The Effect of Professional Partnership on the Development of a Mutual-help Organization

The effects of partnership between Schizophrenics Anonymous (SA, a mutual-help organization) and the Mental Health Association in Michigan (MHAM, a professionally staffed advocacy organization) on SA's growth and development were explored. Following the initiation of a formal partnership, SA groups were more available throughout the state, more likely to be associated with formal mental health settings, and less likely to have leaders who had been participants in other SA groups. Groups with consumer leaders had significantly greater longevity than groups with professional leaders. Changes in the organizational structure and process of SA were also identified. SA leaders reported that SA moved from a collective to a more bureaucratic structure. As a result, there was greater consistency, administrative capacity, and response capacity. This enhanced capacity came with costs reported by SA leaders. The leadership role of SA members became less defined. SA members expressed concerns about the more hierarchical structure of SA's organization, decreased consumer control, increased professional involvement in SA, and an excessive focus on group development as opposed to group maintenance. Mental Health Association in Michigan staff reported that MHAM was also impacted by the partnership, both with regard to internal functioning and external perception. Implications for effective partnerships between mutual-help and professional organizations are discussed.     

Mindfulness as a means of reducing aggressive behavior: dispositional and situational evidence

Recent research and theory suggest that mindfulness, or enhanced attention and awareness in the present moment [Brown and Ryan, 2003], may be linked to lower levels of ego-involvement and, as a result, may have implications for lowering hostility and aggressive behavior. Accordingly, we conducted two studies to examine the potential aggression-mitigating role of mindfulness. In Study 1, we found that dispositional mindfulness correlated negatively with self-reported aggressiveness and hostile attribution bias. In Study 2, participants made mindful before receiving social rejection feedback displayed less-aggressive behavior than did rejected participants not made mindful. Discussion centers on potential mechanisms by which mindfulness operates to reduce aggressive behavior.     

Ego involvement moderates the assimilation effect of affective expectations

Based on the affective expectations model and research on mental effort mobilization, two experiments manipulated affective expectations (no expectations versus positive expectations) and ego involvement (low versus high) and assessed participants’ affective reactions to hedonically neutral stimuli. In Experiment 1, evaluations were more positive when participants had positive expectations about neutral photos—but only when ego involvement was low. High ego involvement neutralized this affective expectation assimilation effect. Experiment 2 replicated these findings for experienced mood after reading a hedonically neutral short essay. Furthermore, high ego involvement led to longer response latencies in the affect ratings in Study 1. The findings support the idea that high ego involvement resulted in relatively high mental effort that was necessary to detect discrepancies between affective expectations and stimuli’s real affective potential and therefore moderated the assimilation effect to affective expectations.

家庭作业与学业成绩的关系

家庭作业不仅是一种被广泛采用的教学手段,也是学生课后最为重要的学习活动。本文从家庭作业特征、家庭作业完成过程、家庭作业中父母参与和家庭作业对学习效果影响的机制几个方面探讨了家庭作业与学业成绩的关系。最后指出了家庭作业学习效果研究的实践价值和未来研究方向。     

工作投入的概念、测量、前因与后效

工作投入是个体在工作中的一种积极的、完满的融入状态, 它是连接个体特质、工作因素和工作绩效的完美纽带, 是组织创造竞争优势的重要途径。通过梳理工作投入概念的起源和发展, 并将其与工作卷入、心流、专念等相似概念进行了比较, 提出了工作投入的整合概念, 即个体面对工作时产生的一种同时包含积极的情绪体验、谨敏的认知和高度激发的体能状态在内的、持久的心理行为状态。介绍了UWES量表、SMVM量表等主要的工作投入量表以及相应关于工作投入因素结构的不同理论观点, 并根据近年来的实证研究对工作投入的前因和后效变量进行了梳理和表格化呈现, 由此进一步对未来的研究方向提出了三点思考。     

