A Path to Teacher Happiness? A Sense of Meaning Affects Teacher–Student Relationships,Which Affect Job Satisfaction

Meaningful work and meaningful relationships at work have been highlighted for their potential desirable consequences for employees and organizations. The present research focuses on teaching, as a potentially meaningful occupation, and suggests that teachers’ sense of meaning at work affects teacher–student relationships, which in turn affect teachers’ job satisfaction. This hypothesized path is examined in two complementary studies. In Study 1, 312 teachers completed self-report measures of their sense of meaning at work, perceived relationships with students, and job satisfaction. Results, based on structural equation modeling analysis, showed a good fit of the data to the theoretical model. In Study 2, 120 teachers completed daily measures of their sense of meaning at work, relationships with students, and job satisfaction. Results, based on HLM analyses, confirmed daily effects of teachers’ sense of meaning on teacher–student relationships, and daily effects of perceived teacher–student relationships on teachers’ job satisfaction. These findings point to a potential path through which teachers’ sense of meaning at work may affect work outcomes and attitudes. The theoretical and practical implications for the effects of meaningfulness and relationships at work for researchers, educators, and organizations are discussed.     

Learning General Phonological Rules From Distributional Information: A Computational Model

Phonological rules create alternations in the phonetic realizations of related words. These rules must be learned by infants in order to identify the phonological inventory, the morphological structure, and the lexicon of a language. Recent work proposes a computational model for the learning of one kind of phonological alternation, allophony (Peperkamp, Le Calvez, Nadal, & Dupoux, 2006). This paper extends the model to account for learning of a broader set of phonological alternations and the formalization of these alternations as general rules. In Experiment 1, we apply the original model to new data in Dutch and demonstrate its limitations in learning nonallophonic rules. In Experiment 2, we extend the model to allow it to learn general rules for alternations that apply to a class of segments. In Experiment 3, the model is further extended to allow for generalization by context; we argue that this generalization must be constrained by linguistic principles.     

An Affordance-Based Approach to Visually Guided Overtaking

When an automobile driver overtakes a lead vehicle while avoiding oncoming traffic, does he or she do so with reference to the limits of his or her car? We investigated overtaking from the perspective of the theory of affordances. We define the overtake-ability affordance as a ratio of the minimum satisfying velocity required for safe overtaking (MSV) to the maximum velocity of the driver's car (V_max). Two groups of participants performed overtaking maneuvers, if deemed possible, by driving either a slow (V_max = 25 m/s) or a fast (V_max = 32.5 m/s) virtual car in overtaking situations constrained by 14 values of MSV. For any given MSV condition, participants in the fast car group were more likely to attempt an overtaking maneuver. However, when MSV was expressed in intrinsic units as a ratio of V_max for both groups, the frequency of overtaking was not significantly different across groups. Furthermore, overtaking frequency dropped to near 0% for both groups when MSV exceeded V_max. In accordance with the affordance-based framework (Fajen, 2007), our results suggest that participants select their overtaking maneuvers by perceiving an overtake-ability affordance.     

Religion,Cultural Clash,and Muslim American Attitudes About Politically Motivated Violence

Does adherence to Islam predict attitudes about “suicide bombing” among American Muslims? This study examines the effects of religious and political factors on views of politically motivated violence (PMV). We draw from diverse scholarship, emphasizing arguments that are inspired by Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilizations perspective, as well as recent work in the sociology of Islam. Using a measure that gauges support for “suicide bombing” from the 2007 Pew Survey of American Muslims, results from logistic regression models suggest that political views and religious factors have a minimal effect on Muslim American attitudes toward suicide bombing. Furthermore, we find that Qur’ānic authoritativeness (i.e., the view that the Qur’ān is the word of God and not written by men) is associated with lower odds of supporting this form of PMV. We discuss the implications of our findings for the often anecdotal and alarmist accounts that link Muslim religiosity to support for “radical” extremism. We close with study limitations and avenues of future research.     

Determinants and Predictive Value of Clinician Assessment of Short‐Term Suicide Risk

We examine the interrelations among clinicians' judgment of patients' suicide risk, clinicians' emotional responses, and standard risk factors in the short‐term prediction of suicidal thoughts and behaviors. Psychiatric outpatients (n = 153) with a lifetime history of suicide ideation/attempt and their treating clinicians (n = 67) were evaluated at intake. Clinicians completed a standard suicide risk instrument (modified SAD PERSONS scale), a 10‐point Likert scale assessment of judgment of patient suicide risk (Clinician Prediction Scale), and a measure of their emotional responses to the patient (Therapist Response Questionnaire‐Suicide Form). The Columbia Suicide Severity Rating Scale and the Beck Scale for Suicide Ideation were administered at a one‐month follow‐up assessment (n = 114, 74.5%). Clinician judgment of risk significantly predicted suicidal thoughts and behaviors at follow‐up. Both the standard suicide risk instrument and clinician emotional responses contributed independently to the clinician assessment of risk, which, in turn, mediated their relationships with suicidal thoughts and behaviors. Our findings validate the importance of clinical judgment in assessing suicide risk. Clinical judgment appears to be informed both by concrete risk factors and clinicians' emotional responses to suicidal patients, highlighting emotional awareness as a promising area for research and training.     

Concreteness and item-to-list context associations in the free recall of items differing in context variability

Context variability can be defined as the number of preexperimental contexts in which a given concept appears. Following M. Steyvers and K. J. Malmberg's (2003) work, the authors have shown that concepts that are experienced in fewer preexperimental contexts generally are better remembered in episodic memory tasks than concepts that are experienced in a greater number of preexperimental contexts. The purpose of this article is to demonstrate that low context variability confers its memorial advantage because of stronger item-to-list context associations as compared with high context variability. Three experiments that use environmental context changes from study to test demonstrate that the low context variability advantage is eliminated when item-to-list context associations are not available because of environmental changes at test. In addition, the low context variability advantage is eliminated when inward processing at study prevents the formation of item-to-list context associations.     

Depression, Marital Satisfaction and Communication in Couples: Investigating Gender Differences

The correlation between depression and dysfunctional marital interaction is well documented, but only a few studies have examined gender-related differences in marital interaction patterns of couples with a depressed partner. In this paper we examined differences in observed marital communication in a sample of 62 Swiss couples presenting for treatment of depression. There were 16 maritally distressed couples with a depressed wife, 21 maritally nondistressed couples with a depressed wife, 18 maritally distressed couples with a depressed husband, and 7 maritally nondistressed couples with a depressed husband. Marital interaction behavior was found to depend on gender, depression, marital distress, as well as gender of the depressed partner. Our results suggest the need for a gender-sensitive model of the link between marital interaction and depression.