Paternal and Maternal Mind‐mindedness and Preschoolers' Theory of Mind: The Mediating Role of Interactional Attunement

The present investigation explored (1) fathers' contributions to children's theory of mind (ToM) development, (2) the similarity between maternal and paternal mind‐mindedness (MM) in relation to children's ToM, and (3) the relative predictive strength of two concurrently administered measures of MM (an online and an interview assessment) in relation to children's ToM. Thirty‐nine fathers, mothers, and their four‐year‐olds participated. Paternal MM was positively correlated with children's ToM performance. In addition, the two groups of parents performed similarly on both measures of MM. The findings also suggest that mothers and fathers who scored higher on the MM interview were more attuned to their children's mental processes during the online interaction measure of MM. The online measure of MM was found to mediate the relationship between the interview measure of MM and children's ToM for the maternal–child data only.     

Inter‐parent Aggression as a Precursor to Disengagement Coping in Emerging Adulthood: The Buffering Role of Friendship Competence

Using multi‐informant data drawn from a prospective study involving 184 youth, mother‐perpetrated and father‐perpetrated partner aggression during early adolescence (the age of 13) was examined as a predictor of five types of disengagement coping strategies in emerging adulthood (the age of 21): behavioral disengagement, mental disengagement, denial, substance use, and restraint. The ability to develop close friendships, or friendship competence, was examined as a moderator of these links. Results suggest that inter‐parent aggression in early adolescence can predict reliance on disengagement coping 8 years later, but that friendship competence can buffer against the reliance on disengagement coping. Moreover, close friendship competence was not directly related to partner aggression by mothers or fathers, suggesting that friendship competence develops along an independent developmental track and thus may truly serve as a buffer for young adults with a history of exposure to inter‐parent aggression.     

Experiences of Biological Parents and Their Older Children in Out-of-Home Care for the First Time

This article will examine the parenting characteristics and challenges that faced a cohort of families participating in an exploratory qualitative research study. This study sought to describe the experiences and characteristics of parents whose children were placed in the child welfare system in early-to-late adolescence (ages 12–18), thus gaining an understanding of the parenting challenges faced as they were able to maintain their children in their homes for a significant portion of their lives. The families of older youths entering care for the first time described how alcohol and drug abuse impacted their relationships with children, significant others, jobs, and their mental health status. A significant issue that emerged in several of the cases were older children who initiated a report to child welfare themselves.     

‘SUBTERRANEAN PASSAGES OF THOUGHT’: EMPIRE'S INSERTS

Scattered throughout Hardt and Negri's Empire are a number of short sections whose manifesto-like energy contrasts with the relatively expository style of the main text. These passages, modeled after the scholie of Spinoza's Ethics, are meant to suggest new ways of thinking about material already presented, to highlight the affective aspect of the material, and to point to hidden connections among different discursive elements. Several of these which did not appear in the published version of Empire for reasons of space are published here for the first time. The matters touched on are as diverse as those in Empire itself: Totality as a philosophical problem, the gender of biopolitical production, the relationship between genocide and the nationstate, the possibility of hope; the paradoxes of unemployment, the function of fear, postmodern prophecy,Hollywood's imperial fantasy, and the paradoxical relationship between being-against and love that has puzzled and fascinated many of Empire's readers.     

Occupational stress,rescue workers and English law

Abstract

This paper shows how two strands of English case law, one establishing liability to compensate for shock suffered by those at the scene of disaster, and the other concerned with physical injury suffered by rescuers, were brought together in the 1960s to provide a remedy for a rescuer suffering from what the law describes as ‘nervous shock’. It further traces the development of employers' liability in this context, but finds that the law provides few examples of the contractual duty of employers to protect employees generally against stress that may cause psychological injury. It points out that there is no case law on the liability of employers for stress suffered by rescue workers, whether professional or otherwise. It notes that law reports give little guidance as to the medical evidence judges require to persuade them that nervous shock has been suffered. Finally, it spells out that EC-inspired regulations could now be used to require employers to assess, and take steps to control, stress to which their employees, including rescue workers, are exposed.     

