Self-esteem, academic self-concept, and aggression at school

The present study explores the relation between academic self-concept, self-esteem, and aggression at school. Longitudinal data from a racially diverse sample of middle-school students were analyzed to explore how academic self-concept influenced the likelihood of aggressing at school and whether high self-concept exerted a different pattern of influence when threatened. Data include self-reported academic self-concept, school-reported academic performance, and parent-reported school discipline. Results suggest that, in general, students with low self-concept in achievement domains are more likely to aggress at school than those with high self-concept. However, there is a small sample of youth who, when they receive contradictory information that threatens their reported self-concept, do aggress. Global self-esteem was not found to be predictive of aggression. These results are discussed in the context of recent debates on whether self-esteem is a predictor of aggression and the use of a more proximal vs. general self-measure in examining the self-esteem and aggression relation.     

Body Type Preferences in Asian and Caucasian College Students

While there is an extensive literature on gender differences in body image, little has focused on ethnic group differences in men's body image. College students ( N = 466) from a prestigious New England university indicated their current and ideal figures. Compared to Caucasians (N = 289), Asians (N = 92) reported smaller current figures. Both Caucasian and Asian women rated their current figure as larger than their ideal. Caucasian males reported no discrepancy between their current and ideal figures. However, Asian males rated their current figures as smaller than ideal. The effect of ethnicity on body satisfaction depended upon gender. For women, the ideal was thinner than current figure regardless of actual size, producing a discrepancy between current and ideal figures for both Caucasian and Asian women. Conversely, Asian and Caucasian men identified a similar ideal, producing a discrepancy between current and ideal figures only for Asian men.     

Conceptualizing ‘social capital’ for health promotion in small local communities: a micro‐qualitative study

This paper reports on a micro‐qualitative case study of peoples' experiences of local community life in a south‐east English town. This material is used as the basis for a critical discussion of the suitability of Putnam's notion of social capital as a conceptual tool for the design and evaluation of ‘community strengthening’ policies and interventions. The study was motivated by a concern that too much debate about social capital has been conducted by academics and policy‐makers in a top‐down manner, with inadequate attention to the realities of life in the local communities that they refer to. Three‐hour semi‐structured interviews were conducted with 37 residents in two less affluent wards in our town of interest. Informants—half men and half women, and spread across the 15–75 age group—were encouraged to talk about their personal experiences of local community life. Interview findings are presented within the ‘norm’ categories of trust, neighbourliness and reciprocal help and support, and the ‘network’ categories of participation in informal networks, voluntary groupings and community activist groupings. Our case study points to a number of ways in which Putnam's concept needs to be refined if it is to inform ‘community strengthening’ policies and interventions in England. Far more notice needs to be taken of the role played by informal networks of friends and neighbours in the construction of local community life. Attention also needs to be given to the complex and shifting geographical spread of peoples' significant social networks. Putnam's conceptualization of cohesive local communities and his unitary notions of trust and local identity may also be unduly essentialist. In our particular communities of interest, they failed to capture the fluidity of local community norms and networks in a rapidly changing society. They also failed to do justice to the extent to which social distinctions—such as age, gender, ethnicity and housing tenure—shape and constrain the way in which people create, sustain and access social capital. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Organizational Politics,Perceived Control,and Work Outcomes: Boundary Conditions on the Effects of Politics1

This investigation examined the moderating influences of perceived control (i. e., personal control and job self‐efficacy) on relationships between perceptions of organizational politics and organizational commitment, job satisfaction, intention to turnover, and job stress. Although results failed to support predictions concerning the interaction of perceptions of organizational politics and personal control, some support was found for predictions concerning the interactive influence of perceptions of organizational politics and job self‐efficacy on outcomes. Data from 189 hotel managers supported the hypothesized interactive effects of perceptions of organizational politics and job self‐efficacy for the outcomes of organizational commitment and job satisfaction. These results suggest that job self‐efficacy exacerbates the relationship between perceived politics and certain dysfunctional attitudes.     

