Adapting Trauma-Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy to Treat Complex Trauma in Police Officers

Clinical Social Work Journal - Police officers are at risk of being exposed to multiple traumas throughout their careers. Compared to the general population, police officers are also at elevated...     

Online measures of looking and learning in infancy

Infants in laboratory settings look longer at events that violate their expectations, learn better about objects that behave unexpectedly, and match utterances to the objects that likely elicited them. The paradigms revealing these behaviors have become cornerstones of research on preverbal cognition. However, little is known about whether these canonical behaviors are observed outside laboratory settings. Here, we describe a series of online protocols that replicate classic laboratory findings, detailing our methods throughout. In Experiment 1a, 15-month-old infants (N = 24) looked longer at an online support event culminating in an Unexpected outcome (i.e., appearing to defy gravity) than an Expected outcome. Infants did not, however, show the same success with an online solidity event. In Experiment 1b, 15-month-old infants (N = 24) showed surprise-induced learning following online events—they were better able to learn a novel object's label when the object had behaved unexpectedly compared to when it behaved expectedly. Finally, in Experiment 2, 16-month-old infants (N = 20) who heard a valenced utterance (“Yum!”) showed preferential looking to the object most likely to have generated that utterance. Together, these results suggest that, with some adjustments, online testing is a feasible and promising approach for infant cognition research.     

Siblings as Confidants: Emotional Understanding, Relationship Warmth, and Sibling Self-Disclosure

Associations among (a) self-disclosures between early adolescent siblings, (b) emotional understanding, and (c) relationship warmth were investigated. Grade 5–6 children (M age = 11.5 years) were interviewed concerning the incidence of disclosures to closest-in-age siblings (20 = older, 20 = younger), feelings regarding disclosing (or not), and sibling relationship quality. Warmth was measured with the Sibling Relationship Questionnaire (Furman & Buhrmester, 1985) and emotional understanding was assessed with the Hypothetical Relationships Picture Task (adapted from Schneider, 1989, & Aquan-Assee, 1992). Hierarchical multiple regressions indicated self-disclosure was positively associated with feeling good about sharing and negatively associated with reports of not trusting or not receiving emotional support from their sibling. Sibling relationship warmth was a key characteristic associated with both emotional understanding and self-disclosure; female target children demonstrated greater emotional understanding. Warmth, but not emotional understanding, was associated with self-disclosure. Findings are discussed in light of the importance of links between affective relationships and children's social-emotional understanding.     

Politics and Power within Multinational Corporations: Mainstream Studies,Emerging Critical Approaches and Suggestions for Future Research

Given the increased public interest in the use and misuse of power in multinationals in the aftermath of the financial crisis, it is notable that power relations in multinational corporations (MNCs) have not gained enhanced attention in the academic community. What is missing so far in the study of MNCs is a systematic examination of how power and politics within MNCs have been addressed in mainstream international business (IB) and sociological research studying the MNC. This paper starts by critically reviewing these two mainstream approaches in the study of MNCs as organizations and seeking to understand the shortcomings of former research. Next, it reviews new emergent critical perspectives, which the authors call socio‐political studies of MNCs, where power and politics are addressed not just more prominently, but also differently, from a more bottom‐up and actor‐centred perspective. After reviewing this emergent stream of research, the authors propose that future studies should take a more micro‐political perspective and focus in more detail on the micro‐foundations of power relations. In the concluding section, the authors show how future studies of MNCs can learn from both critical interactionist and discursive theories when analysing organizational politics and power relations. A framework is proposed for the study of micro‐level political game‐playing in MNCs, based on a three‐dimensional framework for organizational power (episodic, rules of the game and domination), and some key research questions for future studies are suggested.     

