A qualitative study of adaptation experiences of 1.5-generation Asian Americans

Adaptation experiences of 1.5-generation Asian American college students (N = 10) were examined using the consensual qualitative research method. Results indicated 4 domains of adaptation experiences: preimmigration experiences, acculturation and enculturation experiences, intercultural relationships, and support systems. Participants reported that English proficiency played a significant role in their initial adjustment. Currently, most of the participants reported feeling identified with both the U.S. and Asian cultures. Some participants reported having experienced racism in the past. Many participants noted that they currently have no difficulty establishing friendships with culturally different persons. Participants reported currently feeling most close to friends of a similar background and that they usually seek support from friends, family, and religious organizations, but not from a psychologist or counselor.     

School Misbehaviour as a Coping Strategy for Negative Social Comparison and Academic Failure

This paper presents research findings suggesting that unacceptable behaviour in schools is a group strategy adopted for coping with negative social comparison and academic failure. Participants are adolescents in Singapore schools who are identified through self-reports as misbehaving and conforming students. They are presented with a vignette of a student who has failed an examination and is thus faced with the threat of negative social comparison. Two coping strategies are given, one is a strategy of competition adopted by the individual; the other is a group strategy of derogating the more successful and hypothetical outgroup. Two other conditions are included, that of attribution of the failure to lack of effort and to lack of ability. Findings revealed that although there is an overall preference for the individual-competitive strategy, misbehaving students showed relatively higher evaluation of the outgroup-derogation strategy compared to conforming students, but only when the attribution of failure was to lack of ability rather than lack of effort. Misbehaving students who showed a higher preference for the outgroup-derogation coping strategy tend to perceive the self-derogation levels of the target who adopts this strategy to be lower than the target who adopts the individual-competitive strategy.     

Contextual changes in the prototypicality of extreme and moderate outgroup members

Previous social categorization research has tended to treat prototypicality (the degree to which a stimulus is representative of a category) as a fixed stimulus property. In contrast, self-categorization theory sees prototypicality as an aspect of the categorization process that is dependent on features of the social context within which categorization takes place. To test this view two experiments (Ns = 256, 73) examined the perceived representativeness of extreme and moderate members of the same target outgroup in conditions which manipulated the salience of intergroup division. As predicted, the extremist was seen to be relatively more representative of the outgroup than the moderate to the extent that intergroup differences were salient. In Experiment 1 the extremist's message was also seen to be less important in low salience conditions and in Experiment 2 shifts in prototypicality were associated with changes in the evaluation of individual targets. Implications for the analysis of social categorization and stereotyping are discussed.     

The creation of uncertainty in the influence process: The roles of stimulus information and disagreement with similar others

Social and cognitive psychologists have conceptualized judgemental confidence (how strongly a person holds the belief that some judgement is correct) as being proportional to the amount of evidence in favour of a response. Festinger (1950) argued that there are two separate processes by which uncertainty (the inverse of confidence) can be reduced. These two processes are physical reality testing (the perceptual processing of stimulus information) and social reality testing (reliance on other people to resolve particularly ambiguous situations). However, there is surprisingly little direct evidence that uncertainty is either reduced or increased by the responses of other people. In two experimental tests (N = 74 and N = 83) it was found that disagreement increased uncertainty and agreement tended to reduce uncertainty. In a third experiment (N = 63) it was found that disagreement only increased uncertainty when stimulus information was limited, but that agreement generally reduced uncertainty. The results challenge Festinger's model of uncertainty reduction and support a self-categorization theory account.     

Heuristic and statistical support for protocol analysis with SHAPA Version 2.01

This paper describes SHAPA Version 2.01, an interactive program for performing verbal protocol analysis. Verbal protocol analysis is a time-consuming activity that has hitherto typically been done by hand, whereas SHAPA represents an attempt to build a software environment to aid (but not replace) researchers in this activity. SHAPA allows researchers to develop an encoding vocabulary, to apply it to raw verbal protocol files, and to perform various types of data aggregation and data reduction. When performing verbal protocol analysis, researchers often try out different possible coding schemes before settling on the most effective one. SHAPA has been designed to support quick alterations to an encoding vocabulary and to support the rigorous statistical analysis of content and patterns (sequential data analysis) in protocol data. It is intended as an exploratory, as well as analytical, tool and has been designed to be easy for novices to learn and use, yet fluid and powerful for experts. A prototype version of SHAPA has already been used by a sample of researchers, and their experiences and requests have guided the programming of the present much more powerful version.     

