Pre-operative transgender motivations for entering policing occupations

This article examines the motivations for American, English, and Welsh transgender motivations for entering policing. Historically and empirically, policing has been documented as a social environment where binary gendered ideologies are strictly enforced and upheld. Further, scant research on transgender perceptions of the police have highlighted fear of sexual assault, fear of arrest, heightened levels of police violence, and general uncomfortableness with interactions with the police. This article argues that instead of avoiding a perceived volatile binary gendered environment, pre-transition transgender identities seek out policing due to hyper masculine expectations of the job itself. I argue that MtF (male-to-female) and FtM (female-to-male) pre-transition transgender identities seek refuge within the hyper masculine environment of policing to ease internal conflicts as a result of gender dysphoria (i.e. pre-transition distress) prior to transition. In this study, 13 transgender police officers from America, England, and Wales were interviewed about their motivations for entering policing. This study found that a majority of male-to-female (MTF) and female-to-male (FTM) transgender identities chose to enter policing due to gender distress pre-transition. This research found that pre-transition people with MtF trasngender identies chose to enter policing to combat their gender dysphoria by proving their "masculinity," and people with FtM transgender identities enter policing to foster and embrace their “masculinity.”     

RISKY CHOICE IN PIGEONS AND HUMANS: A CROSS‐SPECIES COMPARISON

Pigeon and human subjects were given repeated choices between variable and adjusting delays to token reinforcement that titrated in relation to a subject's recent choice patterns. Indifference curves were generated under two different procedures: immediate exchange, in which a token earned during each trial was exchanged immediately for access to the terminal reinforcer (food for pigeons, video clips for humans), and delayed exchange, in which tokens accumulated and were exchanged after 11 trials. The former was designed as an analogue of procedures typically used with nonhuman subjects, the latter as an analogue to procedures typically used with human participants. Under both procedure types, different variable‐delay schedules were manipulated systematically across conditions in ways that altered the reinforcer immediacy of the risky option. Under immediate‐exchange conditions, both humans and pigeons consistently preferred the variable delay, and indifference points were generally ordered in relation to relative reinforcer immediacies. Such risk sensitivity was greatly reduced under delayed‐exchange conditions. Choice and trial‐initiation response latencies varied directly with indifference points, suggesting that local analyses may provide useful ancillary measures of reinforcer value. On the whole, the results indicate that modifying procedural features brings choices of pigeons and humans into better accord, and that human—nonhuman differences on risky choice procedures reported in the literature may be at least partly a product of procedural differences.     

Measuring generalised expectancies for negative mood regulation in China: The Chinese language Negative Mood Regulation scale

Negative mood regulation expectancies (NMRE) represent people's confidence that they can alleviate their negative affect or induce a positive emotional state through thought or action. NMRE predict coping behaviour and mood outcomes for individuals under stress. Since 1990, much research documents the reliability and validity of the English language Negative Mood Regulation (NMR) scale as a measure of NMRE. The current research reports two studies developing a Chinese language translation of the NMR (NMR‐C) scale that goes beyond literal translation to be a culturally sensitive measure of NMRE in China. In Study 1, 713 college students from both a major city and a rural setting in China were surveyed. Data support the resulting 32‐item NMR‐C's reliability (alpha = .88) and validity. The NMR‐C showed both direct and indirect links to depression and anxiety; coping mediated the indirect effect. In Study 2, 331 prison police officers in three Chinese provinces participated. NMRE buffered the effect of high role pressure, moderating the relationship between prison police role stress and job engagement. Results of the two studies support the reliability and validity of the Chinese language NMR scale and parallel results found with measures of NMRE in the West and in other Asian countries.     

Alleviating inflation of conditional predictions

Previous studies indicated that conditional predictions—the assessed probability that a certain outcome will occur given a certain condition—tend to be markedly inflated. Five experiments tested the effects of manipulations that were expected to alleviate this inflation by inducing participants to engage in analytic processing. Rewarding participants for accurate predictions proved ineffective. A training procedure in which participants assessed the likelihood of each of several outcomes before assessing the probability of a target outcome was partly effective in reducing overestimation. Most effective was the requirement to work in dyads and to come to an agreement about the assessed likelihood. Working in dyads helped alleviate prediction inflation even after participants made their individual predictions alone, and its debiasing effect also transferred to the estimates that were made individually on a new set of stimuli. The results were discussed in terms of the factors that make prediction inflation resistant to change.     