Cultural Influences on Stigmatization of Problem Gambling: East Asian and Caucasian Canadians

Cultural influences on problem gambling stigma were examined using a between subject vignette study design. Students of East Asian (n = 64) and Caucasian (n = 50) ancestry recruited from a Canadian University rated a vignette describing either an East Asian problem gambler or a Caucasian problem gambler on a measure of attitudinal social distance. In accordance with the hypothesis, a factorial ANOVA revealed that East Asian Canadians stigmatize problem gambling more than Caucasian Canadians. Moreover, East Asian participants stigmatized the East Asian individual described in the vignette more than they did the Caucasian individual. Individuals with gambling problems were generally not perceived as being dangerous. However, participants who perceived problem gambling as a dangerous condition wanted more social distance than those who did not perceive individuals with a gambling problem as dangerous.     

Caste,purity, and female dress in IT India: Embodied norm violation as reflexive ethnographic practice

This article proposes the methodology of embodied norm violation for overcoming the dichotomy between cognitive reflexivity and embodied ethnographic practice. The methodology is derived from the author's own embodied experiences as a female Indo-German ethnographer in the field of IT India. For exemplifying the methodology and its potential, this article focusses on two field-related phenomena, namely adhering to a vegetarian diet and dressing the female body. It uses them to gather insights on embodied purity and caste in IT India and discusses implications with regard to the political body (Foucault), the social body (Bourdieu), and the individual body (Merleau-Ponty). The theoretical contribution lies in suggesting embodied norm violation as a reflexive research methodology which delivers organizational insights beyond text, discourse, and cognition. On the empirical level, embodied norm violation enabled the researcher to uncover the pre-reflexive and gendered dimension of IT India as a neocolonial, modernist, and male project.     

THE MARRIED WIDOW: MARRIAGE PENALTIES MATTER!

Marriage penalties are a controversial feature of many government policies. Empirical evidence of their behavioral effects is quite mixed, which is surprising because economic theory predicts that they should have an impact on the headship decision. We investigate the removal of marriage penalties from the surviving spouse pensions of the Canadian public pension system in the 1980s. These reforms provide a simple and transparent source of identification. Our results indicate that marriage penalties can have large and persistent effects on marriage decisions. We also present evidence suggesting that it is individuals with characteristics correlated with greater wealth who respond to the penalties. (JEL: J1, H2)     

Managerial Risk‐taking in International Acquisitions in the Brewery Industry: Institutional and Ownership Influences Compared

This paper deals with the role that institutional differences play in managerial risk‐taking when firms engage in international acquisitions. It is assumed that multinational corporations (MNCs) have different interests and capabilities when dealing with international acquisition, which in the authors’ view are significantly shaped by specific home country institutional influences. This study concerns the question of how different forms of ownership – concentrated (e.g. family and bank based) and dispersed (stock market based) – influence risk‐taking and managerial decision‐making in large international acquisitions. Comparing a total of 12 large acquisitions of four leading MNCs in the global brewery industry, the paper shows that mutually reinforcing influences of country of origin (coordinated vs liberal market economies) and ownership (family ownership vs stock market ownership) lead to different risk profiles and managerial risk‐taking with regard to international acquisitions.     

Random projections for Bayesian regression

This article deals with random projections applied as a data reduction technique for Bayesian regression analysis. We show sufficient conditions under which the entire d-dimensional distribution is approximately preserved under random projections by reducing the number of data points from n to \(k\in O({\text {poly}}(d/\varepsilon ))\) in the case \(n\gg d\). Under mild assumptions, we prove that evaluating a Gaussian likelihood function based on the projected data instead of the original data yields a \((1+O(\varepsilon ))\)-approximation in terms of the \(\ell _2\) Wasserstein distance. Our main result shows that the posterior distribution of Bayesian linear regression is approximated up to a small error depending on only an \(\varepsilon \)-fraction of its defining parameters. This holds when using arbitrary Gaussian priors or the degenerate case of uniform distributions over \(\mathbb {R}^d\) for \(\beta \). Our empirical evaluations involve different simulated settings of Bayesian linear regression. Our experiments underline that the proposed method is able to recover the regression model up to small error while considerably reducing the total running time.