The Impact of Parenting Experience on Gender Stereotyped Toy Play of Children

The purpose of this study was to examine gender role socialization as a function of parenting experience in an actual toy play situation and as a function of adults' perceptions of typically gender-stereotyped children's toys. Each of 48 children (24 boys and 24 girls) played with 3 adults: either his or her own mother or father, a matched mother or father of another child, and a matched man or woman who was not a parent. The amount of time children and adults played with gender-specific toys, adults' categorization of toys into gender categories, and adults' desirability ratings of gender-specific toys were examined. The gender-sorting task revealed that adults did not agree with traditional expert categorizations of some of the toys, which suggests a shift in the perceived function of some traditionally stereotyped toys. Regardless of how parents sorted toys into categories, when playing with boys, most time was spent with masculine toys. With girls, however, there was greater flexibility in the categories of toys with which they played. Parenting experience influenced the perceived desirability of toys; parents found toys more desirable than nonparents but these differences did not affect the actual play session with children. These results suggest a change in perceptions of traditionally stereotyped toys and differences as a function of gender in what is appropriate gender-typing behavior.     

Maternal Appraisal Styles,Family Risk Status and Anger Biases of Children

The present study investigated the relationship between maternal appraisal styles, family risk status, and anger biases in children. Participants included 90 mothers and their children between 3–6 years of age. Eighty families were followed up 1 year later. Maternal appraisal styles were assessed via a naturalistic story-reading method, and Time 1 and Time 2 emotion biases included teacher ratings of anger and aggression, peer ratings of anger, as well as classroom and playground observations of anger. While discussing ambiguous stories with their children, mothers with higher scores on the family risk index utilized more hostile appraisals and fewer prosocial appraisals in their explanations. A higher proportion of hostile-to-prosocial appraisals was also related to higher-risk family status. Prosocial appraisals by mothers were inversely correlated with childrens anger biases at school. When the appraisal balance in mothers talk favored hostile appraisals, children tended to show higher levels of anger biases evidenced at school. Finally, a hostile balance of maternal appraisals was found to predict change in childrens anger biases in the school with different effects in high- and low-risk families.     

Questionner le sens dans l’accompagnement d’une transition vers la reconversion professionnelle : une recherche-intervention

This contribution is based on a research-intervention contracted by a team of researchers in social psychology with a local authority. It focuses on the support of public sector workers, declared medically inapt to occupy their current position, during the transition that is redeployment period. The contributions of two theoretical approaches allowing to understand this question are first crossed: existential psychology relative to the life-span career counseling on the one hand, and psychology of the socialization, underlied by the activities of personalization mobilized in the construction of meaning on the other hand. Secondly, these approaches are discussed in the light of the experience of support workshops developed and implemented in the field of this research. These workshops, organized in four sessions, aim to help participants to objectify the questions inherent in this professional transition and to give meaning to their life course and their experience of the situation. The exchanges made it possible for the participants to share views on issues such as the situation of inaptitude, their relationships to work or the redeployment package itself. These workshops give evidence of the possibility of supporting subjects, concerned by ruptures in their life, towards the development of a capacity to act and to transform their environment and highlight the psychosocial effects of a support designed as a social support for the change of professional activities.     

They raised me to resist: Examining the sociopolitical pathways between parental racial socialization and Black youth's racial justice action

In a sample of 500 self-identified Black adolescents from across the United States, this study investigated the pathways between youth's experiences of parental racial socialization (RS) and their sociopolitical development. Findings from structural equation modelling reveal that RS messages and actions were positively associated with youth's awareness of racial inequality (critical reflection) and confidence and motivation in addressing racism (critical agency). Further, there were direct and indirect associations between RS and multiple forms of racial justice actions (interpersonal, political/communal, and online). Racial barriers messages were directly positively associated with political/communal and indirectly positively associated with interpersonal and online action, while cultural socialization actions were directly positively associated with all three forms of action. These findings support theoretical contentions that RS messages and actions may be powerful tools for cultivating Black youth's understanding and capacity to transform racially unjust systems. Further, parents' behaviours to racially socialize their children may be more impactful than their verbal messages in cultivating multiple forms of racial justice action. Finally, recommendations for future research and practice related to Black youth's consciousness and activism are presented. Please refer to the Supplementary Material section to find this article's Community and Social Impact Statement .     

