Program Context,Sensation Seeking,and Attention to Televised Anti-Drug Public Service Announcements

This study examined effects of message and program sensation value, sensation seeking, and drug use on visual attention to televised anti-drug public service announcements (PSAs) among 318 18–22-year-olds, who were placed individually in a simulated home environment with the opportunity to read from print media selections and/or watch a half-hour TV program including two presentations of the test PSA. The TV program was high or low in sensation value. High sensation seekers paid greater attention to high sensation value programming and to PSA embedded in such programming, whereas low sensation seekers paid greater attention to PSA embedded in low sensation value programs. Ongoing attention to a program may help to sustain attention to a subsequent PSA. The findings relate to an activation model of information exposure and indicate that program sensation value and sensation seeking are important factors to be considered in the placement oftelevised drug abuse prevention messages.     

THEOLOGY FROM A FRACTURED VISTA: SUSAN NEIMAN'S EVIL IN MODERN THOUGHT

Evil in Modern Thought, Susan Neiman's account of the intellectual trajectory of modernity, employs the trope “homeless” to articulate deep difficulties that affirmations of divine transcendence and of human capacities to acknowledge transcendence face in a contemporary context thoroughly marked by fragmentation, fragility, and contingency. The “hospitality” of the Incarnation, which makes a fractured world a place for divine welcoming of the human in all its contingency and brokenness, is proposed as locus for theological engagement with Neiman's appropriation of a Kantian sense of hope as the readiness to resist evil in a world seemingly bereft of welcome.     

Social Contagion and Multiplexity Communication Networks as Predictors of Commitment and Role Ambiguity

This research compares two contrasting perspectives of social contagion processes associated with the organizational outcome variables of commitment and role ambiguity in organizations. The two perspectives are structural equivalence (which focuses on the positions of individuals in social networks) and cohesion (which focuses on an individual's direct communication contacts). It was hypothesized that structural equivalence would be more associated with role ambiguity and that commitment would be more associated with cohesion. The relationship between these variables and multiplex content networks was also studied. It was hypothesized that commitment was a much more broadly based concept in the sense that a number of functional content networks systematically relate to it. On the other hand, role ambiguity was hypothesized to be more closely associated with uniplex networks, especially those related to job duties and organizational goals. While there were exceptions, generally the research results supported the hypotheses relating to multiplexity. The hypotheses that structural equivalence was more associated with role ambiguity and that commitment was more associated with cohesion also were supported in this research.     

VALIDITY AND TEST-RETEST STABILITY OF THE NASH MANAGERIAL EFFECTIVENESS SCALE ON THE REVISED FORM OF THE STRONG VOCATIONAL INTEREST BLANK1

Managers ’motives (preferences for different activities or outcomes) probably determine, in part, their relative job effectiveness. This hypothesis was tested and confirmed by Nash (1966) when he developed and cross-validated a Managerial Effectiveness Key for the 1937 edition of the Strong Vocational Interest Blank (SVIB). We revised the Nash SVIB key for those items retained in the recently-revised form of SVIB (Campbell, 1966). The new key has the same validity as Nash's key and high test-retest stability for lengthy periods of time (up to twenty-two years). Validity of the key is not extremely high (about .30), but its content does denote a pattern of stable and distinct manager motives which merit study along with cognitive, aptitude, and temperament factors as potential determiners of effective managing.