Relationship of Parental Marital Dissolution and Sex to Selected Mental Health and Self-Concept Indicators in a Sample of Black University Freshmen

This study sought to examine the relationship between parental divorce/separation and selected variables in a university sample of 900 Black freshmen students. Subjects of divorced/separated parents were compared to subjects from intact homes, on a number of indicators of self-concept and mental health. Comparisons were also made between male and female subjects whose parents were divorced or separated. Tests of significance revealed significant differences between the sexes on two indicators of self-concept and two indicators of mental health. It was concluded that negative effects of divorce or separation for Black males and females may vary along specific dimensions which may be masked when these subjects are combined and compared with subjects from intact homes.     

Visual Access and Attention in Two‐Year‐Olds' Event Reasoning and Object Search

Several recent studies have revealed substantial limitations in 2‐year‐olds' ability to search accurately for objects that have undergone unseen movement, even along highly constrained paths. In many of these studies, children observed a ball as it rolled down a track and behind an occluding panel that contained 4 doors. The track had a barrier that was partly visible and could be placed in locations corresponding to the doors. When the ball came to a rest against the barrier and behind the occluder, the child's task was to find the ball by opening the correct door. The search accuracy of 2‐year‐olds has not differed from chance across several variations of this task. This research was conducted to identify the source of 2‐year‐olds' limitation in this domain. Children were granted a full view of the event before the ball was occluded with a door panel. Children's performance was better under this condition, but was still not systematically accurate unless their gaze remained locked onto the correct location. Two‐year‐olds' weak performance in these search tasks appears to be more a consequence of limitations in spatial integration than in their representation of unseen movement.     

Opening the "Black Box' of Software The micro-foundations of informational technologies, practices and environments

The technical and production structures of informational development, the mechanisms that translate information into new products and power, remain opaque. Without defining these micro-foundational patterns, simple questions - what is information, how is it produced, is this production structure significantly unique - remain unanswered, limiting analysis of informational development generally, and evaluation of higher-level "information' theories specifically. Opening the "black box' of software outlines these production practices in one of the central industries of the coming decades, helping explain its social and economic impact and locating its evolution within broader global economic patterns. Software is a unique informational practice that draws on socially structured domain-knowledge as its central resource. This clarifies the importance of information and design in an informational environment, as well as signalling the impact of digital architectures in structuring new patterns of social interaction. These informational patterns are embedded in software both technically and through the development process, resulting in a strong cohesion between production, product and industry structures. The expansion of software process and products throughout society raises the impact of these unique patterns in shaping future economic and social structures in multiple industries, locations and institutions. Detailing the informational patterns in software opens a path to consider an ideal-typology of informational production. Such an ideal type helps define terms and hypotheses that capture both unique differences and general patterns in an informational environment, opening more rigorous analysis of the broader social transformations in the global environment. Failing to recognize these processes limits the space for social debate, policy and action around the establishment and evolution of new digital architectures at the locus of their development.     

Cotton‐Top Tamarins' (Saguinus oedipus) Expectations About Occluded Objects: A Dissociation Between Looking and Reaching Tasks

Recent work with human infants and toddlers suggests a dissociation between performance on looking and reaching tasks. Specifically, infants appear to generate accurate representations of occluded objects and their actions when tested in expectancy violation looking tasks but often fail to use this information when reaching for occluded objects. We explore a similar dissociation in cotton‐top tamarin monkeys (Saguinus oedipus). We presented adult tamarins with an event in which a piece of food rolled behind an occluder and into a solid barrier. In Experiment 1, subjects were required to retrieve the hidden food using the location of the solid barrier. Like human toddlers, adult tamarins failed to take into account solidity information when reaching for an invisibly displaced object. In Experiments 2 and 3, we presented subjects with expectancy violation looking versions of the same solidity problem using an identical apparatus and setup. We presented subjects with an event in which a piece of food appeared to roll unexpectedly through a solid barrier or stopped at the appropriate spot. Although tamarins failed to locate the food in Experiment 1, the same subjects successfully detected violations of solidity in these 2 looking studies. This performance dissociation is discussed in light of similar dissociations in human toddlers and other primate species.     

