Ambient air pollution and children’s cognitive outcomes

Population and Environment - Ambient air pollution remains a serious public health concern, with growing literature linking higher concentrations to adverse health effects among children....     

Emotion understanding and maternal sensitivity as protective factors against hostile attribution bias in anger‐prone children

The present research examined children’s anger proneness, emotion understanding, and maternal sensitivity during toddlerhood as predictors of children’s hostile attribution bias (HAB) during the later preschool years. At 2.8 years (N = 128), maternal sensitivity (e.g., child‐centered behavior) was observed during mother–child play and snack, and parents reported on children’s anger proneness. At 3.3 years, emotion understanding (i.e., ability to identify emotional expressions accurately) was measured via an interactive puppet interview. At 4.8 and 5.4 years, children's HAB was assessed via child responses to hypothetical vignettes of ambiguous peer provocations. Path models revealed that maternal sensitivity predicted fewer hostile attributions. In addition, emotion understanding and maternal sensitivity emerged as buffers against the negative effect of anger proneness on HAB. Specifically, greater anger proneness was associated with more frequent hostile attributions, but only when children had lower emotion understanding or had mothers who were less sensitive. The findings highlight the interplay between intrapersonal and interpersonal factors in early childhood that contribute to a hostile attribution bias during the preschool period.     

Who is it That Would Make Business Schools More Critical? Critical Reflections on Critical Management Studies

We suggest in this paper that whilst exploring how to make business schools more critical we must also turn a critical and reflexive lens upon ourselves, critical management thinkers. Our endeavour is outlined here as a 'reflexive journey' in which we turn upon ourselves, academics who identify as 'critical' thinkers, the theories we use to analyse others. Our focus is upon critical management education. We use three vignettes drawn from our previous research. One is of graduands from the postgraduate programmes on which two of us teach, the second an analysis of knowledge transfer programmes in which we have participated, and the third a study of the construction of academic identities. The first study shows the academic teacher may become an internalized, judgemental gaze, the second that what we see as a critical approach may be construed by our students as another 'truth' that fails to encompass the complexities of organizations and management, and the third encourages us to ask some questions about our own positions. This causes us to ask some uncomfortable questions about our own positions as critical management scholars and the ways in which we conceptualize business schools and our colleagues who work in them.     

Predicting Vaccination Intention and Benefit and Risk Perceptions: The Incorporation of Affect,Trust, and Television Influence in a Dual‐Mode Model

Major health behavior change models tend to consider health decisions as primarily resulting from a systematic appraisal of relevant beliefs, such as the perceived benefits and risks of a pharmacological intervention. Drawing on research from the disciplines of risk management, communication, and psychology, this study proposed the inclusion of a heuristic route in established theory and tested the direction of influence between heuristic and systematic process variables. Affect and social trust were included as key heuristics in the proposed dual‐mode framework of health decision making. Furthermore, exposure to health‐related coverage on television was considered potentially influential over both heuristic and systematic process variables. To test this framework, data were collected from a national probability sample of 584 adults in the United States in 2012 regarding their decision to vaccinate against a hypothetical avian flu. The results provided some support for the bidirectional influence between heuristic and systematic processing. Affect toward flu vaccination and trust in the Food and Drug Administration were found to be powerful predictors of vaccination intention, enhancing intention both directly and indirectly via certain systematic process variables. The direction of influence between perceived susceptibility and severity, on the one hand, and affect, on the other, is less clear, suggesting the need for further research. Contrary to the opinion of media critics, exposure to televised health coverage was negatively associated with the perceived risks of vaccination. Results from this study carry theoretical and practical implications, and applying this model to the acceptance of different health interventions constitutes an area for future inquiries.     

Integrating Gestalt psychotherapy into social work practice with adult oncology patients

This article will provide an examination of Gestalt psychotherapy and its application to adult cancer patients. Gestalt psychotherapy can be utilized as a psychosocial intervention targeted to meet the needs of oncology patients. The following article will examine Gestalt therapy theory and review basic principles to utilize in clinical practice. The authors will highlight the populations to which Gestalt has been applied, and additional case vignettes will demonstrate concrete ways to incorporate this theory into practice with oncology patients.     

Social media and the doping of sport surveillance

Reviewing literatures from sociology of sport, surveillance, and internet studies, we consider the processes by which social media regulate the behavior of athletes. Nowhere is this more evident than in the current regulation of anti‐doping in elite sport where athletes' social media postings have been highly critical of fellow competitors. As social media becomes increasingly blended into everyday routines, this form of surveillance extends the gaze of those who watch and increases the pressure for online disclosure while making traditional distinctions between formal and informal social control less meaningful. Contemporary social media acts as a form of social control that has become more preemptive and grassroots. When athletes internalize surveillance and disclosure as consistent with their professional norms, the power relationships that surround sport performance become increasingly difficult to discern. This article helps to illuminate the ways in which surveillance through social media have become a part of everyday routines, extends and amplifies the power of more traditional agents of surveillance, and calls for continued research into the role of contemporary social media as a surveillance practice.     

Citation analysis and discoverability: a critical challenge for disability studies

Disability is an identity, a culture/community/cause/power struggle; a rights movement demanding civil, ethical, political and social positions at tables of power, equality and social justice. This perspective forms the core of changes in the past 50 years in legal, social and political arenas that have taken place and is essential to understanding the growth, depth and nature of Disability Studies as a separate and legitimate field of inquiry. This study focuses primarily on studying the evolving literature in the core aspects of Disability Studies, using citation and text analyses to study trends in publishing patterns and the field’s impact on the wider academic enterprise. Lack of thorough indexing to key journals made traditional citation analysis impossible, leading to the use of dissertations as a means to tease out useful information on the state of Disability Studies today. The most significant finding of the study is the lack of adequate indexing of key journals in standard scholarly databases, which can only limit the potential development of both the field and its impact/influence on related disciplines and professions. The study also found the significant role that dissertations can play in tracking new research directions.