The repressor personality and avoidant information processing: A dichotic listening study

The present research was designed to investigate the proposition that repressors, operationally defined by the conjunction of low anxiety and high defensiveness, are particularly adept at avoiding the processing of information when motivated to do so. Four groups of participants (nondefensive-low anxious, high anxious, repressors, and defensive-high anxious) were administered a dichotic listening task involving neutral or negative affective words presented in the unattended ear. Participants shadowed the material presented to the attended ear and simultaneously responded to a probe task presented on a video monitor. Results revealed that repressors made significantly fewer shadowing errors than high anxious and defensive-high anxious participants and marginally significantly fewer shadowing errors than low anxious participants for both neutral and negative words. High anxious participants, however, were later able to recognize the negative words that had been presented to the unattended ear at well above chance levels, whereas the recognition memory of repressors for such negative unattended words was at chance levels. In addition, repressors' responses to a postexperiment questionnaire indicated a significantly greater number of distracting thoughts during the experiment relative to other participants. Repressors, it seems, are indeed skillful at avoidant information processing and this capacity may well be related to the emotional memory deficits they have displayed in previous research.     

The interaction of cognitive styles and classroom environment in determining first-graders' behavior

This study investigates the importance of two “person” variables, reflection impulsivity and divergent thinking, and one “situation” variable, the classroom climate of first-grade classrooms, for the classroom adaptation of first-graders. Three types of classrooms differing in classroom climate were selected: open, intermediate, and traditional. Subjects were the children (n = 189) in these classrooms. Classroom adaptation variables included self concept, school attendance, and teacher ratings of classroom behavior, overall academic rank, and personal preference. Both main effect and interactional relationships between “person” and “situation” variables and classroom adaptation were hypothesized. Classroom environment was found to affect degree of classroom disturbance manifested by the children with students in open classrooms exhibiting most and students in the intermediate classrooms exhibiting least. Boys in the open classrooms had higher achievement anxiety and lower teacher preference ratings than boys in traditional or intermediate classrooms. Reflective children obtained higher ratings as self-reliant learners and, for boys, reflection was related to low classroom disturbance and high achievement anxiety. Interactional relationships between classroom environment and reflection-impulsivity were also found for boys. Divergent thinking was not related to classroom adjustment for boys. Girls high in divergent thinking were higher in school involvement and achievement anxiety and more preferred by teachers.     

Myriad Philosophical Methodologies

This article offers an overview of philosophical methodologies. In an attempt to avoid a certain circularity, the article itself tries to avoid consciously or solely deploying and engaging with any current standard notion of what constitutes a philosophical method or philosophy itself. It hopes to find some of the possible places in which philosophy occurs, and this turns out to include (at least) such endeavours as literature, art, poetry, and linguistics. From here it considers how almost anything—for example, conversation, everyday life, and love—can also be philosophy. An attempt is made to identify some characteristic feature of philosophy as it occurs in all such forms. In the end, the simultaneous enacting of a peculiar optimism and particular humility both, in the search for knowledge, is put forward as potentially sufficient to at least begin to identify philosophy across its many guises.     

Infant care from infants' viewpoint: the views of some professionals

Debate about infant care tends to focus on still unresolved questions about whether or not day care is harmful, while research studies often confine care options to an unrealistic axis of choice between group care and mother care. Research that delineates constituents of day care quality in relation to measurable outcomes for different groups of children is urgently needed and should be based on a broader view of infant care options. A postal opinion survey sought the confidential views of members of an international organization of infant mental health professionals as to the kinds of care they considered likely to be best for infants from birth to 36 months, assuming that all types of care were of equally high quality and availability. Surprisingly lengthy periods of care by mothers were consistently endorsed; fathers were almost entirely disregarded as principal or joint caregivers; all forms of family care were endorsed over all forms of purchased care, but all forms of individual care were preferred to full-day group care for all age groups and to half-day group care up to the age of 2. The patterns of care judged by these respondents as likely to be best for infants are very different from those which most infants experience now, and from those which policy- and opinion-makers, practitioners and parents aspire, publicly at least, to provide for infants in the future. ©1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.