Survival at work: flexibility and adaptability in American corporate culture

Using such business self-help bestsellers as Spencer Johnson’s Who Moved My Cheese?, Harvey Mackay’s Swim With the Sharks Without Being Eaten Alive and Kevin Kelly’s New Rules for the New Economy, this article analyses a recent trend in the American business world’s use of Darwinian discourse: the increasing centrality of two specific traits – flexibility and adaptability – to corporate ‘survival’ in the 1980s, 1990s and today. The article argues that this focus on adaptability and flexibility has two especially troubling implications: individuals may be compelled to adapt ceaselessly, and the problematic idea that one can survive or succeed through sheer individual will may become naturalized.     

Sea change: Santa Barbara and the eruption of corporate social responsibility

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) programs have proliferated among the world's largest corporations. While the lion's share of scholarly attention has been devoted to the competitive advantage of CSR as a branding strategy, very little notice has been taken of CSR's history, particularly the emergence of CSR programs during the politically turbulent l960s and l970s. The paucity of historical attention has led to several distortions, including the failure to recognize CSR's origins as a survivalist reaction to crisis, and the resulting overemphasis of CSR as an unambiguously ethical model of managerial proactive effectiveness. Based on an examination of newspaper records of a politically crystallizing oil spill in the waters off the coast of Santa Barbara, California, and an analysis of CSR's market penetration and rhetoric, this paper offers an alternative framework for reexamining corporate social responsibility.     

Nonparametric two-sample tests for dispersion differences based on placements

Two different two-sample tests for dispersion differences based on placement statistics are proposed. The means and variances of the test statistics are derived, and asymptotic normality is established for both. Variants of the proposed tests based on reversing the X and Y labels in the test statistic calculations are shown to have different small-sample properties; for both pairs of tests, one member of the pair will be resolving, the other nonresolving. The proposed tests are similar in spirit to the dispersion tests of both Mood and Hollander; comparative simulation results for these four tests are given. For small sample sizes, the powers of the proposed tests are approximately equal to the powers of the tests of both Mood and Hollander for samples from the normal, Cauchy and exponential distributions. The one-sample limiting distributions are also provided, yielding useful approximations to the exact tests when one sample is much larger than the other. A bootstrap test may alternatively be performed. The proposed test statistics may be used with lightly censored data by substituting Kaplan-Meier estimates for the empirical distribution functions.     

BAYESIAN HYPER‐LASSOS WITH NON‐CONVEX PENALIZATION

The Lasso has sparked interest in the use of penalization of the log‐likelihood for variable selection, as well as for shrinkage. We are particularly interested in the more‐variables‐than‐observations case of characteristic importance for modern data. The Bayesian interpretation of the Lasso as the maximum a posteriori estimate of the regression coefficients, which have been given independent, double exponential prior distributions, is adopted. Generalizing this prior provides a family of hyper‐Lasso penalty functions, which includes the quasi‐Cauchy distribution of Johnstone and Silverman as a special case. The properties of this approach, including the oracle property, are explored, and an EM algorithm for inference in regression problems is described. The posterior is multi‐modal, and we suggest a strategy of using a set of perfectly fitting random starting values to explore modes in different regions of the parameter space. Simulations show that our procedure provides significant improvements on a range of established procedures, and we provide an example from chemometrics.     

Television Viewing by School-Age Children: Associations with Physical Activity,Snack Food Consumption and Unhealthy Weight

Alarm about the increasing prevalence of childhood obesity has focussed attention on individual lifestyle behaviours that may contribute to unhealthy weight. Television viewing is often a focus of the obesity debate. Not only is it sedentary, it also has the potential to influence other lifestyle behaviours either by displacing physical activities or through the consumption of high energy snack foods while watching TV. The research reported here uses data from 2,143 Australian 6–7 year children to examine the lifestyle behaviours associated with excess weight. These children spent 90 min each day watching television, 100 min each day in physical activity, and 39% consumed high levels of snack foods. Nearly one in five (18%) were overweight or obese. After adjustment for family and child characteristics, more time spent watching television was associated with more snacking and less physical activity. However, television viewing was associated with children’s weight status, but snacking and physical activities were not. These findings confirm the existence from a young age, of a cluster of lifestyle behaviours that are associated with unhealthy weight status.