Always look on the bright side of students: does valence of teacher perceptions relate to students’ educational performance?

Social Psychology of Education - We studied the role of the valence of female teachers’ perceptions in predicting various student outcomes. Using a prospective design, at the beginning of...     

Older Women: Hope and Approaches to Life

This study investigated hope levels and approaches to life in women who were 70 years of age or older and living in nursing homes. The overall findings indicated that these women tended to approach life from a hopeful mindset, although a slightly different pattern emerged between more-hopeful women and less-hopeful women.     

The Role of Culture and Gender in the Relationship between Positive and Negative Affect

An integrative explanation proposes that culture and gender interact to produce fundamentally different patterns of association between positive and negative emotions. People in independent-based cultures (e.g. the United States) experience emotions in oppositional (i.e. bipolar) ways, whereas people in interdependent-based cultures (e.g. China) experience emotions in dialectic ways. These patterns are stronger for women than men in both cultures. In support of the theory, Study 1 showed that positive and negative emotions are strongly correlated inversely for American women and weakly correlated inversely for American men, but strongly correlated positively for Chinese women and weakly correlated positively for Chinese men. In Study 2, findings for Koreans, although mixed, were closer to the results for Chinese.     

Mind Your Own Business: Reflective Aretaic Responsibility

Ethical Theory and Moral Practice - The distinctive depth and seriousness of moral responsibility is often thought to stem from the seriousness of violating moral obligations. But this raises...     

The Priest’s Husband

Clergy self-concepts provide an important resource for research into the psychosocial pressures that often breed domestic tension and marital discord in ministerial families. More than 30 years ago the Journal of Religion and Health published (15:3, 1976) Platt and Moss’s initial study of clergy families, research focused on the self-perceptions of the wives of Episcopal priests. That investigation explored some of the intrapsychic ingredients and interpersonal concerns of these women. Oden now concentrates on clergy spouses from a different vantage—the historically recent phenomenon of the Episcopal priest’s husband. This article grows out of the first formal study of such a growing parochial reality. Husbands of priests present novel issues because there has never been anyone like them before. They are men who will inevitably find themselves confronted by congregational expectations that can modify their self-concepts and retailer their marriages, “for better or for worse”.     

Enhancing implicit change detection through action

Implicit change detection demonstrates how the visual system can benefit from stored information that is not immediately available to conscious awareness. We investigated the role of motor action in this context. In the first two experiments, using a one-shot implicit change-detection paradigm, participants responded to unperceived changes either with an action (jabbing the screen at the guessed location of a change) or with words (verbal report), and sat either 60 cm or 300 cm (with a laser pointer) away from the display. Our observers guessed the locations of changes at a reachable distance better with an action than with a verbal judgment. At 300 cm, beyond reach, the motor advantage disappeared. In experiment 3, this advantage was also unavailable when participants sat at a reachable distance but responded with hand-held laser pointers near their bodies. We conclude that a motor system specialized for real-time visually guided behavior has access to additional visual information. Importantly, this system is not activated by merely executing an action (experiment 2) or presenting stimuli in one's near space (experiment 3). It is activated only when both conditions are fulfilled, which implies that it is the actual contact that matters to the visual system.     

Representation of Argumentation in Text with Rhetorical Structure Theory

Various argumentation analysis tools permit the analyst to represent functional components of an argument (e.g., data, claim, warrant, backing), how arguments are composed of subarguments and defenses against potential counterarguments, and argumentation schemes. In order to facilitate a study of argument presentation in a biomedical corpus, we have developed a hybrid scheme that enables an analyst to encode argumentation analysis within the framework of Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST), which can be used to represent the discourse structure of a text. This paper describes the hybrid representation scheme and illustrates its use for investigation of contexts that license omission of elements of an argument. The analyses given in the paper involve reconstruction of enthymemes. Defeasible argumentation schemes serve as a constraint on reconstruction. In addition, the examples illustrate several other types of contextual constraints on reconstruction of enthymemes.