Encounters at the Religious Edge: Variation in Religious Expression Across Interfaith Advocacy and Social Movement Settings

In a time of increasing religious diversity, interfaith political coalitions have become important settings for interreligious interaction, but little research has explored the types of religious expression that are generated therein. Prevailing theories in the sociology of religion indicate that interaction with religious others results in dilution of traditional religious commitments or production of stronger boundaries. But emerging perspectives in cultural sociology shift attention from individual religious commitments to the ways in which settings shape different styles of religious expression. Insights about edge spaces drawn from urban theory suggest that religiously diverse settings can be generative of new types of religious practices. We apply these insights to the study of interfaith activism by drawing on interviews and ethnographic fieldwork with religious advocacy professionals and activists working in interfaith coalitions. Conceptualizing the sites of these interfaith encounters as edge spaces, we analyze variation in the types of religious expression that occur in interfaith settings. We find that both aggregative and integrative practices are produced, but these vary depending on the goals and structure of the setting, as well as participants’ accountability to outside religious gatekeepers.     

Do Birds of a Feather Flock Together? An Examination of Calling,Congruence, Job Design and Personality as Predictors of Job Satisfaction and Tenure

This study explored whether congruence, calling, job characteristics or personality were better predictors of job satisfaction and tenure. The sample consisted of 1968 employees across four different job roles: sales engineers (N=309), graphic designers (N=383), teachers (N=481) and clergy (N=795). Data was collected as part of a selection and development centre battery. Results found evidence of calling, with clergy reporting significantly higher levels of work satisfaction and tenure, despite the absence of some personality predictors (i.e. conscientiousness) and job characteristics (task identity, feedback). In general personality [particularly conscientiousness (+) and neuroticism (-)] along with job characteristics (variety and autonomy) were the most likely predictors of satisfaction across the different roles. No evidence could be found that congruence predicted work satisfaction or tenure. Results have implications for renewed interest in the role of calling according to its original definition and question the role of congruence in determining best fit especially in the context of vocational assessments.     

Peer Aggression by Secondary School Learners in a South African School Setting: Effects of Race,Ethnicity, and Gender

This study reports the experience of aggression by secondary school learners attending a South African school. There were 14 participants ranging in age from 16 to 19 years (Gender: 6 young women and 8 young men; Ethnicity: 7 Black; 3 Coloured; 2 Indian and 2 White). Data were collected using open ended interviews and analysed using Tesch's (1990) thematic panning method. The findings suggest these learners have little understanding or appreciation of diversity in their multicultural schools. Consequently, they experience negative interpersonal relationships with peers and teachers. The accompanying aggression they experience and display has racial and gender overtones that are shaped by the violence in their communities.     

Teaching Community Psychology into Obscurity: A Reflection on Community Psychology in South Africa

The terms “community” and “community psychology” need to be examined within the context of human diversity in order to understand the apparent marginalisation of community psychology in South Africa. Community psychology might be marginalized as the term “community” tends to be associated with black, poor individuals. Current teaching practices in community psychology in South Africa may unwittingly reinforce these stereotypes by having predominantly junior, black and female staff teach community psychology, by generally introducing community psychology at post-graduate level only, and by making community psychology courses predominantly elective. These common teaching practices might contribute to producing raced, gendered and classed student perceptions of community psychology which would devalue psychological activity in communities as less important than individual psychotherapeutic practice in middle class communities. South African psychology would be better able adequately prepare psychologists for public mental health service with a more thoughtful infusion of community psychology teaching into most graduate programmes. Some of the ways in which our teaching can challenge our own and others' views about community psychology in local and international perspectives are discussed.     

On the advantages of word frequency and contextual diversity measures extracted from subtitles: The case of Portuguese

We examined the potential advantage of the lexical databases using subtitles and present SUBTLEX-PT, a new lexical database for 132,710 Portuguese words obtained from a 78 million corpus based on film and television series subtitles, offering word frequency and contextual diversity measures. Additionally we validated SUBTLEX-PT with a lexical decision study involving 1920 Portuguese words (and 1920 nonwords) with different lengths in letters (M?=?6.89, SD?=?2.10) and syllables (M?=?2.99, SD?=?0.94). Multiple regression analyses on latency and accuracy data were conducted to compare the proportion of variance explained by the Portuguese subtitle word frequency measures with that accounted by the recent written-word frequency database (Procura-PALavras; P-PAL; Soares, Iriarte, et al., 2014 Soares, A. P., Iriarte, A., Almeida, J. J., Simões, A., Costa, A., França, P.,?… Comesaña, M. (2014). Procura-PALavras (P-PAL): Uma nova medida de frequência lexical do Português Europeu contemporâneo [Procura-PALavras (P-PAL): A new measure of word frequency for contemporary European Portuguese]. Psicologia: Reflexão e Crítica, 27, 110–123.[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]). As its international counterparts, SUBTLEX-PT explains approximately 15% more of the variance in the lexical decision performance of young adults than the P-PAL database. Moreover, in line with recent studies, contextual diversity accounted for approximately 2% more of the variance in participants' reading performance than the raw frequency counts obtained from subtitles. SUBTLEX-PT is freely available for research purposes (at http://p-pal.di.uminho.pt/about/databases).     

