Happiness is Flextime

We study how work a schedule flexibility (flextime) affects happiness. We use a US General Social Survey (GSS) pooled dataset containing the Quality of Worklife and Work Orientations modules for 1998, 2002, 2006, 2010, and 2014. We retain only respondents who are either full-time or part-time employees on payrolls. For flextime to be associated with greater happiness, it has to be more than just sometimes flexible or slight input into one’s work schedule, that is, little flextime does not increase happiness. But substantial flextime has a large effect on happiness–the size effect is about as large as that of household income, or about as large as a one-step increase in self-reported health, such as up from good to excellent health. Our findings provide support for both public and organizational policies that would promote greater work schedule flexibility or control for employees.     

Misusing church brands: problems with the ownership and management of denominational brand imagery in the United Methodist Church

Trademarked images frequently play an important role in helping contemporary religious institutions establish and maintain a visual identity for their brands. But, these images and the subsequent decision to protect them legally also signify a clash of opinions on authority, theology and rights of ownership. Thus, disputes about trademarked images within religious communities are more than mere negotiations over who can and cannot use a particular symbol, but are ultimately conflicts that end up demarcating the boundaries of institutional membership and revealing a religious body’s (often unquestioned) allegiance to market-based principles. This article explores a case study regarding the United Methodist Church’s ‘Cross and Flame’ insigne, and investigates how tensions over the logo’s proper use uncover implicit statements about the denomination’s position on free market competition in a religious marketplace.     

Sexual Harassment in the Workplace: Exploring the Effects of Attractiveness on Perception of Harassment

This study was designed to explore the effect of attractiveness on perceptions of sexual harassment. Male and female college students (N = 150) rated four scenarios depicting ambiguous incidents of sexual harassment, each paired with photos of a male boss and a female secretary. Male and female attractiveness was varied in a 2 × 2 factorial design. Participants were asked to rate each photo on a series of traits before making harassment judgments. Overall, females perceived more harassment. The behavior of attractive males was less likely to be seen as harassing. Attractive females were more likely to be seen as harassed, especially when the potential harasser was unattractive. The possible mechanisms underlying the effects of attractiveness were explored with the results supporting a direct effect of stereotypes over a mediating role for implicit personality theories.     

Reactions to Affirmative Action: Substance and Semantics

For both theoretical and practical reasons, researchers have sought to map the motivations that underlie people's support for or opposition to affirmative action. In view of the amount of rhetoric surrounding the issues, it is possible that some of the apparent differences in degrees of support come from differences in how the words affirmative action are interpreted. The present investigation shows that the meanings that people ascribe to affirmative action statistically predict their attitudes toward the policy, even after one accounts for demographic and related attitudinal factors. The implications of our findings are important in both applied and conceptual ways.     

Medication Administration By Family Members of Dependent Elders In Shared Care Arrangements

Twenty-three long-term care family caregivers whose care-recipients were enrolled in adult day care programs participated in face-to-face, semistructured interviews designed to learn more about their medication administration experiences. Two distinct styles of decision making were identified: self-directed and physician-directed. To help them with their medication administration responsibility, both groups used primary (physicians, pharmacists, or both) and secondary sources of information (the internet, information hotlines, nurses, more experienced caregivers, and family members with health backgrounds). Self-directed caregivers, who were significantly younger than the physician-directed caregivers, were twice as likely to report use of secondary sources of information to manage their medication administration tasks. Secondary sources of information appear to be important for the development of a caregiver's maturation and critical thinking skills over the long term and need more attention from formal providers in shared care relationships with family caregivers.     

Intellectual similarity of virtual twin pairs: Developmental trends

Virtual twins (VTs) are same-age unrelated siblings reared together from infancy who replicate twinship, but without the genetic relatedness. A 2005 report from the ongoing Fullerton Virtual Twin Study found an IQ intraclass correlation of .26 (p < .01, n = 113 pairs) and a within-pair difference of 13.22 IQ points. The average age of VTs in that study was 8.10 years (SD = 8.56, range: 4.01-54.84 years). An opportunity to retest members of 43 VT pairs, 1.70-8.96 years after their time 1 assessment, allowed additional analyses of genetic and environmental influences underlying general intellectual development. A decrease in the VT IQ correlation and an increase in the within-pair difference were indicated, consistent with increasing genetic and/or non-shared environmental influences and decreasing shared environmental influence on general intellectual development throughout childhood.     

Maternal depression and developmental disability: research critique

Maternal depression in families having a child with a disability has been the subject of considerable research over the past 25 years. This review was designed to describe the literature on maternal depression, critique its research methodology, identify consensus findings across studies, and make recommendations for future research. A particular emphasis is on the distinction between exhibiting depressive symptoms and meeting clinical criteria for a depressive disorder, how or whether research studies made this distinction, and implications for our understanding of maternal adaptation to disability in a family member. Of the 42 articles reviewed, only eight were clinically diagnosed depression; most of them used a scale rating depressive symptoms. Across the studies, mothers of children with disabilities generally exhibited a higher than average rate of depressive symptoms and are more at risk for clinical depression, but the incidence may be lower than reported in previous literature. Child behavior problems, maternal stress, coping style, and support were consistently associated with depressive symptoms. We conclude that we know relatively little about clinical depression in mothers of children with disabilities. The distinction between clinical depression and depressive symptoms may be important in conceptualizing how a child with a disability can influence family members and the nature of support that may need to be provided. Future research should incorporate gold standard diagnostic tools and assess history, severity, and type of depression. Research is also needed to study treatments to reduce the occurrence of both depressive symptoms and clinical depression.     

Coping behavior: Implications for disabled infants and toddlers

This article discusses the coping process and examines issues concerning the influence of a handicapping condition on the development of coping competence in young children. A preliminary study is reported that investigated the differences between the coping behavior of 25 developmentally disabled and 25 nondisabled children who were 4 to 34 months of age. The Early Coping Inventory was used to assess three categories of behavior related to adaptive coping efforts (sensorimotor organization, reactive behavior, and self-initiated behavior). Results indicated that the nondisabled children, as a group, demonstrated more effective coping-related behavior than did their disabled peers. The disabled children were situationally effective, in that behavior used effectively in one type of situation was not generalized to other types of situations. Their coping behavior tended to be erratic, inflexible, or limited in the range of available management strategies. The greatest discrepancy between the two groups was in their self-initiated behavior. The findings suggest the need for intervention services to address the enhancement of coping behavior of infants and toddlers with disabilities.     

Assessment of mothers' working models of relationships: Some clinical implications

The parent-child relationship exerts a powerful influence upon child behavior. Thus, it has been suggested that psychiatric diagnoses of infants and young children should include a characterization of parent-child relationships and interactions. In this article, we discuss one way of characterizing relationships, which is based upon interviews of parents' childhood histories and their conceptualizations or working models of early experiences (Adult Attachment Interview, George, Kaplan, & Main, 1985). The associations between mothers' working models, their parenting behavior, and the behavior of their children are discussed. Patterns of parent-child relationships described in mothers' subjective histories are discussed with respect to the patterns of interactional behavior of the mothers and their children observed in a laboratory play session. Case examples are given to illustrate the patterns, and implications for clinical use of this system are discussed. The interview appears to be a reliable tool for characterizing parental histories, assessing the associations between subjective conceptualizations and parenting behavior, exploring parental contributions to child behavior, and outlining patterns of relationships.