Adolescents’ Socio‐Motivational Relationships With Teachers,Amygdala Response to Teacher's Negative Facial Expressions,and Test Anxiety

The amygdala is essential for processing emotions, including the processing of aversive faces. The aim of this multimethodological study was to relate the amygdala reactivity of students (N = 88) toward teachers’ fearful and angry faces, to students’ relationship with their teachers. Furthermore, students’ neural responses during the perception of teachers’ faces were tested as predictors of test anxiety (controlling for neuroticism as a potential trait anxiety effect). Multiple regression analysis revealed that students reporting high‐quality teacher–student relationships showed stronger amygdala activity toward fearful faces, which was related to worry. Furthermore, students with high levels of neuroticism tended to perceive their teachers as motivators and showed higher amygdala activity toward angry faces, which was related to the measures of emotionality.     

What are Research Expectations? A Comparative Study of Different Academic Disciplines

This paper is intended to assist professors, administrators, librarians and other members of university level committees that must consider research expectations and research quality in academic fields that they lack. While this is not a problem for field experts, it is a difficulty when people are asked to make decisions in areas of study other than their own. This is commonly the case for senior university professors, librarians and administrators in regards to university wide decisions. The paper investigates this gap, through a study of 27 academic fields in 348 highly regarded universities. We find that there are almost always statistically significant differences in activity between academic fields, regardless of the metric one considers. However, it is possible to understand these differences by comparing the distribution of a known academic field to that of a field that one is not familiar with. Tables and information are provided to assist in the comparison of different fields of study on metrics such as: departmental publications and researcher level metrics of publications, citations, H-index, and total number of co-authors. The information can also be used to support decisions associated with promotion to senior posts such as endowed chairs and professorships. Information regarding specific universities and researchers are included in the data supplement.     

Social network effects on academic achievement

How peer groups contribute to educational outcomes has long interested researchers. However, the possibility that peer groups dominated by either low- or high-achieving youth can have substantively different effects on achievement has been largely ignored. In this paper, we show that while being embedded in a high-achieving network of friends is not associated with increased own achievement, being embedded in a low-achieving network is associated with decreased own achievement. In additional analyses, we present evidence that these associations are at least in part due to influence, as opposed to only selection effects or shared environment. We also examine whether the structure of the network in which a student is embedded might affect their educational achievement. We show that achieving at higher levels positively predicts how centrally located a student is in their network, but being more centrally located does not predict concurrent achievement. This finding suggests that the behavior of individuals is affecting the formation of network structure and not the reverse.     

Digit ratios (2D:4D) as predictors of risky decision making for both sexes

Many important decisions involve financial risk, and substantial evidence suggests that women tend to be more risk averse than men. We explore a potential biological basis of risk-taking variation within and between the sexes by studying how the ratio between the length of the second and fourth fingers (2D:4D) predicts risk-taking. A smaller 2D:4D ratio has been linked to higher exposure to prenatal testosterone relative to estradiol, with men having lower ratios than women. In financially motivated decision-making tasks, we find that men and women with smaller 2D:4D ratios chose significantly riskier options. We further find that the ratio partially explains the variation in risk-taking between the sexes. Moreover, for men and women at the extremes of the digit-ratio distribution the difference in risk-taking disappears. Thus, the 2D:4D ratio partially explains variation in financial risk-taking behavior within and between sexes and offers evidence of a biological basis for risk-taking behavior.     

The Black Worker: Race,Labor, and Civil Rights since Emancipation (2007)

P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins, British Imperialism: Innovation and Expansion, 1688–1914 (1993), xiv + 490; British Imperialism: Crisis and Deconstruction, 1914–1990 (1993), xiii + 326 (Longman, London, £17.99 and £3.99).

W. D. Rubinstein, Capitalism, Culture, and Decline in Britain, 1750–1990 (1993), viii + 182 (Routledge, London, £25.00).

Stanley Chapman, Merchant Enterprise in Britain: From the Industrial Revolution to World War I (1992), xvi + 336 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, £40.00).     

Exploratory Study on Drug Users’ Perspectives on Quality of Life: More than Health-Related Quality of Life?

In drug treatment outcome literature, a focus on objective and socially desirable indicators of change (e.g. no drug use) has predominated, while outcome indicators that are important for drug users themselves (e.g. quality of life, satisfaction with treatment) have largely been neglected. Nonetheless, Quality of Life (QoL) has become an important concept to evaluate effectiveness of treatment in mental health care research and disability studies. Given the almost exclusive focus on Health-related Quality of Life (HRQOL) in substance abuse research and the neglect of clients’ perspectives in this field, we explore in this study the concept of QoL as perceived by drug users. Focus group discussions (n = 9) were organised in various treatment settings and community services for drug users in the region of Ghent, Belgium to identify important dimensions of QoL and their interpretation by drug users. Data were clustered and analysed based on the theoretical framework of Robert Schalock (Quality of life. Volume 1: Conceptualization and measurement, 1996). The domains ‘personal relationships’, ‘social inclusion’ and ‘self-determination’ were discussed most frequently by the participants. They stressed the importance of a supportive social network in particular. It can be concluded that QoL is not primarily associated by drug users with health and it involves much more than the aspects typically represented in measures of HRQOL.     

Ridge Regression: Degrees of Freedom in the Analysis of Variance

It appears to be common practice with ridge regression to obtain a decomposition of the total sum of squares, and assign degrees of freedom, according to established least squares theory. This discussion notes the obvious fallacies of such an approach, and introduces a decomposition based on orthogonality, and degrees of freedom based on expected mean squares, for non-stochastic k.     

Dynamic populations with uniform natural increase across states

Multistate populations with changing rates of interstate transfer are an example of compartment models and depict the experience of persons in distinct but intercommunicating states. Such models can be used in analyses of many demographic phenomena, including migration, labor force participation, and health status. This paper extends present knowledge of the relationships prevailing in such dynamic models by developing procedures that yield closed form expressions relating transfer rates to the state-specific population trajectories that they generate. The focus is on a subset of multistate models that do not recognize age and that have restricted variability in rates of transfer and natural increase. Dynamics in the two state, no-growth case, where the two time-varying transfer rates always sum to a constant value, are analyzed in depth. In specified models with any number of intercommunicating states, sine and cosine fluctuations in the transfer rates are shown to yield sine and cosine fluctuations in the numbers of persons in each state.