Reactions to Job Content Plateaus: Examining Role Ambiguity and Hierarchical Plateaus as Moderators

Plateauing research often reveals a negative relationship between job content plateauing (i.e., lacking challenge in one's job) and work attitudes. This study explores situations where job content plateauing is associated with fewer negative work attitudes, revealing role ambiguity (i.e., being unclear about job duties and responsibilities) and hierarchical plateauing (i.e., low likelihood of promotions) as moderators of the job content plateau‐work attitude relationship. Specifically, job content plateaued employees reported greater job satisfaction and organizational commitment if they were not also experiencing a hierarchical plateau. Job content plateaued employees also reported greater job satisfaction when role ambiguity was low.     

African American Children's Adjustment: The Roles of Maternal and Teacher Depressive Symptoms

This study examined the unique and interactive roles of mother and teacher depressive symptoms in child adjustment in 277 African American single mother‐headed families, as well as whether the associations differed depending on the age and gender of the child. Findings revealed a significant association between maternal depressive symptoms and child depressive symptoms in girls, but not boys. Moreover, the combination of higher levels of both mother and teacher depressive symptoms was associated with the highest level of child depressive symptoms and, for younger children, externalizing symptoms. The importance of considering the multiple social contexts in which children interact is discussed.     

Reasoning With Partial Knowledge

We investigate how sociological argumentation differs from classical first–order logic. We focus on theories about age dependence of organizational mortality. The overall pattern of argument does not comply with the classical monotonicity principle: Adding premises overturns conclusions in an argument. The cause of nonmonotonicity is the need to derive conclusions from partial knowledge. We identify metaprinciples that appear to guide the observed sociological argumentation patterns, and we formalize a semantics to represent them. This semantics yields a new kind of logical consequence relation. We demonstrate that this new logic can reproduce the results of informal sociological theorizing and lead to new insights. It allows us to unify existing theory fragments, and it paves the way toward a complete classical theory.     

Rainfall interception by Santa Monica's municipal urban forest

Effects of urban forests on rainfall interception and runoff reduction have been conceptualized, but not well quantified. In this study rainfall interception by street and park trees in Santa Monica, California is simulated. A mass and energy balance rainfall interception model is used to simulate rainfall interception processes (e.g., gross precipitation, free throughfall, canopy drip, stemflow, and evaporation). Annual rainfall interception by the 29,299 street and park trees was 193,168 m³ (6.6 m³/tree), or 1.6% of total precipitation. The annual value of avoided stormwater treatment and flood control costs associated with reduced runoff was $110,890 ($3.60/tree). Interception rate varied with tree species and sizes. Rainfall interception ranged from 15.3% (0.8 m³/tree) for a small Jacaranda mimosifolia (3.5 cm diameter at breast height) to 66.5% (20.8 m³/tree) for a mature Tristania conferta (38.1 cm). In a 25-year storm, interception by all street and park trees was 12,139.5 m³ (0.4%), each tree yielding $0.60 (0.4 m³/tree) in avoided flood control costs. Rainfall interception varied seasonally, averaging 14.8% during a 21.7 mm winter storm and 79.5% during a 20.3 mm summer storm for a large, deciduous Platanus acerifolia tree. Effects of differences in temporal precipitation patterns, tree population traits, and pruning practices on interception in Santa Monica, Modesto, and Sacramento, California are described.     

Infants' Ability to Learn Phonetically Similar Words: Effects of Age and Vocabulary Size

What do novice word learners know about the sound of words? Word‐learning tasks suggest that young infants (14 months old) confuse similar‐sounding words, whereas mispronunciation detection tasks suggest that slightly older infants (18–24 months old) correctly distinguish similar words. Here we explore whether the difficulty at 14 months stems from infants' novice status as word learners or whether it is inherent in the task demands of learning new words. Results from 3 experiments support a developmental explanation. In Experiment 1, infants of 20 months learned to pair 2 phonetically similar words to 2 different objects under precisely the same conditions that infants of 14 months (Experiment 2) failed. In Experiment 3, infants of 17 months showed intermediate, but still successful, performance in the task. Vocabulary size predicted word‐learning performance, but only in the younger, less experienced word learners. The implications of these results for theories of word learning and lexical representation are discussed.