Audience Influence on EGM Gambling: The Protective Effects of Having Others Watch You Play

One component of social facilitation on gambling is the potential for an audience of people to observe the play of Electronic Gaming Machine (EGM) gamblers and influence their behaviour without participating directly in gambling themselves. An experiment was conducted with an audience of onlookers, purported to be students of research methods, taking notes while watching the participants play an EGM. Forty-three male and 82 female participants (N = 125), aged 18–79 (M = 49.2, SD = 15.6), played a laptop simulated 3-reel EGM using a $20 stake in three conditions: (1) alone, (2) watched by a simulated audience of six persons, or (3) watched by an audience of 26. Outcomes on the poker machine were rigged with a fixed sequence of five wins in the first 20 spins and indefinite losses thereafter. The results found smaller bet-sizes associated with larger audiences of onlookers, and this outcome is consistent with a hypothesized motivation to display more wins to the audience. Moreover, final payouts were greater in the audience conditions compared to the control, further suggesting that an audience may be a protective factor limiting player losses.     

Social capital and nonprofit leaders

The concept of social capital seems to be a very compatible, useful, and important one for nonprofit organizations. Nonprofits must sustain and enhance the original social capital with which they were formed and broaden it into a variety of key areas. Nonprofits and their leaders must foster social capital in order to recruit and develop board members, raise philanthropic support, develop strategic partnerships, engage in advocacy, enhance community relations, and create a shared strategic vision and mission within the organization and its employees. Nonprofit executives have a pivotal role in carrying out these functions, but they do so through relationships and networks with others. These activities are time‐consuming and demanding, and they require planning. This article provides a focused literature analysis on the concept of social capital as it applies to nonprofit management and leadership. The author views the literature with respect to definitions of social capital and the way nonprofits generate and mobilize social capital in order to achieve organizational goals. The author also cites methods for measuring social capital.     

A new test for the presence of a normal mixture distribution based on the posterior Bayes factor

We present a new test for the presence of a normal mixture distribution, based on the posterior Bayes factor of Aitkin (1991). The new test has slightly lower power than the likelihood ratio test. It does not require the computation of the MLEs of the parameters or a search for multiple maxima, but requires computations based on classification likelihood assignments of observations to mixture components.     

Intuitive Toxicology. II. Expert and Lay Judgments of Chemical Risks in Canada

This study is a replication and extension in Canada of a previous study in the United States in which toxicologists and members of the public were surveyed to determine their attitudes, beliefs, and perceptions regarding risks from chemicals. This study of "intuitive vs. scientific toxicology" was motivated by the premise that different assumptions, conceptions, and values underlie much of the discrepancy between expert and lay views of chemical risks. The results showed that Canadian toxicologists had far lower perceptions of risk and more favorable attitudes toward chemicals than did the Canadian public. The public's attitudes were quite negative and showed the same lack of dose-response sensitivity found in the earlier U.S. study. Both the public and the toxicologists lacked confidence in the value of animal studies for predicting human health risks. However, the public had great confidence in the validity of animal studies that found evidence of carcinogenicity, whereas such evidence was not considered highly predictive of human health risk by many toxicologists. Technical judgments of toxicologists were found to be associated with factors such as affiliation, gender, and worldviews. Implications of these data for risk communication are briefly discussed.     

Agricultural education: Gender identity and knowledge exchange

Women farmers are underserved in agricultural education and technical assistance. Long held social constructions of farming women as ‘farmwives’ and in some cases ‘the bookkeepers’ rather than farmers or decision-makers influence the direction of most educational programming delivered through extension programs in land-grant universities in the United States. Consequently, many women farmers generally view these spaces as hostile, rather than helpful environments. This paper uses the agricultural training framework developed by Liepins and Schick (1998) to analyze our research on developing educational programming for women farmers. We conducted five focus groups with members of the Pennsylvania Women's Agricultural Network (PA-WAgN) to better understand women farmers’ needs for education. Women farmers reported the kinds of knowledge and information they want, in what kinds of contexts, and through what means of communication. We adapt and extend the original theoretical framework developed by Liepins and Schick to incorporate the seriality of women's identities, their discourses of embodiment and the agency granted to them through social networks. Through a presentation of the results of these focus groups, we discuss both the relevance of gender to agricultural education and the importance of the network model in providing education to women farmers.     

