associated with school misconduct of male and female immigrant adolescents. Additionally, we verify the moderating role of ethnic identification and host national identification. The results show that discrimination and host national identification are related with the school deviance of immigrant adolescents. The relationship between discrimination and school deviance differs for male and female adolescents. Ethnic identification and host national identification only moderate the relationship of ethnic teacher discrimination and school delinquency for girls who experienced ethnic teacher discrimination on a frequent basis.     

Self-Esteem, Self-Efficacy, and the Balance of Peer Support Among Persons With Chronic Mental Health Problems

Despite several suggestions that peer support is empowering for persons with mental health problems because of its mutual nature, few studies have empirically studied the role of its reciprocity and the effects on subjective well-being of clients from mainstream mental health care settings. Using data of 628 users of vocational and psychiatric rehabilitation centers ( N  = 51) in Flanders, the effects of the reciprocity of peer support on self-esteem and self-efficacy are explored by testing hypotheses derived from the theories of exchange, social capital, equity, and self-esteem enhancement. Results show that providing peer support is more beneficial than receiving it. One conclusion is that the net beneficial effects of receiving support from peers are overestimated.     

Introduction to the special section on integrative approaches to source memory

Source memory involves recognizing or recalling particular features that cause us to think of a mental experience as representing a particular past event. Research directed at understanding source memory comes from many domains, including cognitive-behavioral psychology, neuroscience, lifespan psychology, clinical psychology, and psychiatry. The authors believe that integrating multiple approaches to investigating source memory--most notably here, cognitive-behavioral and cognitive neuroscience--provides productive cross-fertilization of theory, methods, and analyses that in turn will yield unique constraints to our understanding of human memory. The investigations in this special section demonstrate the promise of such an integrative approach for advancing theories of source memory.     

Effects of salience are short-lived

ABSTRACT— A salient event in the visual field tends to attract attention and the eyes. To account for the effects of salience on visual selection, models generally assume that the human visual system continuously holds information concerning the relative salience of objects in the visual field. Here we show that salience in fact drives vision only during the short time interval immediately following the onset of a visual scene. In a saccadic target-selection task, human performance in making an eye movement to the most salient element in a display was accurate when response latencies were short, but was at chance when response latencies were long. In a manual discrimination task, performance in making a judgment of salience was more accurate with brief than with long display durations. These results suggest that salience is represented in the visual system only briefly after a visual image enters the brain.     

Illness perceptions and self-care behaviours in the first years of living with type 2 diabetes; does the presence of complications matter?

Objective: To assess illness perceptions, self-care behaviours and their relationship in recently diagnosed type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) patients with and without diabetes-related complications.

Design: Cross-sectional survey among 192 recently diagnosed T2DM patients of whom 23% reported the presence of diabetes-related complications. Illness perceptions and self-care were assessed by the Revised Illness Perception Questionnaire (IPQ-R) and the revised Summary of Diabetes Self-Care Activities (SDSCA) measure.

Results: Generally, participating patients perceived T2DM as a chronic, but relatively controllable condition with minor consequences. In the presence of complications, however, T2DM was perceived as more unpredictable with more (serious) consequences and less controllable by self-care or medical treatment. Furthermore, engagement in exercise and foot care was reported more often by patients with complications. Self-care was related to certain illness perception dimensions, and interactions between perceptions and complications were found.

Conclusion: T2DM patients in the first years of their illness are often recommended to make lifestyle changes in the absence of noticeable diabetes-related symptoms or complaints. As many T2DM patients do not seem to perceive their condition to be serious and postpone lifestyle changes until diabetes-related complications appear, a major challenge for professionals is to convince asymptomatic patients of the importance of self-care.     

Five types of personality continuity in childhood and adolescence

This study examines 5 types of personality continuity--structural, mean-level, individual-level, differential, and ipsative--in a representative population (N=498) and a twin and sibling sample (N=548) of children and adolescents. Parents described their children on 2 successive occasions with a 36-month interval using the Hierarchical Personality Inventory for Children (I. Mervielde & F. De Fruyt, 1999). There was evidence for structural continuity in the 2 samples, and personality was shown to be largely differentially stable. A large percentage had a stable trait profile indicative of ipsative stability, and mean-level personality changes were generally small in magnitude. Continuity findings were explained mainly by genetic and nonshared environmental factors.     

Attentional capture within and between objects

The present study addressed the question whether attentional capture by abrupt onsets is affected by object-like properties of the stimulus field. Observers searched for a target circle at one of four ends of two solid rectangles. In the focused attention condition the location of the upcoming target was cued by means of a central arrowhead, whereas in the divided attention condition, the target location was not cued. Irrelevant abrupt onsets could appear either within the attended or within the non-attended object. The results showed that in the focused attention condition, onsets ceased to capture attention irrespective of whether the onset appeared within an attended object or within a non-attended object.     

Prioritized selection in visual search through onset capture and color inhibition: evidence from a probe-dot detection task

Observers performed a preview search task in which, on some trials, they had to indicate the presence of a briefly presented probe-dot. Probes could be presented on locations corresponding to old or new elements and prior to or after the presentation of the new elements. After the presentation of the new elements, probes were generally detected faster on new than on old locations, indicating prioritized selection of new elements. Prior to the presentation of the new elements, probes were detected faster on new than on old locations only when old and new elements differed in color. These results suggest that prioritized selection of new elements is mediated not by visual marking but by onset capture. Additionally, observers may apply color-based inhibition.     

Social salience does not transfer to oculomotor visual search

ABSTRACT

Evidence suggests that socially relevant information, such as self-referential information, leads to perceptual prioritization that is considered to be similar to prioritization based on physical stimulus salience. The current study used an oculomotor visual search paradigm to investigate whether self-prioritization affects visual selection early in time, akin to physical salience, or later in time, where it would relate to processing of top-down strategies. We report three experiments. Prior to each experiment, observers first performed a manual line-label matching task where they were asked to form associations between two orientation lines (right-tilted and left-tilted) and two labels (“you” and “stranger”). Participants then had to make a speeded eye-movement to one of the two lines without any task instructions (Experiment 1), to a dot probe target located on one of the two lines (Experiment 2), or to the line that was validly cued by its associated label (Experiment 3). We replicate previous findings with the manual stimulus-matching task. However, we did not find any evidence for increased salience of the self-relevant “you” stimulus during visual search, nor did we observe any self-prioritization due to later goal-driven or strategic processing. We argue that self-prioritization does not affect overt visual selection. The results suggest that the effects found in the manual matching task are unlikely to reflect self-prioritization during perceptual processing but might rather act on higher-level processing related to recognition or decision-making.