Illusory correlations in perceptions and predictions of organizational traits

People often believe in ‘illusory’ correlations between variables that are similar, but not actually correlated. This study suggests that judgments of organizational traits reflect illusory correlations, because subjects' perceptions of correlations between traits, and the predictions of Hage's (1965) ‘axiomatic’ theory, were more highly correlated with independent similarity ratings than with actual correlations between traits. Some methodological reasons why organizational-trait theories might unwittingly produce illusory correlation predictions are discussed, along with possible remedies.     

The Political Manipulation of Group Composition: Engineering the Decision Context

Group decisions are not made solely by evaluating the merits of the contending positions. Instead, actors may engage in manipulation to increase the fortunes of their policy preference. Actors may manipulate information, group procedures, or group composition. Using a model of group socialization, this paper argues that a manipulator may seek to alter the group composition as to access and/or status. In doing so, the manipulator seeks to create a more favorable decision environment. This political perspective maintains that the dynamic nature of group composition provides an opportunity for a manipulator to engineer the decision context, potentially affecting the group's decisional output. Strategies and tactics of composition manipulation are presented and then utilized to analyze the American decision process during the Iranian revolution.     

Culture, Society, and the Individual: Cross-Cultural Political Psychology in Japan

Studies of political behavior and attitudes in Japan have often looked to similarities and differences between the West, most notably the U.S., and Japan. This paper details two approaches concerned with examining Japanese social and political behavior within a cross-cultural context. The first—nihonjinron—works with cultural nationalism, which argues that Japanese values are unique and thus no social theory developed in the West can be applied to Japanese society. The second approach is characterized by field studies and tries to assess Japanese social behavior by comparing it to that of Americans and Europeans. There is a great deal of knowledge on political behavior in Western countries which scholars in Japan often refer to in order to evaluate the significance of their survey results. But there is still limited information on the Japanese situation, and any attempt to construct a general theory in either cultural or cross-cultural political psychology will have to refer also to human attitudes in this non-Western industrial society.     

Pedagogy and educational democratization: The problem of alienation

Education is viewed as not merely a particular domain of social life. It is more a universal process than a mere learning of sciences and arts; it is richer than an individual's socialization. The educational democratization turns out to be a prerequisite of humanization of the entire social life. The orientation at the supreme humane values as a strategic direction of democratic evolution of education is opposed to the authoritarian tendencies as an antivalue of pedagogical relations.Being a significant step towards a genuinely humane society, democratization is unable, however, to resolve the fundamental problem of human formation: that of alienation. The opportunity to resolve it is dependent upon proper conditions for a free self-determination of a personality in culture.     

Occupational differentiation among white men in the first decade after high school

Most research on career development is concerned with the fate of individuals, but portraits of the heterogeneity and development of whole populations or aggregates of individuals can also be useful for understanding the needs and development of different client populations. Two population-level concepts are proposed and defined: differentiation and distribution. This report then charts the rate at which occupational differentiation proceeds among 3730 young white men and investigates the personal and family attributes by which these men are distributed, or distribute themselves, to jobs. Data from the National Longitudinal (Parnes) Survey of the Labor Force Experience of Young Men are used to examine employment among men aged 16 to 28 in different levels and fields of work. Results suggest that the rate of labor force participation stabilizes in the early twenties, differentiation among men by education and the distribution of men among different broad levels and fields of work stabilize by the mid-twenties, and the sorting of men with different socioeconomic backgrounds into different occupational groups continues through the late twenties at which age it appears to have been largely completed. Discriminant analyses suggest that the distribution of men to jobs is primarily along an occupational status dimension, and secondarily according to field of work. Among the variables used in the analyses, academic achievement is the major dimension by which men are sorted or sort themselves to different jobs.