TRAVEL AS AN ANALYTIC OF EXCLUSION: BECOMING NONCITIZENS,AND THE POLITICS OF MOBILITY AFTER THE BERLIN WALL

This article examines the ways in which travel serves as an analytic to understand citizenship and the production of noncitizens after the Berlin Wall. This production is linked to a shift in the post-Wall German and European discourses and practices of asylum, which are significantly renegotiated and restricted shortly after the Wall falls. It is not only the law that changes, but also the mobility of the subjects perceived not to belong. The production of non-citizens is also related to official and unofficial articulations that attach Germanness to “Whiteness.” “Black” subjects must not only negotiate their citizenship via real histories of mobility and displacement but also because their skin itself signifies travel and adventure. In the end, I write about the space that this imagination of travel and adventure through “Black” bodies both opens up and closes off for a politics based on “Blackness.” I turn from normative accounts to the voices and bodies of “Black” subjects themselves.     

Where Infants Look Determines How They See: Eye Movements and Object Perception Performance in 3‐Month‐Olds

A fundamental question of perceptual development concerns how infants come to perceive partly hidden objects as unified across a spatial gap imposed by an occluder. Much is known about the time course of development of perceptual completion during the first several months after birth, as well as some of the visual information that supports unity perception in infants. The goal of this investigation was to examine the inputs to this process. We recorded eye movements in 3‐month‐old infants as they participated in a standard object unity task and found systematic differences in scanning patterns between those infants whose post‐habituation preferences were indicative of unity perception versus those infants who did not perceive unity. Perceivers, relative to nonperceivers, scanned more reliably in the vicinity of the visible rod parts and scanned more frequently across the range of rod motion. These results suggest that emerging object concepts are tied closely to available visual information in the environment, and the process of information pickup.     

Body Structure Perception in Infancy

Structural cues, such as the relative size and arrangement of parts, are key aspects of adults' representation of human bodies, and they are used to derive significant social information such as age, sex, and attractiveness. Prior studies have not clearly addressed young infants' sensitivity to these body characteristics. In the current experiments, 3.5‐month‐olds exhibited a preference between images of intact bodies versus those with parts in wrong locations. Infants also discriminated between intact bodies and those with distorted part proportions. In both cases, infants discriminated when images were presented upright but not when they were inverted. These results indicate that infants are sensitive to the arrangement and size of human body parts at least by 3.5 months of age. Thus, contrary to some prior reports, body representation early in life is developed enough to include structural information.     

AIDS,travel and migration: legal and human rights aspects

This article discusses the legal and human rights aspects of AIDS, travel, and migration in Africa. Restrictions upon migration and travel in the context of HIV/AIDS have directed attention on the jeopardy of free international movement and the need to uphold it. International travel and migration have been blamed for introducing HIV and restrictions imposed to prevent the import of such disease. Contemporary legal and administrative barriers to free movement of people across national borders are similar to the physical barriers imposed to prevent the spread of diseases in past centuries. However, physical barriers failed to prevent the international spread of diseases and legal and administrative barriers have been proven ineffective. Meanwhile, responses to HIV/AIDS set patterns for other health-related issues and to affect the entire legal framework of international travel and migration. Based on previous studies, data on migratory flows and numbers of travelers and migrants are scarce in Africa. Migrants represent more or less 10% of the population of sub-Saharan Africa or 35 million persons, including some 60 million refugees.     

Getting Out and About: The Relationship Between Urban Form and Senior Travel Patterns

As the overall U.S. population expands outward from the central city and core suburbs and as people age in place, more seniors will reside in suburban and exurban locations. This research seeks to determine whether older adults who live in areas with differing urban forms experience travel pattern variations under controls for other factors related to travel. We analyzed data from a telephone survey of a random sample of seniors aged 75 years and older and we employed a unique approach for establishing the urban form of their residential settings. The results show that urban form does influence travel patterns, including the number of trips and transportation mode, and suggest that the construction of compact, mixed-use communities where today's older adults can age in place may be part of the solution to addressing the mobility needs of our aging population.     