父母的婚姻满意度对父亲教养投入的影响：父母协同教养的中介作用

在全国多个省市选取364对幼儿父母,采用父亲教养投入问卷、婚姻满意度问卷和协同教养问卷分别测查父亲教养投入、父母婚姻满意度及协同教养状况,通过结构方程模型检验父母的婚姻满意度、协同教养和父亲教养投入三者间的溢出、补偿和交叉效应及协同教养在父母婚姻满意度与父亲教养投入间的中介作用。结果发现：（1）溢出、补偿和交叉效应同时存在于婚姻满意度、协同教养与父亲教养投入三者之间;（2）以协同教养的团结或一致维度为中介变量时,父亲的协同教养行为可完全或部分中介父亲婚姻满意度对父亲教养投入的影响,母亲的婚姻满意度和母亲的协同教养行为对父亲教养投入均没有影响;以协同教养的冲突或贬低维度为中介变量时,父母的婚姻满意度直接对父亲教养投入产生影响,父母的协同教养行为不存在中介作用。     

The promotive effects of family educational involvement for low-income children's literacy

Longitudinal data for 167 low-income children were analyzed to examine associations between family educational involvement during kindergarten, children's feelings about literacy, and children's literacy achievement from kindergarten through fifth grade. The promotive effect of family educational involvement for feelings about literacy and literacy achievement was moderated by maternal education such that involvement was more positively associated with literacy outcomes for children whose mothers were less educated compared with children whose mothers were more educated. In addition, children's feelings about literacy mediated associations between family educational involvement and literacy achievement. Implications for intervention efforts are discussed.     

A Developmental Framework for Collaboration in Child-Serving Agencies

Collaboration for the purpose of interdependent problem solving represents a fundamental reform of services for children with serious emotional disturbance and their families, which have typically been categorical, poorly coordinated, costly, overly restrictive, and frequently provided outside of the children's home communities. This article presents a developmental framework for collaboration that is based on the experience of families, service providers, administrators, and community members who have been involved in local collaborative processes in their own communities. The framework provides those interested in building collaboration a clear identification of the stages of collaborative development, defining characteristics of each stage, collaborative activities typical of that stage, and identification of the catalyst for change to the next stage. The results of this project indicate that while well-developed professional collaboration is a necessary component of collaboration, it is not sufficient in and of itself. The sites participating in this project related their experiences in building collaborative processes to both the development of strong interagency collaborations and the development of family participation. Their experience indicates that these two processes must be fully developed and woven together to achieve the goal of true collaboration.     

Meta-analyses in sales research

Meta-analytic inquiries enable researchers to synthesize empirical findings obtained over the evolution of a topic area and identify boundary conditions affecting the associations of key variables. Sales researchers can employ meta-analytic techniques to amalgamate empirical work conducted in a given topic area, and several sales researchers have effectively used meta-analyses to advance our understanding of the field. This article provides an exposition of this research design by analyzing its application in sales research. The authors review the meta-analytic studies in sales research and advance key considerations in topical foci, article selection, data coding and evaluation, and analytic approaches. An empirical example is provided to illustrate the power of meta-analysis in substantiating or refuting findings that diverge from accumulated insight in sales research. Results provide support for a positive effort–job satisfaction association in contrast to findings evidencing a negative association between these variables. A second empirical example is used to evaluate the nomological and discriminant validity of two related constructs: job involvement and organizational commitment. Results suggest that these two constructs may be empirically redundant. The authors also provide guidance for the future in regard to new substantive research areas, construct assessment, and additional types of meta-analytic approaches.     

Mesurer le risque social en entreprise. Le modèle de la réluctance socio-organisationnelle

This research aims at highlighting the existence of a generic concept, which could measure the social risk in company: the socio-organizational reluctance. First, we will define this concept, which comes from the electromagnetic field, where reluctance deals with the concept of resistance between two fields. Then, we will identify and define the concepts that are useful to measure social risk: social climate, organizational commitment, personal involvement and subjective congruence. Finally, we will test their links and their structure in a multivariate perspective, using structural equations modeling. The adjustment between the empirical data and the model confirms the existence of a global concept of reluctance. We also can see that organizational commitment and involvement have particular links to each other, which need more investigations.