Boys Just Don’t! Gender Stereotyping and Sanctioning of Counter-Stereotypical Behavior in Preschoolers

Sex Roles - Although children start to adopt gender stereotypes by the age of three, there is less evidence about how early they start to sanction other children’s counter-stereotypical...     

Pragmatic Narratives of Hysterectomy Among Australian Women

Drawing on a qualitative study based on in-depth interviews with 30 rural and urban Australian women, we analyze their experiences of a hysterectomy for conditions other than cancer. Women were recruited via advertisements in community newspapers and the network sampling technique. The study aimed to identify the personal, social and medical factors that influenced their decision to undergo surgery and on their understandings of self following this procedure. Three common themes emerged: a negative response to a hysterectomy, ambivalence about it and a perceiving it as having a positive impact on the woman’s self. The latter pattern predominated, indicating that contrary to the medical rhetoric, women’s own accounts are different and relevant when counseling women about a hysterectomy.     

Just an anger synonym? Moral context influences predictors of disgust word use

Are verbal reports of disgust in moral situations specific indicators of the concept of disgust, or are they used metaphorically to refer to anger? In this experiment, participants read scenarios describing a violation of a norm either about the use of the body (bodily moral) or about harm and rights (socio-moral). They then expressed disgust and anger on verbal scales, and through facial expression endorsement measures. The use of disgust words in the socio-moral condition was largely predicted by anger words and only secondarily by disgust faces, whereas in the bodily moral condition the use of disgust words was predicted to a similar extent by disgust faces and anger words. Angry faces, however, never predicted disgust words independently of anger words. These results support a middle-ground position in which disgust words concerning socio-moral violations are not entirely a metaphor for anger, but bear some relationship to other representations of disgust. In the case of socio-moral violations, however, the use of disgust language is more strongly related to anger language, and less strongly to facial representations of disgust than in the case of bodily moral violations.     

Social class and wellbeing among staff and students in higher education settings: Mapping the problem and exploring underlying mechanisms

Within Higher Education (HE), staff and students from lower social class backgrounds often experience poorer wellbeing than their higher social class counterparts. Previous research conducted outside educational contexts has linked social class differences in wellbeing with differences in the extent to which low and high social class individuals feel respected (i.e., status), in control (i.e., autonomy), and connected with others (i.e., inclusion). However, to our knowledge, there has been no research that has investigated these psychosocial needs within HE settings. Furthermore, inclusion, status and autonomy are correlated, yet little is known about how these psychosocial needs contribute to wellbeing simultaneously, and independently, of one another. To fill these gaps, we report the results of two studies; firstly with HE students (Study 1; N = 305), and secondly with HE staff (Study 2; N = 261). Consistently across studies, reports of poor wellbeing were relatively common and more than twice as prevalent amongst lower social class staff and students compared to higher social class staff and students. Inclusion, status and autonomy each made a unique contribution and accounted for the relationship between social class and wellbeing (fully amongst students, and partially amongst staff members). These relationships held across various operationalizations of social class and when examining a range of facets of wellbeing. Social class along with inclusion, status and autonomy explained a substantial 40% of the variance in wellbeing. The present research contributes to the literature exploring how social class intersects with psychosocial needs to impact the wellbeing of staff and students within HE.     

Branding the brain: A critical review and outlook

The application of neuroscience to marketing, and in particular to the consumer psychology of brands, has gained popularity over the past decade in the academic and the corporate world. In this paper, we provide an overview of the current and previous research in this area and explain why researchers and practitioners alike are excited about applying neuroscience to the consumer psychology of brands. We identify critical issues of past research and discuss how to address these issues in future research. We conclude with our vision of the future potential of research at the intersection of neuroscience and consumer psychology.     

