Linguistic and developmental influences on superordinate facial configuration categorization in infancy

Humans perceive emotions in terms of categories, such as “happiness,” “sadness,” and “anger.” To learn these complex conceptual emotion categories, humans must first be able to perceive regularities in expressive behaviors (e.g., facial configurations) across individuals. Recent research suggests that infants spontaneously form “basic-level” categories of facial configurations (e.g., happy vs. fear), but not “superordinate” categories of facial configurations (e.g., positive vs. negative). The current studies further explore how infant age and language impact superordinate categorization of facial configurations associated with different negative emotions. Across all experiments, infants were habituated to one person displaying facial configurations associated with anger and disgust. While 10-month-olds formed a category of person identity (Experiment 1), 14-month-olds formed a category that included negative facial configurations displayed by the same person (Experiment 2). However, neither age formed the hypothesized superordinate category of negative valence. When a verbal label (“toma”) was added to each of the habituation events (Experiment 3), 10-month-olds formed a category similar to 14-month-olds in Experiment 2. These findings intersect a larger conversation about the nature and development of children's emotion categories and highlight the importance of considering developmental processes, such as language learning and attentional/memory development, in the design and interpretation of infant categorization studies.     

A Survival Analysis of Timing of Entry into Prostitution: The Differential Impact of Race, Educational Level, and Childhood/Adolescent Risk Factors

Using survey data obtained from 309 women working in street-level prostitution in Phoenix, Arizona, this investigation examines the influence of minority status, educational level, and the experience of risk factors in an individual's childhood or adolescence on the hazard rate for age of entry into prostitution. Findings of this study show that women engaging in prostitution have limited educational backgrounds and often do not complete high school. Results indicate that both white and minority women engaging in prostitution experienced high rates of physical and sexual abuse in childhood, as well as parental substance abuse. When compared to minority women, white women are more likely to have experienced any one of these three risk factors thought to influence entry into prostitution, yet event-history analysis indicates that minority women consistently experience significantly higher hazard rates for entry into prostitution. Findings suggest the need for future research to better assess the impact of race—in the form of socioeconomic and social disadvantages associated with minority status—as it relates to entry into the sex trade.     

Relational Personality Theory and Holland's Typology Among Women: An Exploratory Investigation

Relational personality theorists propose that women have a tendency to view themselves in the context of relationships with others and to make decisions to optimize and maintain relationships. The current study explored whether relational identity may underlie women's career interests as measured by Holland's typology and examined possible implications of this relationship in career settings. Measures of women's connected self and the Social dimension of Holland's typology were found to be related but separate constructs. Participants with Social interests also indicated some variation in their interest in working in collaborative environments and/or in helping roles on the job.     

Aus der Praxis: Erfolgsfaktoren der Post-Merger Integration

The article describes the internationalization process of a Facility Management company. Five key factors for success have been identified: new perspectives for employees, maintenance of independency + homogenization of structures, transparency, internationalization of management and formation of a common identity. The role of organization development in this process and future challenges for post-merger integration are depicted.     

Social accounting for nonprofits: Two models

After giving an overview of the development of social accounting, this article presents two models of social accounting for nonprofits: the community social return on investment model and the expanded value‐added statement. The discussion focuses on the process for establishing a comparative market value for nonmarket social outputs. The authors discuss these models and the comparative market value in relation to social accounting, an academic field that has evolved as part of a critique of financial accounting, especially its failure to analyze the impact of the organization on society and the natural environment. For the most part, scholars have not related social accounting to nonprofits. This article attempts to draw nonprofits into the field of social accounting. Both models address the social impact of nonprofits by including social inputs and outputs that accounting statements normally exclude.     

The Adoptee's Journey

The subject of adoption has often been mired in wishful thinking and denial. Because of the secrecy in the system, adopted children have been forced to repress their need to know about their origins; many feel invisible because an essential part of them is unacknowledged by their adoptive parents and society. The purpose of this article is to help mental health and legal professionals, as well as those in the extended community, to see what is specific about the formation of the adoptee's inner world. It introduces the concept of cumulative adoption trauma and discusses the adoptee's need to dissociate feelings of loss, grief, and anger. The struggle to form a coherent sense of self may eventually lead to the adoptee's need to search out the birth parents in order to integrate the past and the present and move on into the future.     

Wirkprinzipien handlungsorientierter Beratungs- und Trainingsmethoden

The article suggests effect principles of action-oriented methods for organizational counselling and training. It is shown that action-oriented methods use “surplus reality” (a concept developed by J. L. Moreno) as a constitutive medium in which they duplicate organizational reality by means of scenic embodiment. The authors show how action-oriented methods derive their specific potential for the depiction and reflection of work-related problems in organizational counselling, training, supervision and coaching from this surplus reality.     

Quality of life after radiation therapy: A study of 309 cancer survivors

(1) Comparison of patients with a national sample reveals no difference in income (adjusted for inflation), marital status and education level but patients, who are typically older, are more often retired or disabled. (2) Overall, perceived quality of life is nearly the same for patients and national sample; apparent differences can be readily explained by factors other than cancer or its treatment. (3) While some minor differences among patients were found as a function of their site of cancer, treatment modality, or health status, no evidence was found of significant detrimental effects due to radiation therapy or perceived quality of life. (4) Contrary to expectations of deteriorated quality of life, compared to the national baselines the patients are actually more satisfied with their lives as a whole.     

Children's Economic Roles in the Maya Family Life Cycle: Cain,Caldwell, and Chayanov Revisited

This article examines the relationship between household demographic pressure and interage transfers for a group of Maya subsistence agriculturists in Yucatán, Mexico. The authors use data from a field study conducted in 1992–93 on individual time allocation, relative productivity by age and sex, and caloric costs of activities to estimate age schedules of average consumption and production. Using these, they investigate the net costs of children to their parents and find that children have a negative net asset value up to the time they leave home. The direction of net wealth flows in this group is downward, from older to younger, and in economic terms the internal rate of return to children is highly negative up to the time they leave home. Nonetheless, children play a critically important role in the family's economic life cycle. On average, girls offset 76 percent of their consumption costs before leaving home at age 19, and boys offset 82 percent before leaving home at 22. Without the contributions from children as a group, parents would have to double or triple their work effort during part of the family life cycle if they were to raise the same number of children. By the thirteenth year of the family life cycle, children as a group produce more than half of what they consume in every year, and after the twentieth year children produce more than 80 percent of what they as a group consume. The authors also find that the elderly in the sample, ages 50 to 65, produce more than they consume. Thus while children have a negative net asset value to parents, the timing of their children's economic contribution across the family life cycle plays a key role in underwriting the cost of large families.