A Note on the Nonlinearity of the Age-Job-Satisfaction Relationship

Research assessing the relationship between age and job satisfaction has typically provided mixed results. Inherent problems including limited samples and a failure to control for tenure and affective disposition have potentially contributed to these conflicting results. Moreover, a significant concern has been researchers' focus on detecting linear effects alone. In the current study, we statistically controlled for gender, supervisor and position tenure, quadratic tenure terms, and affective disposition (NA and PA) based on previous research regarding the relationship between these variables and job satisfaction. Finally, we used hierarchical polynomial regression to assess the form of the age-satisfaction relationship. Results confirmed that a U shape best characterized the relationship between age and job satisfaction. Implications of these findings as well as directions for future research are discussed.     

Can We Really Have It All? The Attainment of Work and Family Values

We discuss the role values and value attainment play in the complex and dynamic process of balancing work and family demands. We contend that an individual experiences conflict between work and family demands because of value incongruence between that individual and a pivotal family member (i.e., lack of value similarity) or because of the incongruent values between that individual and the organization (i.e., lack of value congruence). We further argue that work-family conflict leads to job and life dissatisfaction for individuals because this conflict frustrates the attainment of important work and family values. We develop and propose a conceptual model, capturing both work and family values as they relate to work-family conflict, value attainment, and outcomes.     

Ontogeny of early event memory: I. Forgetting and retrieval by 2- and 3-month-olds

In 2 experiments, 2-month-olds, trained in the mobile conjugate reinforcement paradigm for two daily sessions, showed retrieval deficits relative to 3-month-olds. In Experiment 1, tests of simple forgetting administered to 2-month-olds after retention intervals of 1, 3, 6, and 9 days (a period over which 3-month-olds remember the contingency) indicated that their forgetting was complete after delays greater than 1 day. In Experiment 2, reactivation treatments administered to 2- and 3-month-olds alleviated forgetting after a retention interval of 28, but not 35, days in the 3-month-old group only. Previously, alleviated forgetting by a reactivation treatment had been demonstrated in 2-month-olds after a delay of 18 days. In both of the present experiments, performance of the two age groups did not differ during the immediate retention test at the end of training. These results suggest that neither the age of the infant nor the age of the memory determines memory retrieval after long delays; instead, it appears to be determined by the length of time that a memory has been inaccessible (i.e., forgotten). We propose that factors which delay simple forgetting will correspondingly increase the length of the interval over which a retrieval cue can still be effective in a reactivation paradigm, irrespective of the age of the infant or the age of the memory.     

High calcium intake does not prevent stress-salt hypertension in dogs

Avoidance conditioning sessions and isotonic saline (1.3 L/day) were administered to dogs for 12 days under conditions of a low (0.1%) or high (1.5%) calcium diet. Twenty-four-hour mean arterial pressure increased comparably during the stress-salt conditioning periods on both the low (systolic: +16 ± 5 mm Hg; diastolic: +6 ± 2 mm Hg) and high (systolic: +17 ± 4 mm Hg; diastolic: +11 ± 4 mm Hg) calcium diets. Urine volume, sodium excretion, and serum calcium levels on the high calcium diet were not significantly different from those on the low calcium diet. In a second experiment, calcium was infused continuously for six days into the arterial circulation of normotensive or stress-salt hypertensive dogs at a rate of 0.12–0.23 mEq/min. Although serum calcium levels increased by up to 50% under these conditions, there were no significant effects on 24-hour levels of arterial pressure. In contrast to the protective effect of augmented potassium intake, these findings indicate that calcium intake does not influence the development of stress-salt hypertension in dogs.     

Empty nest,cohort, and employment in the well-being of midlife women

Whether the empty-nest experience has positive or negative consequences for women's well-being at midlife may depend on their historical cohort membership and employment status. In this study, it was posited that the empty nest was likely to be a negative experience among the particular cohort of women (Cohort II) who reached adulthood during the period of strong societal emphasis on women's maternal role known as the feminine mystique, would be experienced positively among the earlier cohort (Cohort I) who as young adults were encouraged to enter the labor force during World War II. Analyses of covariance tested the relationships among empty-nest status, cohort membership, and employment status, and three measures of psychological well-being, adjusted for age, education, and marital status. The results of this study show that cohort and employment each have important independent associations with women's well-being at midlife, but that the experience of the empty nest depends on these two factors, especially cohort experiences.The authors wish to thank Joseph Veroff, Elizabeth Douvan, and Richard Kulka for the use of the data from The Study of Modern Living, and Joseph Veroff for comments on an earlier version of this paper.