The Distribution of the Product Explains Normal Theory Mediation Confidence Interval Estimation

The distribution of the product has several useful applications. One of these applications is its use to form confidence intervals for the indirect effect as the product of 2 regression coefficients. The purpose of this article is to investigate how the moments of the distribution of the product explain normal theory mediation confidence interval coverage and imbalance. Values of the critical ratio for each random variable are used to demonstrate how the moments of the distribution of the product change across values of the critical ratio observed in research studies. Results of the simulation study showed that as skewness in absolute value increases, coverage decreases. And as skewness in absolute value and kurtosis increases, imbalance increases. The difference between testing the significance of the indirect effect using the normal theory versus the asymmetric distribution of the product is further illustrated with a real data example. This article is the first study to show the direct link between the distribution of the product and indirect effect confidence intervals and clarifies the results of previous simulation studies by showing why normal theory confidence intervals for indirect effects are often less accurate than those obtained from the asymmetric distribution of the product or from resampling methods.     

Personal Construct Psychology in Preservice Teacher Education: The Path Toward Reflexivity

In times of rapid changes, it is necessary to prepare teachers to be agents of education reform and thus educate them for reflective practice. However, prospective teachers in Serbia rarely have the opportunity to reflect on personal constructs of the teaching profession and their own practice. With the aim of supporting prospective teachers to become reflective practitioners and persons-as-scientists, we organized “alternative lectures” as part of the compulsory study course for future teachers. Within four encounters with four groups of 8 to 10 student teachers, we applied three techniques, developed within frames of personal construct psychology. Modifications of the technique “river of experience,” Career Rivers, enabled student teachers to reflect on the past and reveal constructs that guided previous actions in the professional field. Two self-characterizations, one portraying them as teachers and another portraying them as specialists in a different profession (in accordance with their education), made their constructions of future jobs more permeable. Through the combination of the perceiver element grid and perceiver self grid, they were encouraged to enter the role relationship with pupils and community. Although it raised new questions, this cooperative enterprise resulted in the reduction of anxiety regarding future jobs, embedding the stance of a person-as-scientist and sowing the seeds of reflective practice.     

Social Anxiety Symptoms in Young Children: Investigating the Interplay of Theory of Mind and Expressions of Shyness

Children’s early onset of social anxiety may be associated with their social understanding, and their ability to express emotions adaptively. We examined whether social anxiety in 48-month-old children (N = 110; 54 boys) was related to: a) a lower level of theory of mind (ToM); b) a lower proclivity to express shyness in a positive way (adaptive); and c) a higher tendency to express shyness in a negative way (non-adaptive). In addition, we investigated to what extent children’s level of social anxiety was predicted by the interaction between ToM and expressions of shyness. Children’s positive and negative expressions of shyness were observed during a performance task. ToM was measured with a validated battery, and social anxiety was assessed using both parents’ reports on questionnaires. Socially anxious children had a lower level of ToM, and displayed more negative and less positive shy expressions. However, children with a lower level of ToM who expressed more positive shyness were less socially anxious. Additional results show that children who displayed shyness only in a negative manner were more socially anxious than children who expressed shyness only in a positive way and children who did not display any shyness. Moreover, children who displayed both positive and negative expressions of shyness were more socially anxious than children who displayed shyness only in a positive way. These findings highlight the importance of ToM development and socio-emotional strategies, and their interaction, on the early development of social anxiety.     

Relative visual saliency differences induce sizable bias in consumer choice

Consumers often need to make very rapid choices among multiple brands (e.g., at a supermarket shelf) that differ both in their reward value (e.g., taste) and in their visual properties (e.g., color and brightness of the packaging). Since the visual properties of stimuli are known to influence visual attention, and attention is known to influence choices, this gives rise to a potential visual saliency bias in choices. We utilize experimental design from visual neuroscience in three real food choice experiments to measure the size of the visual saliency bias and how it changes with decision speed and cognitive load. Our results show that at rapid decision speeds visual saliency influences choices more than preferences do, that the bias increases with cognitive load, and that it is particularly strong when individuals do not have strong preferences among the options.