?Ein bisschen wie ein Au?erirdischer“: subjektive imperative und mentale Blockaden von Frauen in technisch-naturwissenschaftlichen Berufsfeldern

Women are still gravely underrepresented in technical and engineering professions. So far there is few research regarding psychological barriers and especially mental blocks of women in technical fields. This study investigates mental blocks of women that might hinder their career advancement in technical professions. To this end, a secondary analysis of 19 qualitative interviews with women from technical fields was conducted. The analysis was based on the theory of mental interference and the respective text analysis method proposed by Wagner (Gelassenheit durch Aufl?sung innerer Konflikte. Mentale Selbstregulation und Introvision. Stuttgart, Kohlhammer, 2007). The analysis shows that numerous so-called subjective imperatives could be identified that might interfere with women??s career advancement. They were grouped in three main categories: Work-life balance, gender stereotypes, and career advancement. Practical implications are discussed.     

A Collaborative Approach to Infant Research: Promoting Reproducibility,Best Practices,and Theory‐Building

The ideal of scientific progress is that we accumulate measurements and integrate these into theory, but recent discussion of replicability issues has cast doubt on whether psychological research conforms to this model. Developmental research—especially with infant participants—also has discipline‐specific replicability challenges, including small samples and limited measurement methods. Inspired by collaborative replication efforts in cognitive and social psychology, we describe a proposal for assessing and promoting replicability in infancy research: large‐scale, multi‐laboratory replication efforts aiming for a more precise understanding of key developmental phenomena. The ManyBabies project, our instantiation of this proposal, will not only help us estimate how robust and replicable these phenomena are, but also gain new theoretical insights into how they vary across ages, linguistic communities, and measurement methods. This project has the potential for a variety of positive outcomes, including less‐biased estimates of theoretically important effects, estimates of variability that can be used for later study planning, and a series of best‐practices blueprints for future infancy research.     

Visualising political thinking on the screen: a dialogue between von Trotta’s Hannah Arendt and its protagonist

This article analyses Margarethe von Trotta’s film Hannah Arendt: The Woman Who Saw Banality in Evil through its protagonist’s own writings on visual culture, visibility and invisibility in the context of political thinking. We start by clarifying Arendt’s understanding of political theory as an activity aiming to provoke thinking. We then discuss systematically the visual language of the film and offer a typology of its representations of political thinking, subdivided into a part on internalisation and one on externalisation (dialogue). We emphasise von Trotta’s reliance on a negative approach, i.e. the representation of thinking through the absence of any other activity while thinking, capitalising on the power of the invisible. However, the film and its director do not entirely succeed in engaging viewers politically. This is so because, first, the film’s lack of conceptual innovation renders difficult the emergence of subject positions on the part of viewers other than consumers of established opinion. Secondly, the film insufficiently audio-visualises the external-communicative dimension of Arendt’s political thinking: a dialogue in which viewers can participate and in the course of which what seemed to be established through political thinking gets deconstructed and subsequently re-ordered. Finally, we emphasise the importance of a cinema of thinking in our current political environment that seems to be increasingly characterised precisely by the absence of political thinking.     

How important are political interest and internal political efficacy in the prediction of political participation? Longitudinal evidence from Germany / La importancia del interés en la polític y dae la eficacia política interna en la predicción de la participación política. Datos longitudinales originados en Alemania

This study aims to disentangle the effects of interest in politics and internal political efficacy in the prediction of different political activities. The analysis examines the hypothesis that political interest is a more important precursor of electoral and unconventional political participation, and that both political interest and efficacy are required to promote participation in political parties. Using the German Longitudinal Election Study, multiple regression analyses yield that political efficacy is a strong and positive predictor of intentions to participate in party politics and unconventional political behaviour. Political interest has differential effects on voting conditional on whether respondents are surveyed before or after elections, and differential moderated effects appear for conventional and unconventional political action. The findings are discussed with respect to the importance of political interest and efficacy for citizen participation.     

Exploring the Interaction Between Volunteering Status,Paid Job Characteristics and Quality of Volunteers’ Motivation on Mental Health

The literature on the health-promoting effects of community work has primarily dealt with the population in retirement age, yet the vast majority of volunteers are people still in the workforce. The aim of this study is to observe the relationship between volunteering and health within the context of working life, considering paid work conditions and motives to volunteer as moderating variables. We conducted an online survey with a sample of Swiss workers employed in different industries. Results show that volunteers with self-determined motives (but not with controlled motives) report lower levels of stress and burnout than non-volunteers. Moreover, volunteers in general (regardless of the quality of motivation) report higher levels of work engagement and well-being. Analyses further reveal an interaction effect for burnout and stress, where the difference between self-determined volunteers and non-volunteers becomes larger with unfavorable working conditions at their paid job, hinting at potential compensatory effects. Implications for future research and the voluntary sector are discussed.