‘Lecturing’s Work’: A Collaborative Study with Harold Garfinkel

This article discusses some empirical materials from a collaborative study of ??lecturing??s work?? which the author conducted with Harold Garfinkel. The paper shows Garfinkel at work by presenting a history of the collaboration and discussing what we found. The article also considers some larger implications of our research for understanding how ethnomethodological studies can recover and discover the material regularities of everyday life as they are practiced in distinct settings. The paper reports on a program of ethnomethodological inquiry for discovering in situ what the produced orderliness of any setting??s endogenous tasks, competent courses of action and organizational objects could possibly be. The promise is that just what is identifying of social order, action and meaning is to be found massively, as the routine grounds of everyday activities, and in every case, as something worldly and embodied.     

Athlete identity and athlete satisfaction: The nonconformity of exclusivity

The goal of this study was to determine if there was a relationship between athletic identity, a relatively stable individual difference, and athlete satisfaction. A second goal was to evaluate the structure of athletic identity to examine potential differences between facets. Analyzing data from 175 NCAA student athletes, results indicated that use of overall athletic identity hid meaningful relationships between this self-identity concept and level of athlete satisfaction. When examined at the facet level, results indicated that athletic social identity and negative affectivity were positively related to athlete satisfaction while the exclusivity facet of athletic identity was negatively related to athlete satisfaction.     

The benefits of emotional expression for math performance

This study investigated the effects of emotional expression on actual and perceived math performance. Female participants were either asked to express their emotions or given no special instructions before taking a math test under stereotype threat or no stereotype threat conditions. Participants in the emotional expression condition performed better on the math test than participants in the control condition. Under stereotype threat, participants in the emotional expression condition believed they performed better on the math test. Emotional expression appears not only to have health benefits (e.g., Pennebaker, 1997), but academic benefits as well, including for stereotyped threatened individuals.     

Prioritizing Happiness has Important Implications for Mental Health,but Perhaps Only if you Already are Happy

Happiness is frequently posited as an important outcome of quality of life and characteristic of well-adjusted and functioning individuals. Happy individuals are less likely to report adverse mental health. Understanding the importance that individuals place on happiness is less clearly articulated and inconsistent. Valuing or placing higher importance of happiness appear to confer both benefits and risk for mental health outcomes. The primary aim of this study was to examine the relationship between the importance of happiness and mental health outcomes and whether the relationship between happiness and mental health is moderated by the importance individuals place on happiness. We utilised data from two studies, a university student sample (n = 413) and a community sample (n = 248) to examine the study aims. Mental health was operationalised in terms of psychological distress and symptoms of depression and anxiety. Happiness and the level of importance individuals ascribed to happiness were associated with adverse mental health outcomes. In multi-variate analyses, level of happiness was more strongly related to mental health. Interactions between happiness and the importance of happiness revealed that the effect of happiness was moderated by the importance that individuals placed on happiness. Overall happiness and to a lesser extent, the importance of happiness, are significantly associated with mental health outcomes. Happiness was most strongly related to mental health amongst those who rated the importance of happiness more highly.

     

Access to HIV care among migrant Africans in Britain. What are the issues?

In the UK, substantial numbers of new HIV diagnoses are within migrant communities, especially African communities. Current surveillance shows that despite health promotion efforts and advances in therapy these communities are accessing HIV care late. This paper explores the issues influencing the access and uptake of HIV care by migrant Africans in Britain. Using Kleinman's model of health care systems (Kleinman, 1980) as a theoretical framework, we highlight the importance of placing health within its broader context if we are to make significant improvement to the health of HIV-infected Africans in Britain.     

Spontaneous emotion regulation during evaluated speaking tasks: associations with negative affect, anxiety expression, memory, and physiological responding

In these studies, the correlates of spontaneously using expressive suppression and cognitive reappraisal during stressful speeches were examined. Spontaneous emotion regulation means that there were no instructions of how to regulate emotions during the speech. Instead, participants indicated after the speech to what extent they used self-motivated expressive suppression or reappraisal during the task. The results show that suppression is associated with less anxiety expression, greater physiological responding, and less memory for the speech while having no impact on negative affect. In contrast, reappraisal has no impact on physiology and memory while leading to less expression and affect. Taken together, spontaneous emotion regulation in active coping tasks has similar consequences as experimentally induced emotion regulation in passive tasks.     

The simultaneous learning effect: why does simultaneous task learning improve retention?

Despite the prevalence of encoding variables that have been shown to influence the rate of learning, very few affect the rate of forgetting of verbal material. However, when a list of words is learned simultaneously with other lists, the rate of forgetting is markedly lower than that of single-task learning. Although the magnitude of this simultaneous learning effect is large compared with typical list learning effects, it has received little empirical attention. Experiments 1 and 2 tested the hypothesis that the simultaneous learning effect is the result of a differential contribution of short-term memory during encoding. The results showed that the advantage for simultaneous task learning was obtained even under conditions that minimized the potential effects of short-term memory. Experiment 3 revealed that the simultaneous learning effect was larger when the specific items learned simultaneously were the same on each learning trial than when they were different. This finding supported a cuing explanation of the effect: the items from the other lists act as retrieval cues during delayed recall.