Cutting Off Your Nose to Spite Your Face: A Justice Perspective on Damaging an Alma Mater's Reputational Ranking

Although economic self-interest and self-enhancement theory predict that graduates will maximize their alma maters' reputational rankings, anecdotal evidence indicates that some graduates denigrate their alma maters' reputations when surveyed by the external media. Using organizational justice theories to motivate our hypotheses, we conducted a longitudinal investigation of 161 graduates from one university and predicted their intentions to badmouth their school to the external media. Results suggest that, controlling for perceptions of school quality, graduates used badmouthing to "punish" their alma maters when they perceived the fairness of job-search processes and outcomes to be low. Moreover, the relationship between justice and badmouthing was interactive, such that procedural justice mattered most when distributive justice was low, highlighting the role of career offices in universities' reputational rankings.     

INCREASING ONE ASPECT OF SELF‐DETERMINATION AMONG ADULTS WITH SEVERE MULTIPLE DISABILITIES IN SUPPORTED WORK

We attempted to increase one aspect of self‐determination among 3 supported workers with multiple disabilities. Following Baer's (1998) self‐determination conceptualization, the workers were exposed to two conditions that involved working more versus less independently based on availability of assistive devices. Next, their condition preferences were assessed and honored. All participants consistently chose the more independent condition. Results reflect how self‐determination may be enhanced by giving workers increased control over work situations.     

Interpreting infant emotional expressions: Parenthood has differential effects on men and women

Interpreting and responding to an infant's emotional cues is a fundamental parenting skill. Responsivity to infant cues is frequently disrupted in depression, impacting negatively on child outcomes, which underscores its importance. It is widely assumed that women, and in particular mothers, show greater attunement to infants than do men. However, empirical evidence for sex and parental status effects, particularly in relation to perception of infant emotion, has been lacking. In this study, men and women with and without young infants were asked to rate valence in a range of infant facial expressions, on a scale of very positive to very negative. Results suggested complex interaction effects between parental status, sex, and the facial expression being rated. Mothers provided more positive ratings of the happy expressions and more extreme ratings of the intense emotion expressions than fathers, but non-mothers and non-fathers did not. Low-level depressive symptoms were also found to correlate with more negative ratings of negative infant facial expressions across the entire sample. Overall, these results suggest that parental status might have differential effects on men and women's appraisal of infant cues. Differences between fathers’ and mothers’ perceptions of infant emotion might be of interest in understanding variance in interaction styles, such as proportion of time spent in play.     

Raiding the inarticulate: The internal analytic setting and listening beyond countertransference

The analytic setting exists not only externally but also internally as a structure in the mind of the analyst. The internal analytic setting constitutes an area of the analyst's mind where reality is defined by unconscious symbolic meaning. Clinical examples illustrate how a secure internal setting allows flexibility in the external setting without sacrifice of its analytic quality. The internal setting can help analysts listen inwardly to themselves in a way that is free-floating with regard to their internal processes. This points beyond usual ideas of countertransference. An analytic encounter may stir up elements that belong to the analyst's psyche which, rather than impeding the analysis, can actively enrich it. Seamus Heaney's writings evoke comparisons between listening to poems and listening to patients, and a week in a patient's analysis is described in relation to these themes.     

The temporal relationship between alcohol consumption and HIV-medication adherence: a multilevel model of direct and moderating effects

Previous studies documenting an association between alcohol use and HIV medication nonadherence, have been unable to distinguish between-persons characteristics from within-person characteristics representing the temporally linked effects of alcohol. Hierarchical Linear Modeling (HLM) explored within- and between-person predictors of adherence during the past 14 days, as well as factors that moderate the event-level effects of alcohol consumption among 272 HIV-positive men and women with alcohol problems. On days in which participants drank, they had almost 9 times higher odds of medication nonadherence, with each drink increasing the odds by 20%. The cognitive and alcohol factors had significant between-person effects on adherence. Individuals with strong and rigid beliefs about the importance of strict medication adherence were significantly more affected by each dose of alcohol, while individuals with more alcohol use and problems were less affected by each drink. Regimen complexity increased the effects of having 1 or more drinks. These results highlight the importance of promoting medication adherence among alcohol-using adults, especially among patients with complex regimens or with high confidence and positive attitudes toward HIV medication.     

Why Should We Save Nature's Hidden Gems?

Aesthetic preservation is the idea of sparing natural areas from development because of their aesthetic value. In this article I discuss a problem for aesthetic preservation that I call the ‘hidden gems problem’: in certain cases, the natural area under consideration is so remote and/or fragile that few people can actually experience it. In these cases, it becomes unclear how nature's aesthetic value can justify its preservation when development promises practical human benefits. After rejecting some potential responses to the hidden gems problem, I offer a different solution. I argue that we have an aesthetic reason to preserve nature's hidden gems because they are required to produce ‘true judges’ of aesthetic value, who are capable of improving the general quality of taste for landscape. I develop this argument using the example of recent preservationist efforts to save the isolated landscape of Sable Island, Nova Scotia.