Balance between volunteer work and family roles: Testing a theoretical model of work‐family conflict in the volunteer emergency services

Trends indicate overall declines in numbers of volunteer emergency service workers and suggest negative organisational factors impacting adversely on volunteers and organisations. Conflict between emergency service work and family is implicated in falling volunteer numbers, and there is thus a need for research on difficulties experienced in balancing volunteer work and family. The current study tested an adaptation of the work‐family conflict (WFC) model originally proposed by Frone, Russell, and Cooper, in a sample of 102 couples in which one partner was an Australian emergency service volunteer. Results supported a model in which volunteer work‐related antecedents, including time invested in on‐call emergency activities and post‐traumatic stress symptoms, had indirect links with outcomes, including volunteer burnout and their partners' support for the volunteer work role, through the effects of WFC. These results add to research using theoretical models of paid work processes to better understand the problems faced by volunteer workers, and identify specific antecedents and outcomes of WFC in the volunteer emergency services. Implications for future research and organisations reliant on volunteer workers are discussed.     

Remuneration disparities in Oceania: Papua New Guinea and Solomon Islands

This paper explores the impact of remuneration differences on workers in the Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea. In these countries remunerative differences are linked to government policy (in Papua New Guinea) and job contracts (in the Solomon Islands), and have impacted on industrial relations in both settings (strike action). A total of N = 350 professionals (n = 60 expatriates) from 54 organizations in aid, government, higher education and industry (mean response rate = 36%) responded to an organizational survey form. Remuneration ratios between international and local respondents based on the World Bank's index of purchasing power parity approached 9:1. In both sites staff compared pay and benefits (remuneration) packages: Internationally remunerated staff rated their ability higher than their local counterparts did; locally remunerated groups reported more injustice in remuneration, were more demotivated by the gaps, and were more likely to be thinking about leaving the organization. In-country workshops of N = 40 largely local stakeholders from aid and community organizations plus government ministries considered the survey's findings and recommended: in Solomon Islands, (a) introducing a policy of localization, (b) establishing a remuneration commission (already existent in Papua New Guinea), and (c) reducing the remunerative gap; in Papua New Guinea, (d) reversing the post-Independence "dual pay system" (currently official policy), (e) instituting pay-for-performance, and (f) ensuring the existent localization policy is applied to recruitment, selection, and staff career planning and management.     

Evolution and relationship maintenance: Fertility cues lead committed men to devalue relationship alternatives

An evolutionary perspective provides a conceptual framework with which to study adaptive processes that facilitate the maintenance of long-term relationships. One common relationship threat people face involves exposure to tempting relationship alternatives. Desirable relationship alternatives can threaten people's relationship commitment and, consequently, evoke relationship maintenance processes designed to protect people's relationship esteem. The current research examined whether cues of female ovulation–an important reproductive variable–evokes relationship maintenance processes in committed men. Men rated the attractiveness of a normally cycling relationship alternative at various points in her menstrual cycle. Unlike single men, who rated the woman as especially attractive when she was highly fertile, committed men exhibited the opposite pattern, rating her as less attractive during her period of peak fertility. This research illustrates the utility of integrating theories of relationship maintenance with evolutionary psychological theories of mating.     

都市女性消费心理与行为

探讨女性消费心理与行为的特点,揭示女性消费的热点和趋势。结果表明：（1）都市女性消费具有时尚、理性、注重健康、品牌忠诚度高、注重心理享受等特点;（2）其消费热点和趋势主要体现在：网络消费渐成时尚;发展类消费日益攀升;时尚、品质、品位消费成为亮点;消费时尚的全球化趋势;（3）企业与商家在商业行为中若能合理利用现代都市女性消费的心理特点与规律,合理调整营销策略,必能赢得市场。     

Terminated Seed: Death,Proprietary Kinship and the Production of (Bio)Wealth

What is mental disorder and how can it be identified? These are complex and multifaceted questions, given the multiple ambiguities that centre on the psychopathological concepts employed within contemporary psychiatry and psychology. Yet, scientists investigating mental disorders must successfully resolve these uncertainties if research is to continue. For neuroscientists studying the contested conditions antisocial personality disorder and psychopathy, psychiatric and psychological classifications and concepts are used to substantiate one another. This co-produces epistemological and ontological un/certainties, without wholly resolving philosophical and methodological questions regarding what mental disorders are and how they can be recognised. Indeed, these ambiguities are rendered (relatively) unimportant. This kind of practical uncertainty work is thus an important aspect of the investigative process, performing an essential role in the continuation of scientific knowledge production, the legitimation of professional orientations, and the validation of psychopathological concepts.     

The Spirit(s) of Science: Paradoxical Positivism as Religious Discourse among Spiritualists

This article examines a narrative dilemma that popular texts on evolution face. On the one hand, popular science tends to privilege linear and culturally familiar narrative structures, as previous studies of popularization have often emphasized. On the other hand, however, the Darwinian idea of natural selection resists linear narration, as narrative theorist H. Porter Abbott has argued. This resistance arises from the fact that evolution by natural selection lacks proper narrative entities and narrative events and that it relies on two parallel narrative levels, the levels of species and organism. This paper explores how two popular science books on evolution negotiate this narrative dilemma by introducing a third narrative level. Both texts appropriate characteristics from the narrative levels of species and organism and project them on molecular and minute scales by portraying evolution as a micro-narrative that takes place in chromosomes, genes, cells and microscopic details of human organs. While this textual strategy produces a coherent and compelling narrative that for the most part succeeds in masking the structural gap between the narrative levels of species and organism, it also risks naturalizing cultural imagery. In particular, this micro-narrative tends to represent popular gender ideologies as biological truths embedded in molecular processes within our bodies.     

Future of counseling psychology research

The author offers a critique on current counseling psychology research from her perspective as a US counseling psychology researcher and editor. She notes that unless something happens to change the trajectory, future US counseling psychology research will be open to the same criticisms. She summarizes counseling psychology values and argues that counseling psychology research reflects those values. She then identifies five ways that counseling psychology could be different in the future by: building theory-based research, embracing diversity of populations, research questions and methodologies, informing (and being informed) by other psychological disciplines, and informing policy and practice.     

Right and Wrong Reasons in Folk‐Psychological Explanation

Abstract

Davidson argued that the fact we can have a reason for acting, and yet not be the reason why we act, requires explanation of action in terms of the agent's reasons to be causal. The present paper agrees with Dickenson (Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 2007) in taking this argument to be an inference to the best explanation. However, its target phenomenon is the very existence of a case in which an agent has more than one reason, but acts exclusively becaue of one reason. Folk psychology appears to allow for this phenomenon. However, appreciation of ‘rationalization’ as a form of contrastive explanation reveals the existence of the Davidsonian possibility to the problematic. Claims that ‘I did it because of R₁, not because of R₂’ are entertained in folk psychology, and may be sincere or insincere. But as reports of conscious practical reasoning, even when sincere, they are not authoritative about the mechanism of motivation.     

Growing Up with Child Sexual Abuse in an Experimental Commune: Making Sense of Narrative Variation

The legitimacy of adult's accounts of child sexual abuse depends on the consistency of the story they tell about this experience. But there are a variety of influences that conspire to create dynamic variation in retrospective accounts of child sexual abuse. In a study of an experimental New Zealand commune called Centrepoint, participants showed considerable variation in accounting for the child sexual abuse that was known to have occurred there. We used a narrative methodology to show the variation between stories that highlighted abuse and suffering and others that represented an idyllic childhood within which sex between children and adults was normalised. There was also considerable variation within individual participant's accounts. The variation within and between accounts was shaped by features such exposure to contradictory experiences, different social positioning in relation to child sexual abuse, shifts in memory and interpretation over time, differences between insider and outsider perspectives on child sexual activity at the commune and alternative perspectives on victimhood. This research challenges the mythology that accounts of child sexual abuse should be expected to be clear and consistent. Instead, variation should be treated the rule rather than the exception in these accounts. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Between Minimal Self and Narrative Self: A Husserlian Analysis of Person

The distinction between minimal self and narrative self has gained ground in recent discussions of selfhood. In this article, this distinction is reassessed by analysing Zahavi and Gallagher’s account of selfhood and supplementing it with Husserl’s concept of person. I argue that Zahavi and Gallagher offer two compatible and complementary notions of self. Nevertheless, the relationship between minimal self and narrative self requires further clarification. Especially the embeddedness of self, the interplay between passivity and activity, and the problems of uniqueness and persistence are better understood with Husserl’s analysis of person and its central concepts of position-taking, habitualities, and overall style. The embeddedness of self is elucidated by outlining how person is related to its environment, to other people, and to its past. This relational notion of self is both passively constituted and actively shaped: person mediates between minimal self characterized by perspectival ownership and narrative self based on authorship.