Helping Children and Caregivers Cope with Repeated Invasive Procedures: How Are We Doing?

This paper discusses recent developments in the medical and psychological management of child behavioral distress during invasive (i.e., needle stick) procedures for diagnosis and treatment of chronic pediatric disorders. Along with a review of relevant studies from the medical, pediatric psychology and behavior analysis literatures, representative data are presented from recent research on pediatric procedural pain management. The impact of increasing use of implanted subcutaneous intravenous catheters (ports) and decreased reliance on intravenous cannulation is discussed. Similarly, the effects (and limitations) of more frequent use of topical anesthesia to prepare needle sites also are presented. The continuing need for adjunctive, nonpharmacological (i.e., cognitive and behavioral) interventions for procedural pain is emphasized, and recent studies on distraction and counter-conditioning-based treatments are described. Future research is encouraged on (1) behavioral interventions in relation to day-to-day contextual variables that modulate treatment effects and (2) the development of efficient screening measures to identify children and families who are least likely to cope effectively with repeated procedures, allowing them to be given greater priority for allocation of limited resources for psychosocial intervention.     

Self-construal level and voice procedures: The individual self as psychological basis for procedural fairness effects

In the current article, we investigate the influence of self-construal level on procedural fairness effects, that is, the finding that fair versus unfair procedures influence people’s evaluations of their relation with decision-making authorities. In two experiments, we manipulated self-construal level by activating the individual self (“I”) or the social self (“We”), and we induced a control condition. Furthermore, we manipulated procedural fairness by granting versus denying participants an opportunity to voice their opinion in a decision-making process. Results consistently revealed stronger procedural fairness effects if the individual self is activated than if the social self is activated. It is concluded that sometimes the individual self, rather than the social self, constitutes the psychological basis for procedural fairness effects.     

A Loop-Free Decision Procedure for Modal Propositional Logics K4, S4 and S5

The aim of this paper is to present a loop-free decision procedure for modal propositional logics K4, S4 and S5. We prove that the procedure terminates and that it is sound and complete. The procedure is based on the method of Socratic proofs for modal logics, which is grounded in the logic of questions IEL.     

Effects of active student response during error correction on the acquisition, maintenance, and generalization of science vocabulary by elementary students: A systematic replication

We compared active student response (ASR) error correction and no-response (NR) error correction while teaching science terms to 5 elementary students. When a student erred on ASR terms, the teacher modeled the definition and the student repeated it. When a student erred on NR terms, the teacher modeled the definition while the student looked at the vocabulary card. ASR error correction was superior on each of the study's seven dependent variables.     

The effects of self-regulation training on the academic productivity of secondary students with learning problems

Four self-regulation skills were taught in a series of student-teacher conferences to eight learning disabled (LD) and three non-disabled (NLD) adolescents in an alternative high school. All participants had a prior history of school failure and low lesson-completion rates. The skills taught were behavior contracting, self-recording, self-monitoring, and self-reinforcement. Self-instructional materials in reading, writing, and math were used as the curriculum, and the dependent variables in the study were the number of lessons completed per student per day in the three academic areas. Multiple-baseline designs across students and across academic areas were employed to assess the effects of the self-regulation training and the students' application of the self-regulation skills on lesson completion. Results indicate that all participating LD and NLD students substantially increased their rate of lesson completion after the intervention. These increases occurred in the academic areas targeted by the students for the application of the self-regulation skills. Thus, self-regulation interventions hold promise for bringing at-risk students into contact with the school curriculum.     

School pupils' perceptions of the police that visit schools: Not all police are ‘pigs’

This paper presents data concerning young people's perceptions of the police taking part in a police—schools liaison programme. Eighty-one 14-year-old school pupils took part in 28 semi-structured group discussions concerning their perceptions of the ‘typicality’ of police officers working in their schools. Pupils clearly differentiated between these and those ‘on the street’. Central to this differentiation was the issue of police power; the perceived atypicality of the police in schools was intimately bound up with pupils' perceptions of the qualitatively different social relations that obtain between young people and the police ‘in the school’ and ‘on the street’. The implications of these data for the literatures concerning the ‘contact hypothesis’ and police—schools liaison are discussed.