Universal sex differences in the desire for sexual variety: tests from 52 nations, 6 continents,and 13 islands

Evolutionary psychologists have hypothesized that men and women possess both long-term and short-term mating strategies, with men's short-term strategy differentially rooted in the desire for sexual variety. In this article, findings from a cross-cultural survey of 16,288 people across 10 major world regions (including North America, South America, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Southern Europe, Middle East, Africa, Oceania, South/Southeast Asia, and East Asia) demonstrate that sex differences in the desire for sexual variety are culturally universal throughout these world regions. Sex differences were evident regardless of whether mean, median, distributional, or categorical indexes of sexual differentiation were evaluated. Sex differences were evident regardless of the measures used to evaluate them. Among contemporary theories of human mating, pluralistic approaches that hypothesize sex differences in the evolved design of short-term mating provide the most compelling account of these robust empirical findings.     

Linking Biomechanical Workload and Organizational Practices to Burnout and Satisfaction

We found support for several hypotheses linking work practices to employee outcomes: reducing biomechanical workload is associated with decreased burnout via perceptions that job demands are less threatening; lower demands are associated with higher job satisfaction primarily through decreases in burnout; employers who include employees in decision making processes have employees with lower levels of burnout and higher satisfaction; and having a disability management program is associated with having employees who report less job-related burnout. This study demonstrates the importance of programs that increase perceived organizational support and the importance of job design strategies that take into account physical workload.     

Source-monitoring judgments about anagrams and their solutions: Evidence for the role of cognitive operations information in memory

Generating solutions to anagrams leads to a memory advantage for those solutions, with generated words remembered better than words simply read. However, an additional advantage is not typically found for solutions to difficult anagrams relative to solutions to easy ones, presenting a challenge for the cognitive effort explanation of the generation effect. In the present series of experiments, the effect of manipulating anagram difficulty is explored further by introducing two new source-monitoring judgments. These studies demonstrate that when attention is directed at test to the operations activated during encoding (by way of source-monitoring judgments focused on solving vs. constructing anagrams), a source advantage is observed for difficult anagrams. However, when attention is directed to the anagrams themselves, asking participants to remember the kinds of anagrams generated or solved (based on kind of rule rather than subjective impressions of difficulty), a similar source advantage is not observed. The present studies bring a new perspective to the investigation of difficulty manipulations on memory for problem solving by illustrating the impact of a shift in focus from the effort mediating cognitive operations to specifics about the cognitive operations themselves.     

State capacity,economic policy and world system mobility, 1970–1985

Weak states and ineffective economic policies are assumed to mediate the constraints of the world system and to prevent upward mobility among peripheral countries. This article tests the effects of state strength and economic policy on world system mobility in the period 1970–85 on a sample of 162 countries. World system role and mobility were operationalized using role equivalence based network measures. Countries with effective neoorthodox policies experience significantly higher mobility, even after controlling for economic performance, as do countries with states that have high despotic capacity. No effect, direct or indirect, was found for infrastructural state capacity. Ronan Van Rossem studied sociology at the Free University of Brussels (VUB), Brown University, and Columbia University, and at present is a Senior Researcher at the Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry of the New York State Psychiatric Institute in New York City. At present he is involved in a study of the developmental consequences of perinatal brain injury in low birthweight children, and in an evaluation study of ER intervention programs for adolescents who attempt suicide. In his spare time his interests go out to comparative development, political economy, and collective action.     

Prism adaptation with simultaneous receipt of normal input

A 20-diopter vertically-displacing prism was worn on one eye in conjunction with plane glass on the other. Five groups ofSs differed in the density of a neutral filter worn over one eye. No aftereffect could be measured in either eye in any condition where the luminance of the “normal” field was equal to or greater than that of the prism field. As the luminance of the “normal” field is decreased below that of the prism field, the magnitude of aftereffect increases and is measurable in each eye.     

The role of collaborative planning in children's source-monitoring errors and learning.

The aim of this research was to provide empirical evidence for a cognitive process that may contribute to children's learning from another person. A cornerstone of Vygotsky's sociocultural theory is that knowledge is internalized from others; however, the cognitive processes that support this transformation are underspecified. In a series of three studies, kindergarten children (mean age 5 years 8 months) participated in a categorization task with an adult in several collaborative and noncollaborative conditions and then were tested on their memory of who had performed which actions in the task. After the memory task, children were asked to recategorize the items on their own. Source-monitoring patterns and children's learning varied across conditions according to predictions. A measure of recoding was related to children's planning language that, in turn, predicted learning among the children. The results suggest that one process that contributes to children's internalization of knowledge may involve recoding of agent information and that recoding can be indexed by source-monitoring performance.     

Howard h. Kendler (1919-2011)

Presents an obituary for Howard H. Kendler. Kendler was born in New York City on June 9, 1919, and died in Santa Barbara, California, on February 17, 2011. Kendler majored in psychology at Brooklyn College, where he was an assistant to Abraham Maslow, the father of humanistic psychology, and did a research project on the psychology of thinking under the supervision of Solomon Asch, a leading Gestalt psychologist. Howard Kendler's career was characterized by insightful experiments and a consistent analysis of the fundamental issues of the nature of our science, its methods, and its role in the community. The breadth of his knowledge and the depth of his thinking on these issues are rare. Although he did not settle these issues, he brought them into clear focus and forcefully advocated for his point of view. He was a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley, Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and Tel-Aviv University and was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. He held the offices of president of the Western Psychological Association, chairman of the Board of Governors of the Psychonomic Society, and president of the Division of General Psychology and the Division of Experimental Psychology of the American Psychological Association. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved).