Employee Eldercare Responsibilities: Should Organizations Care?

The question "Should organizations be concerned with the eldercare responsibilities of their employees?" was addressed from several perspectives: (1) prevalence of need, (2) the relationships among eldercare responsibilities, satisfaction with eldercare arrangements, and workplace attitudes and outcomes, and (3) support for organizational eldercare programs. Our sample was predominately female and we defined eldercare responsibilities broadly; however, only 5 of 885 employees reported eldercare responsibilities. The majority relied on family arrangements and reported dissatisfaction with these arrangements. Dissatisfaction was related to interruptions at work, leaving early, and intent to quit. Eldercare-givers did not differ from other groups on job satisfaction and organizational commitment, but were absent from work significantly more often. There was strong employee support for employer-sponsored eldercare programs.     

Nondirectiveness and Its Lay Interpretations: The Effect of Counseling Style, Ethnicity and Culture on Attitudes Towards Genetic Counseling Among Jewish and Bedouin Respondents in Israel

To evaluate the effects of ethnicity, culture, and counseling style on the interpretation of nondirectiveness in genetic counseling, a questionnaire containing premarital and prenatal case vignettes in two versions (pessimistic/optimistic) was administered to 281 Jewish and 133 Bedouin respondents. The first study population was comprised of Jewish students enrolled in a university and a community college in the Negev (southern part of Israel). The second study population was comprised of Muslim-Bedouin college students from the same area. The majority of Jewish respondents interpreted the nondirective message as intended by counselors, while the majority of Bedouin respondents did not. Counseling style was found to have a statistically significant effect on the interpretation of the general role of counseling. Gender and susceptibility were not found to have a significant effect on interpretation. Group differences are analyzed through a cultural lens in which different interpretive norms can generate expectations for either nondirectiveness or directiveness.     

The Affect System: Architecture and Operating Characteristics

The affect system refers to the functional components involved in appetitive and aversive information processing. We review evidence suggesting that affect is not a unitary faculty but rather is composed of a number of distinct processes. Physical limitations constrain behavioral expressions and incline behavioral predispositions toward a bipolar (good-bad, approach-withdraw) organization, but this organization appears to be the consequence of multiple operations, including the activation of positivity (appetition) and the activation of negativity (aversion), at earlier affective processing stages. The partial segregation of positive and negative affective processing afforded evolution the opportunity to sculpt distinctive activation functions for these affective components and allows their coactivation. Coactivation, in turn, cultivates the exploration of novel environments and the pursuit of seemingly hospitable events while fostering vigilance for and rapid retreats from hostile developments.     

Political Power and Race Relations in South Africa: African Attitudes Before and After the Transition

When an oppressed majority finally gains political power, what happens to its attitudes to its erstwhile oppressor, and to its perceptions and feelings about its socioeconomic disadvantages that were established during its oppression? Longitudinal data from pre- and post-transition surveys of black South African college and high school students indicate marked reductions in perceptions of and outrage about intergroup socioeconomic inequity and deprivation relative to English-speaking and Afrikaans-speaking whites, but no change in attitudes toward these groups or toward whites in general. The findings are discussed in terms of contemporary theory and research on justice, intergroup relations, and group conflict. Some tentative implications for the prospects for a democratic political culture in South Africa are noted.     

Cancer Risk Assessment and Genetic Counseling in an Academic Medical Center: Consultands' Satisfaction, Knowledge, and Behavior in the First Year

In 1995, we formally established a multifaceted cancer genetics program of clinical services, research, and education at a general academic medical center. In the first year, 58 families, mostly physician referred, received cancer risk assessment and genetic counseling for a family and/or medical history of cancer. The primary reasons for seeking consultation were to determine their risk or their offspring's risk for developing certain cancers and to inquire about the availability of DNA testing for predisposition to breast, ovarian, or colon cancers. To assess the level of satisfaction with program services, 51 consultands (22% with a personal history of cancer) were interviewed independently by telephone 3–12 months after the session. One goal of the survey was to improve program service. Ninety percent of respondents reported that the consultation was worth their time and money. Forty-two percent stated that their anxiety related to their cancer risk had decreased following counseling and 56% indicated no change. Recall of exact numerical risk was poor and one-third could not remember hearing any risk estimate. More respondents would recommend the service to friends (90%) than to family members (75%). Overall, the service was positively received by the majority of patients.     

