The aftereffects of stress: An attentional interpretation

Two studies were conducted in order to test the hypothesis that the aftereffects of stress on both performance and social behavior are attributable to a depletion of attentional capacity. This depletion, or cognitive fatigue, was predicted to increase with both the attentional load and duration of an activity. A laboratory study demonstrated that aftereffects can be induced (without a stressor such as noise, crowding, or shock) by the performance of an attention-demanding task. Deficits on an aftereffects task increased as principal task demand and task duration increased. A second study, conducted in a field setting, found that after performing a high-load task, subjects were less likely to help a woman search for a contact lens than were their counterparts who performed a low-load task. Similarly, subjects who had been crowded were less likely to help than were those who had not been crowded. The data are interpreted as providing support for the cognitive-fatigue explanation of the aftereffects of stress.The research reported in this article was supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation (SOC 75-09224). Study II was part of the second author's Master's thesis.The authors are indebted to Art Ellsworth, manager of Valley River Center; to Ann Lezak and George Hochstetler for serving as experimenters; to Caroline Gredvig and Valerie Kimble for serving as confederates; to Lita Furby for statistical counsel; to Mike Kemp, Al Murphy, and Nick Garshnek for technical assistance; and to David Krantz, Myron Rothbart, and David Mandel for comments on an earlier draft.     

Approximations of rational criteria under complete ignorance and the independence axiom

Rational decision making under complete ignorance, a limit case of uncertainty, is defined. Through a concept of approximation, a meaning is given to a criterion almost possessing a property. Rational criteria depend almost on the sole bounds of the outcome range of each decision, they are almost continuous, they can almost possess a transitive indifference relation; however, under Savage's Independence Axiom, this last property restricts possible criteria to those which can be approximated, at least partly, by either the Maximin or the Maximax criterion.     

The political process of the revolutionary samurai: a comparative reconsideration of Japan’s Meiji Restoration

In the 1860s and 1870s, the feudal monarchy of the Tokugawa shogunate, which had ruled Japan for over two centuries, was overthrown, and the entire political order it had commanded was dismantled. This immense political transformation, comparable in its results to the great social revolutions of the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries in the West, was distinctive for lacking a major role for mass political mobilization. Since popular political action was decisive elsewhere for both providing the force for social revolutions to defeat old regimes and for pushing revolutionary leaders to more radical policies, the Meiji Restoration’s combination of revolutionary outcomes with conservative personnel and means is puzzling. This article argues that previous accounts fail to explain why a group of relatively low-status samurai—administrative functionaries with some hereditary political privileges but in fact little secure power within the old regime—was able to overcome far more deeply entrenched political actors. To explain this, it is necessary to distinguish clearly between two political processes: the long-standing political relations of feudal monarchy and magnate lords and the unprecedented emergence of independent samurai political action and organizations cutting across domain boundaries. It was the interaction of these two processes that produced the overthrow of the Tokugawa and enabled the revolutionary outcomes that followed it. This article’s revised explanation of the Meiji Restoration clearly places it within the same theoretical parameters as the major revolutions of the seventeenth century and later.     

Theory and Validity of Life Satisfaction Scales

National accounts of subjective well-being are being considered and adopted by nations. In order to be useful for policy deliberations, the measures of life satisfaction must be psychometrically sound. The reliability, validity, and sensitivity to change of life satisfaction measures are reviewed. The scales are stable under unchanging conditions, but are sensitive to changes in circumstances in people’s lives. Several types of data indicate that the scales validly reflect the quality of respondents’ lives: (1) Differences between nations in life satisfaction associated with differences in objective conditions, (2) Differences between groups who live in different circumstances, (3) Correlations with nonself-report measures of life satisfaction, (4) Genetic and physiological associations with life satisfaction, (5) Systematic patterns of change in the scales before, during, and after significant life events, and (6) Prediction by life satisfaction scores of future behaviors such as suicide. The life satisfaction scales can be influenced by factors such as question order, current mood, and mode of presentation, but in most cases these can be controlled. Our model of life satisfaction judgments points to the importance of attention, values, standards, and top-down effects. Although the scales are useful in research on individual well-being, there are policy questions that need more analysis and research, such as which types of subjective well-being measures are most relevant to which types of policies, how standards influence scores, and how best to associate the scores with current policy deliberations.     

Advertising morality: maintaining moral worth in a stigmatized profession

Although a great deal of literature has looked at how individuals respond to stigma, far less has been written about how professional groups address challenges to their self-perception as abiding by clear moral standards. In this paper, we ask how professional group members maintain a positive self-perception in the face of moral stigma. Drawing on pragmatic and cultural sociology, we claim that professional communities hold narratives that link various aspects of the work their members perform with specific understanding of the common good. These narratives allow professionals to maintain a shared view of their work as benefitting society and to perceive themselves as moral individuals. As a case study, we focus on the advertising industry, which has long been stigmatized as complicit in exploitative capitalist mechanisms and cultural degradation. We draw on nine total months of fieldwork and seventy-four interviews across three US advertising agencies. We find that advertising practitioners use narratives to present their work as contributing to the common good, depicting themselves as moral individuals who care about others in the process. We analyze three prevalent narratives: the account-driven narrative, which links moral virtue to caring for clients; the creative-driven narrative, which ties caring to the production of meaningful advertisements; and the strategic-driven narrative, which sees caring in finding meaningful relationships for consumers and brands.     

Reactions of students to different settings of field experience

The study assessed Israeli students’ emotional–experiential reaction and attitude to different client populations, following a week-long experience in one of five social services settings. The study provides preliminary findings regarding the implications of first year students’ experience on their emphatic skills, a subject that generally has not received adequate scholarly attention. Using a purpose-built, self-administered questionnaire, we found students’ emotional–experiential response to their experience differed by the setting in which they were placed, being lowest in the Bedouin oriented services, intermediate among those placed in juvenile correction services, and highest in mental health, adult and child disability services. Responses were independent of all other explanatory variables, including sex, cognitive ability, previous training experience and perceptual shifts concerning the population served. We discuss possible reasons for these differences.

     

努力提高城市公交的服务满意度

公共交通是我国城市人民群众最主要、最基本的日常出行方式,是保证城市正常运转的民生事业。随着轨道交通的快速发展,我国一些大中城市公共交通的结构正在发生深刻的变化,常规地面公交的公共客运分担率在逐渐下降。但是,由于耗资巨大、建设周期长、受基本网络规模和运能限制,在一个相当长的时期内,轨道交通还不能成为我国城市公共交通供给的主体。地面公交仍将是大部分城市市民首选的出行工具。