Depression and Anger Trajectories During the Transition to Adulthood

The current study examined within‐person (transitions in living situation and parent status) and between‐persons (age, gender, parent education) predictors of trajectories of depressive and angry symptoms in 577 university graduates (ages 20 to 29) tracked for 7 years. Multilevel models determined that depressive and angry symptoms declined on average. Depressive symptoms were associated with leaving home when younger and living with parents when older. Becoming a parent was associated with increased anger, especially in mothers. These results were obtained after controlling for the effects of marriage and unemployment. Leaving home and parenthood may be turning points that are associated with shifts in trajectories of well‐being, depending on stable characteristics such as age and gender.     

Mental Illness as a Barrier to Marriage Among Unmarried Mothers

This study explores how mental illness shapes transitions to marriage among unwed mothers using augmented data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing study (N= 2,351). We estimate proportional hazard models to assess the effects of mental illness on the likelihood of marriage over a 5‐year period following a nonmarital birth. Diagnosed mental illness was obtained from the survey respondents’ prenatal medical records. We find that mothers with mental illness are about two thirds as likely as mothers without mental illness to marry, even after controlling for demographic characteristics, and that human capital, relationship quality, partner selection, and substance abuse appear to explain only a small proportion of the effect of mental illness on marriage.     

Mortality and recruitment in an urban forest (Forest Park in Portland,Oregon) between 1993 and 2003

I examined tree recruitment and mortality over a ten-year period at permanent plots in an urban forest, Forest Park, in Portland, Oregon. The density and diameter at breast height (dbh) for all trees living and dead were measured in 1993 and again in 2003. Data were analyzed using paired Student t-tests. I found significantly fewer live and significantly more dead trees in 2003 than in 1993. The increase in mortality was significant for all species of trees and for all sizes except large diameter trees. Mortality rates ranged from 0% to 67% at my sites. Recruitment was lower at all sites in 2003 with significantly fewer seedlings and saplings. The high mortality and low recruitment resulted in a net loss of trees at all sites. Loss of trees was not offset by increasing tree diameter, which suggests self-thinning is not the cause. No strong correlation with an urban to rural land use gradient was observed. The results may be related to global climate change or pollution. The high mortality of trees of all species in many diameter classes without a concomitant increase in recruitment could lead to dramatic changes in forest structure.     

Mothers' and Children's Positive Emotion: Relations and Trajectories across Four Years

The goals of this study were to examine the relations between and trajectories of mothers' and children's social positive expressivity (PE). Mothers' and children's PE were observed annually for four years beginning when children were approximately 18 months old (N = 247; 110 girls). Based on correlations, there was evidence of rank‐order stability in children's and mothers' PE. Based on growth curve analyses, mothers' and children's PE followed curvilinear trajectories; thus, mean‐level instability was found. Children's PE during a free‐play interaction with their mothers increased then decreased slightly whereas mothers' affect during the same task decreased then stabilized. Children's PE during a joy‐inducing situation (i.e., bubbles) with an experimenter slightly decreased and then increased. In panel models, there was no evidence of prediction over time across children's and mothers' PE when taking stability into account. These unique trajectories and relations provide insight into the developmental pattern of young children's and their mothers' PE elicited within social contexts.     

Mother–Adolescent Conflict: Stability,Change, and Relations with Externalizing and Internalizing Behavior Problems

Stability and change in mother–adolescent conflict reactions (CRs) and the prediction of CRs from adolescents' earlier behavior problems (and vice versa) were examined with 131 mothers and their adolescents (63 boys). Dyads engaged in a 6‐min conflict discussion twice, 2 years apart [M age was 13 at Time 1 (T1)]. Non‐verbal expressive and verbal CRs during the conflict discussion were coded. Mothers, fathers, and teachers reported on adolescents' problem behaviors. There was inter‐individual (rank‐order) stability for adolescents' CRs whereas mothers' reactions were less stable. Mean levels of mothers' negativity, anger, and positive reactions and adolescents' negativity declined with time. Mothers’ CRs, more often than adolescents’ CRs, predicted and were predicted by adolescents’ problem behaviors in zero‐order correlations. In structural equation models with the stability of the constructs accounted for, adolescents' externalizing problems at T1 predicted higher maternal anger at Time 2 (T2). Mothers' anger and positive CRs at T1 predicted fewer T2 adolescents' internalizing problems. Stability and change in CRs are discussed.