Loneliness and Adolescents’ Neural Processing of Self,Friends, and Teachers: Consequences for the School Self‐Concept

The present interdisciplinary study explored whether perceived loneliness is associated with ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vMPFC) activation during self‐ and social judgments (friends and teachers) in adolescents. Moreover, we examined how vMPFC activity is related to the academic self‐concept (ASC). Results of manifest path analysis indicated that high perceived loneliness was related to lower neural response to self‐judgments. In turn, high neural response to self‐judgments was positively associated with the ASC, whereas there was a trendwise negative association between high neural response to teacher‐related judgments and ASC. This study reveals associations between perceived loneliness and neural processing of the self, underlining the idea that feeling isolated from others may hinder self‐insight and, by extension, the formation of a stable academic self‐concept.     

Leadership behaviour and leader self-reported well-being: A review,integration and meta-analytic examination

ABSTRACT

While the link between leadership and follower well-being is well established, less is known about the relation between leaders’ leadership behaviour and their own well-being. Particularly, a systematic integration of existing studies is missing. Based on an integrated framework summarising major theories on the leader well-being–leadership link, we quantitatively synthesised findings on the relations between different leadership behaviours and leader well-being indicators. The meta-analytical results (95 effect sizes; N?=?12,617) confirmed significant relationships of constructive and destructive leadership with leader well-being in the expected directions. Relative weight analyses on the constructive leadership behaviours showed that change-oriented and relational-oriented leadership (e.g. transformational, participative) accounted for more variance in leader well-being than task-oriented leadership (e.g. transactional). Regarding destructive leadership, active destructive leadership (e.g. abusive supervision) showed stronger negative associations with leader well-being than passive leadership (e.g. laissez-faire). Based on our integrated framework, we proposed and found support for divergent patterns of associations for different forms of well-being (positive vs. negative, short-term vs. long-term, job-related vs. general). Our study demonstrates a considerable linkage between leader well-being and leadership, supporting the adoption of leadership development programmes and organisational health interventions for leaders given their impact on employees, teams and organisations.     

我是茫茫“职海”里一条搁浅的“鱼”

我是今年回国的留学生。看了《我遇上了“抠门”老板》中讲的老板的事,觉得还真是那么回事,我的台资老板也是这样的……本以为自己是美国MPA,在国内找个称心的工作不成问题,没想到回来不到半年,非但没有找到好工作,还遇上了“抠门”老板。现在我的梦想完全破灭,连自信心都快湮没了,感觉就像一条在岸上搁浅的鱼……     

Unintended Consequences of Land Rights Reform: The Case of the 1998 Uganda Land Act

Empirical studies of land rights privatisation have tended to underemphasise the unintended impacts of land rights reform relative to establishing whether the predicted impacts have occurred. This article, in reviewing some of the unintended consequences of the 1998 Uganda Land Act, draws attention to ways in which intended impacts may be undercut by lack of both consultation and foresight in anticipating responses to new legal provisions and by lack of adequate resourcing of the reform process. It also recognises that unintended outcomes may sometimes reflect appropriate adaptations of legal provisions at the local level, and briefly considers what light the Ugandan experience can throw on recent proposals for Normalisation of informal property rights in the Third World.     

A Look at State‐Level Risk Assessment in the United States: Making Decisions in the Absence of Federal Risk Values

State environmental agencies in the United States are charged with making risk management decisions that protect public health and the environment while managing limited technical, financial, and human resources. Meanwhile, the federal risk assessment community that provides risk assessment guidance to state agencies is challenged by the rapid growth of the global chemical inventory. When chemical toxicity profiles are unavailable on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Integrated Risk Information System or other federal resources, each state agency must act independently to identify and select appropriate chemical risk values for application in human health risk assessment. This practice can lead to broad interstate variation in the toxicity values selected for any one chemical. Within this context, this article describes the decision‐making process and resources used by the federal government and individual U.S. states. The risk management of trichloroethylene (TCE) in the United States is presented as a case study to demonstrate the need for a collaborative approach among U.S. states toward identification and selection of chemical risk values while awaiting federal risk values to be set. The regulatory experience with TCE is contrasted with collaborative risk science models, such as the European Union's efforts in risk assessment harmonization. Finally, we introduce State Environmental Agency Risk Collaboration for Harmonization, a free online interactive tool designed to help to create a collaborative network among state agencies to provide a vehicle for efficiently sharing information and resources, and for the advancement of harmonization in risk values used among U.S. states when federal guidance is unavailable.     

Social Trust and E-Commerce: Experimental Evidence for the Effects of Social Trust on Individuals' Economic Behavior

In this study, an experimental design embedded in a nationalsurvey is used to examine the impact of social trust on participationin e-commerce. To what extent does generalized trust in peopleinfluence economic behavior, particularly in newly establishedrealms such as the Internet? Although some previous work hasposited a role for social trust in encouraging both e-commerceand economic development more generally, evidence has been basedon cross-sectional associations and, primarily, at the aggregatelevel of entire countries. While these relationships have beensuggestive, studies have yet to confirm a causal role for socialtrust in influencing e-commerce. Would increasing levels ofsocial trust actually encourage greater e-commerce participation?This study combines the representativeness of a national surveywith the internal validity of an experimental design to answerthis question.