Gender and temporal differences in identifying sources of stress

Much of the methodology in stress research focuses on stress manifestation and organismic reactions to life’s crises. In contrast, the present study sought to identify the major sources of stress and the nature of those sources. The results revealed a consistent pattern in high and low stressors throughout the 3-year period of the study, and differences only of intensity between males and females, not type of stress. Except for individuals’ temporal variations in critical events, the highest stressors for the groups were external, primarily financial and time management. Internal sources, such as personal relationships and self-absorption, were typically the lowest concerns. Everyday problems arising from current life styles seem to be significant sources of stress.     

The relationship of self and occupational concepts to the occupational preferences of adolescents

This study tested aspects of Super's self-concept theory of career development with a sample of British schoolchildren. Findings suggested that self-concepts and concepts of occupational preferences do have a role in career development, though there were some indications that the theory is more applicable to more able youngsters and to those high in self-esteem, than to others. Agreement between ideal-self-concepts and occupational preference concepts was significantly greater than that between actual-self-concepts and occupational preference concepts. This finding was interpreted as reflecting the youngsters' greater concern for the future and the possible, rather than the present and the given, and it suggested that refinements are needed in Super's theory.     

New parents at work: Jobs, families and the psychological contract

Interviews with seven women and six men who had recently returned to work after becoming first-time parents were carried out to examine experiences of the policies, practices and attitudes of their employers towards new parents, and to assess how far they felt able to discuss their circumstances and changed expectations with their managers. Findings pointed to considerable differences in the attitudes of employers to the men and women. Almost all the women had changed to part-time work, but arranging this had not been easy and some had found it difficult to come to terms with a difference in status. Many of the respondents had reservations about discussing their positions and altered expectations with their managers, and it seemed unlikely that mutually beneficial psychological contracts could be negotiated without changes in organisational cultures and policies. The findings have implications for our understanding of organisational careers and for career-planning interventions in organisations.     

Self-reflection,mood, and helpful behavior

Two pilot studies and two experiments were conducted to test for relationships between mood states, self-reflection, and helpfulness. It was hypothesized that both negative and positive feelings would increase helpful reactions. In the case of negative moods, however, helpfulness would be inhibited if the induced affect engenders self-reflection by associating the bad mood with the person's self-image in a self-referencing process. To test these predictions, female undergraduates read mood-inducing statements that were either (a) negative in content and containing the personal pronoun “I”, (b) negative but not self-referencing, (c) emotionally positive in content, (d) emotionally neutral, or (e) no statements. Afterward, they were asked to complete a questionnaire and to volunteer to participate in a future study. Findings in the first experiment confirmed the hypothesis. Women who had read negative, self-referencing statements were the least likely to comply with a helpful request. The most helpful participants were those who had previously recited the negative, but not self-referencing, and the positive statements. Neutral and control subjects displayed intermediate amounts of compliance with the helping request. Questionnaire results showed that self-reflection was responsible for decreasing the helpfulness of women when negative mood was associated with some aspect of the self. A second experiment successfully replicated the major findings of the pilot studies and the first experiment.     

Controlled attending as a function of melodic and temporal context

Melodic and rhythmic context were systematically varied in a pattern recognition task involving pairs (standard-comparison) of nine-tone auditory sequences. The experiment was designed to test the hypothesis that rhythmic context can direct attention toward or away from tones which instantiate higher order melodic rules. Three levels of melodic structure (one, two, no higher order rules) were crossed with four levels of rhythm [isochronous, dactyl (A U U), anapest (U U A), irregular]. Rhythms were designed to shift accent locations on three centrally embedded tones. Listeners were more accurate in detecting violations of higher order melodic rules when the rhythmic context induced accents on tones which instantiated these rules. Effects are discussed in terms of attentional rhythmicity.     

Vocational maturity in adulthood: Toward turning a model into a measure

It is postulated that adult vocational maturity needs to be assessed because of the changing developmental tasks encountered during the course of a career. Vocational maturity having been found to be multidimensional, existing undimensional inventories of adult vocational maturity are considered of limited although demonstrated validity. Relevant theories of adult vocational development and adjustment are reviewed. Super's proposed adult vocational maturity model is examined for the promise that it offers and for the problems that arise in developing a multidimensional measure of vocational maturity. A way of surmounting these problems is proposed as a basis for work now being undertaken.     

Handedness and stuttering: A dead horse?

A handedness questionnaire was administered to 446 stutterers and a control group. No significant male/female or stutterer/control effects were found, although both males and stutterers tended to be less right handed. The slight sex effect in handedness is consistent with previously reported studies and with cerebral structural and functional asymmetries.     

Suicide and prostitution among street youth: a qualitative analysis

This study presents the results of a qualitative analysis of the narratives of 29 street youth in which they describe their experiences with, and understanding of, suicide. A history of attempted suicide was reported by 76% of the participants and the analysis revealed themes of isolation, rejection/betrayal, lack of control, and most centrally, low self-worth as forming the basis of their experiences concerning suicide. Additionally it was found that trading sex, in which most participants had been or were currently involved, was linked with their suicidal experiences and may account for the high attempt rate. Finally, variables related to suicide were found that have not been examined previously in the literature on street youth, including loss of control, assault during prostituted sex, drug abuse as a "slow suicide," and breakups in intimate relationships.     

Implicit statistical learning is directly associated with the acquisition of syntax

This article reports on an individual differences study that investigated the role of implicit statistical learning in the acquisition of syntax in children. One hundred children ages 4 years 5 months through 6 years 11 months completed a test of implicit statistical learning, a test of explicit declarative learning, and standardized tests of verbal and nonverbal ability. They also completed a syntactic priming task, which provided a dynamic index of children's facility to detect and respond to changes in the input frequency of linguistic structure. The results showed that implicit statistical learning ability was directly associated with the long-term maintenance of the primed structure. The results constitute the first empirical demonstration of a direct association between implicit statistical learning and syntactic acquisition in children.     

Phenomenal consciousness with infallible self-representation

In this paper, I argue against the claim recently defended by Josh Weisberg that a certain version of the self-representational approach to phenomenal consciousness cannot avoid a set of problems that have plagued higher-order approaches. These problems arise specifically for theories that allow for higher-order misrepresentation or—in the domain of self-representational theories—self-misrepresentation. In response to Weisberg, I articulate a self-representational theory of phenomenal consciousness according to which it is contingently impossible for self-representations tokened in the context of a conscious mental state to misrepresent their objects. This contingent infallibility allows the theory to both acknowledge the (logical) possibility of self-misrepresentation and avoid the problems of self-misrepresentation. Expanding further on Weisberg’s work, I consider and reveal the shortcomings of three other self-representational models—put forward by Kreigel, Van Gulick, and Gennaro—in order to show that each indicates the need for this sort of infallibility. I then argue that contingent infallibility is in principle acceptable on naturalistic grounds only if we attribute (1) a neo-Fregean kind of directly referring, indexical content to self-representational mental states and (2) a certain ontological structure to the complex conscious mental states of which these indexical self-representations are a part. In these sections I draw on ideas from the work of Perry and Kaplan to articulate the context-dependent semantic structure of inner-representational states.