An Evolutionary Theory of Diversity: The Contributions of Grounded Theory and Grounded Action to Reconceptualizing and Reframing Diversity as a Complex Phenomenon

The author discusses the contributions of grounded theory and grounded action to the development of a new, and evolutionary, theoretical framework for understanding diversity as a complex phenomenon. She discusses the work of Thomas and Gregory as pioneers in expanding the conceptualization of diversity, arguing that this new understanding increases the potential for creative action in systems.     

Entropy,Visual Diversity,and Preference

The author reports relationships between subjective impressions of visual diversity or pleasure with statistical entropies of stimuli. The stimuli were 34 rows of houses that varied in color, scale, and shape, or in shape and articulation. Entropies ranged from 0.0 to 5.6 bits. Fifty-seven participants rated the stimuli on scales of pleasant/unpleasant and uniform/diverse. The relationship between rated diversity and entropy was strong and linear. The relationship between rated pleasure and entropy was either linear or asymptotic, but no evidence was found for an inverted U relationship.     

Managing personal networks: An examination of how high self-monitors achieve better job performance

Structural holes are important network structures that have positive implications for individuals' job performance. Although the emergence of structural holes is closely related to self-monitoring, little is known about how chameleon-like high self-monitors manage to occupy brokerage positions. We posited that leader–member exchange (LMX) quality and network diversity might serve as two important mediating paths through which self-monitoring links to structural holes and sequential job performance. Using structural equation modelling to analyse 10 department networks, we found that high self-monitors were more likely to build high-quality LMX relationships and diversified co-worker networks, which helped to enhance structural holes and job performance. Theoretical contributions and managerial implications are discussed.     

Race/ethnicity and sex in U.S. occupations, 1970–2010: Implications for research,practice, and policy

We used census data on the civilian non-institutional adult population to analyze trends in labor force participation by race/ethnicity and sex in U.S. occupations from 1970 to 2010 in decennial periods. We examined these data for the main effects and interactions of race/ethnicity and sex across the total labor market and within 35 detailed occupations. Results from a log-linear analysis revealed that, as a whole (across race/ethnicity), more women participated in the labor force from 1970 to 2010. The proportions of working racial/ethnic minorities to both the population and the people in the labor force increased across all decades except for Black men. Although White (Caucasian) men continuously comprised the largest racial/ethnic–sex group working across five decades in absolute numbers, their percentage of the total working population declined from 1970 (54%) to 2010 (37%). In our analyses of 35 occupations, significant sex differences within racial/ethnic groups emerged. Overall, with some exceptions, Asian men and women and White women were more likely to be absorbed into occupations typically associated with professional status whereas Black, Hispanic, and American Indian men and women were more likely to be absorbed into occupations typically associated with low skill, low wages, and low status. Implications for the role of psychologists in future research, practice, and policy are discussed.     

Articulatory coding and phonological judgements on written words and pictures: The role of the phonological output buffer

Abstract

The ability of Italian subjects to make phonological judgements was investigated in three experiments. The judgements comprised initial sound similarity and stress assignment on pain of both written words and pictures. Stress assignment on both words and pictures as well as initial sound similarity on pictures required the activation of phonological lexical representations, but this was not necessarily the case for initial sound similarity judgements on word pairs. The first study assessed the effects of concurrent articulatory suppression on the judgements. Experiment 2 used a concomitant task (chewing), which shares with suppression the use of articulatory components but does not involve speech programming and production. The third experiment investigated the effects of unattended speech on the phonological judgements. The results of these three experiments showed that articulatory suppression had a significant disrupting effect on accuracy in all four conditions, while neither articulatory non-speech (chewing) or unattended auditory speech had any effect on the subjects' performance. The results suggest that these phonological judgements involve the operation of an articulatory speech output component, which is not implemented peripherally and does not require the involvement of a non-articulatory input system.