Alcohol-related knowledge and attitudes in people with a mild learning disability – the effects of a ‘sensible drinking’ group

Alcohol-related knowledge and attitudes in people with a mild learning disability, who were either living, or being prepared to live, in relatively independent conditions in the community, were assessed through a structured interview format. Compared with non-learning-disabled teenagers, adults and a hospitalized patient sample, alcohol-related knowledge in the people with a learning disability was found to be significantly poorer, alcohol was reported as having particularly negative effects and susceptibility to social pressure to drink alcohol was greater. A ‘sensible drinking’ group, taking a social skills and influences approach to alcohol education, was conducted with a subgroup of the individuals with a learning disability. The group format and methods, including in vivo sessions in a public house, are described. Follow-up evaluations suggested some significant positive changes in knowledge, attitudes and sensible drinking skills. It is concluded that this population, which is increasingly living, or being moved into, independent conditions in the community, is at least as vulnerable to social influences on alcohol use and abuse as are young people. As with young people, the usefulness of making available such alcohol-education programmes as described in this study, is discussed.     

Understanding public opinion relating to the establishment of community mental health facilities: implications of a discourse analytic approach

This paper demonstrates a novel approach to investigating the problem of public opposition to community mental health facilities. With the move towards community care, organizations setting up mental health facilities have encountered public opposition. It has been argued that this is due, in part, to the attitudes held by the public towards mentally ill people. A knowledge and understanding of attitudes towards this client group therefore has the potential to be of practical use to policy makers and practitioners who have a responsibility to consult on, and implement, community care for mentally ill people. The survey approaches and hypothetical situations used in previous British studies of community attitudes towards mentally ill people have, however, failed to take account of the rhetorical richness and complexity of the attitudes likely to be expressed in real‐life community care contexts. By contrast, the study reported in this paper used a discourse analytic approach to explore the views expressed about mentally ill people in a ‘hot situation’. Specifically, people's views were explored in the contexts of the arguments they used to challenge or advocate a supported accommodation project for mentally ill people in their community. This paper examines some of these arguments and discusses the theoretical implications for traditional approaches to attitude research. In conclusion, the potential practical utility of the findings is considered. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Basque attitude towards political violence: Its correlation with personality variables,other sociopolitical attitudes,and political party vote

The Basque are a strongly nationalistic European people in northern Spain and southern France with an ancient ethnic tradition and a language unrelated to any other known. Their recent history has been overshadowed by a terrorist organization perpetrating political violence within the boundaries of the Basque Country and often beyond its borders within the Spanish state. Research on the Basque, with an emphasis on the comparison of psychological characteristics (studied by the use of an instrument developed for that purpose by the author of this article and another colleague, Jesús Guerra, of the University of the Basque Country), has provided an opportunity to review attitudes towards violence within the general population, analyze different groups constituted according to differences in attitude as well as political party vote, and to compare them with regards to differences in personality. The distribution of these attitudes within the sample population, as well as some hypotheses as to their origins, are presented, discussing their possible relationship to social and psychological variables at work within Basque society. Psychopathological indicators permit an estimation of the degree of abnormality associated with the attitude towards political violence. © 1993 Wiley-Liss, Inc.     

Identity Processes and Environmental Threat: the Effects of Nationalism and Local Identity upon Perception of Beach Pollution

This study examines the importance of local and national identity processes in predicting the perception of a threat to the local environment: pollution of British beaches defined in terms of European Union (EU) regulations concerning cleanliness. Place identity and social identity theories would predict that English people would exhibit positive discrimination when evaluating both their local and national beaches and would allow ingroup preferences to influence their estimates of beach pollution. The study involved administering questionnaires to 347 English students drawn from secondary schools in six seaside resorts (three with ‘polluted’ beaches, and three with ‘unpolluted’ beaches according to the EU criteria). It was hypothesized that degree of both local and national identification would predict variance in perceived levels of pollution independently of either the EU categorization or the physical evidence of pollution available. On the whole, results confirmed this main hypothesis: subjects who were more attached to their town or their nation tended to perceive their local and national beaches as less polluted. Traditional predictors of environmental evaluation (such as socio-demographic variables, environmental concern, use of the environment) did not play an important role in predicting beach pollution perception. Denial of physical assessments of pollution was interpreted as a strategy used to cope with the threat to place identity posed by the labelling of local beaches by a powerful outgroup (the EU).     

Using the Implicit Association Test does not rule out an impact of conscious propositional knowledge on evaluative conditioning

Implicit measures such as the Implicit Association Test (IAT) have recently become popular as tools in research on evaluative conditioning. The reason is that these measures are thought to be impervious to changes in valence that are due to conscious propositional knowledge about the relation between the conditioned stimulus (CS) and the unconditioned stimulus (US). I present data that raise doubts about the validity of this assumption. In two experiments, attitudes towards CSs as measured by the IAT were in line with instructed CS-US contingencies even though the CSs and USs were never actually paired. The results therefore suggest that IAT effects can be biassed by conscious propositional knowledge.