Repairing a Spoiled Identity: An Application of Attribution Theory

Abstract

This exploratory study applies attribution concepts in the investigation of self-presentational tactics. We contend that self-attributions following failure are used by an actor not only to restore self-esteem but to mitigate negative social consequences for the self. Data for this study derive from a role-playing experiment in which subjects were asked to explain a failing academic performance. Weiner's control dimension and Kelley's covariation model are used to codify subjects' explanations of their performance. As predicted, individuals overwhelmingly attributed failure to uncontrollable causes. Further, the vast majority of the information provided by subjects about their performance consisted of claims of high distinctiveness which, according to Kelley, lead to external causal attributions. Effects of sex of actor and of influence target are investigated, and some suggestive patterns emerge. Based on this study, we suggest that the conceptual framework of attribution theory can benefit research on interpersonal tactics.     

Environmentalism: Challenging the societal consensus between labour and capital?

The conflicts between protecting the environment and pursuing conventional political objectives concerned with rising GNP, employment, etc. are increasingly influencing decision‐making processes and scientific debate. For sociology this results in a new area of research that focuses on the consequences and impacts of environmental concerns. One basic aspect of an Environmental Sociology is concerned with the re‐ordering of societal alliances. In order to do so, the article introduces some elements of a cognitive network approach. Environmentalism, advanced by collective actors such as environmental organizations, promotes alternative models to productionist politics. By doing so, these actors are challenging the alliance between labour and capital. In an empirical study of the debate on nuclear energy the paper focuses on the challenge that environmentalism has posed to the consensus between labour and capital in Sweden and Germany. The results show striking differences between both countries. Moreover, the analysis arrives at the conclusion that environmentalism may not only challenge the consensus between labour and capital but may also lead to a new cleavage within the labour movement.     

Movement strategy and performance in a high-volume order picking workstation

The design of a work station generally prescribes a global movement pattern of the operator, but also leaving some degrees of freedom regarding movement strategy. For a specific order picking work station, we studied the movement strategies, the underlying factors and its impact on performance. Eight subjects performed a task comprising, the picking and placing of an object and pressing a button in eight conditions varying in product weight, movement direction (left vs. right), and placing distance. Movements were analyzed and cycle times were obtained from video-recordings. We observed various types of strategy regarding hand use and global placing mode (reaching vs. placing). The different strategies did not show clear relationships with performance (in contrast to the various work place factors). Ergonomically spoken, the fact that the workstation allows movement variation without loss of performance, is favorable.     

Understanding the Demand for Travel: It's Not Purely 'Derived'

We contest the derived demand paradigm for travel as a behavioural absolute. To the contrary, we suggest that travel has an intrinsic positive utility and is valued for its own sake, not just as a means of reaching a destination. We argue that the same positive characteristics that lead people to engage in travel as a recreational activity in itself are likely to motivate them to engage in apparently excess travel in the context of their mandatory and maintenance activities as well. This paper explores the conceptual basis of a positive utility for travel, and presents some results from an ongoing empirical study of attitudes toward travel. In modelling distance travelled (in each of 11 categories), we found that subjective variables such as Travel Liking, the adventure-seeker Personality trait, the travel stress Attitudinal factor, and the Excess Travel indicator added considerable explanatory power to the Demographic variables traditionally used in such models. It appears that, far from being completely determined by demographically based needs, the amount of travel demanded is heavily influenced by one's attitudes toward travel. This is not only true for discretionary (entertainment) purposes, as would be expected, but for more 'mandatory' purposes such as work/school-related activities as well. We are convinced that the demand for travel arises from a fundamental human need for mobility and other subjective characteristics, as well as from the external causes typically measured. To more accurately forecast travel demand and policy response, the role of those subjective characteristics needs to be understood much better than it is at present.     

A hero's journey: young women among males in forestry education

In Norway women are grossly under-represented in all sectors of forestry industry, and recruiting women has been difficult. Are gender attitudes a barrier to recruitment? In this article the question is scrutinized in relation to young women and practical forestry. The article is based on in-depth interviews with 12 girls and 11 boys who attended comprehensive school courses in forestry in 1998/1999. The female students did not necessarily plan to work in practical forestry.The girls’ participation in the setting of forestry education has some characteristics which are best captured in the metaphor of the hero's journey: a travel in foreign country, a road of trials, some helpers, and a return as a stronger, wiser and more self-confident person. This article argues that gender attitudes were not a barrier to the girls’ recruitment to a career in practical forestry work in the future.     

Eight‐Month‐Old Infants Infer Unfulfilled Goals,Despite Ambiguous Physical Evidence

In this study, we tested whether 8‐month‐old infants could infer an actor's unfulfilled goal, despite some physical information present in the displays being inconsistent with the attempted goal. Infants saw a human hand holding a ring repeatedly approach the top of a plastic cone in an apparent failed attempt to place the ring on the cone. The hand and ring then bounced away from the top of the cone toward the floor. Thus, some information presented was relevant to the goal (the motion toward the goal, the afforded relationship between the ring and the cone, and the repeated attempt), but some of it was irrelevant to the goal (the movement away from the goal). Infants were presented with 2 test events: 1 that was consistent with all the trajectory information but inconsistent with the goal, and 1 that was consistent with the goal. Eight‐month‐olds looked longer to the trajectory‐consistent event, suggesting they were able to infer the goal despite the physical ambiguity. Infants who had not been habituated to the failed attempt or who saw a matched inanimate control did not show this pattern, suggesting that infants in the first year of life actively and selectively analyze the unfulfilled goal‐directed behavior of others.     

Insecure Attachment Predicts History of Divorce,Marriage, and Current Relationship Status

The goal of this research was to test the predictive ability of attachment styles and dysfunctional relational communication patterns to predict adults’ relationship status (i.e., single/partnered and ever-married/ever-divorced). Anxious and avoidant attachment styles and dysfunctional relational communication patterns (i.e., criticism, defensiveness, contempt, stonewalling) were predictors of relationship status in 413 adults who participated in an online survey. The results indicated that anxious and avoidant attachment styles significantly predicted both history of divorce and single versus partnered relationship status. The dysfunctional communication patterns did not explain a great deal of variance in relationship history and status above and beyond insecure attachment, although dysfunctional communication was significantly and consistently associated with insecure attachment. These results indicate that some of the individual characteristics that generate a risk for divorce might also pose a barrier to repartnering after a divorce.     

Veblen's theory applied to information specialists

This paper examines the paradoxical class situation of information specialists in the post-industrial society as both professionals and employees. It describes and analyses the ‘technocratic’ authority wielded by them and their mode of consciousness. It's assessed whether these workers function as the vanguard of a new style of democratised work or buttressed the position of managerial authority. It has been found that the subjects experience a class situation that is somewhat more empowered than the industrial or corporate models, but do not differ substantially from that of the production workers in industrial society. Their power, prestige, privilege and status essentially camouflage the subjects’ compliance to hierarchical authority. The subjects exhibit awareness of their power, but essentially they direct their energies toward task attainment and individual mobility. Lacking an orientation toward structure change, the information specialists do not appear to fit the notion of a vanguard group. From this research they have been foreseen some possibilities of changes within organisational authority as information specialists confront management with their expertise, but it's anticipated that the institutions of social domination will prevail, as we can read in some Veblen's theory.     

A comparison of male heterosexual and male homosexual patterns of sexual arousal

We examined both self‐reported and physiologically measured sexual arousal of male heterosexual and homosexual subjects to explore various parameters of sexual response in these two groups. Results clearly support previous work with these groups, demonstrating that films produce more arousal than either slides or audiotaped stimuli and that arousal to lesbian and male homosexual stimuli content were best able to discriminate heterosexual and homosexual arousal patterns for well matched groups of subjects. The previous finding that the correlation between the subjective and physiological measures is lower for male homosexual subjects than for male heterosexual subjects was replicated, but it was demonstrated that this result is a confound of the stimulus content employed. When the level of arousal, pleasantness of the stimulus, or quantity of partner preference cues was controlled, the group differences in correlation were no longer present. Finally, decreased sexual experience and information were found to predict, in both groups, lower concordance between self‐reported and physiological arousal. These results may clarify previous work which has indicated a relationship between the inaccurate tracking of physiological response and sexual dysfunction     

Return and Responsibility

Return is foremost the responsibility of the rejectee. The country where a residence permit has been sought may be of assistance (travel document, ticket) but is hereto not obliged. Countries of origin are obliged to take back their own subjects; readmission agreements may be of some help, but are no condition sine qua non . The Executive Committee of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in October 1998 indicated that it too should facilitate the return of persons not in need of international protection. Non-return does not result in access to the labour market and/or the social welfare system.