The Effect of Father–Toddler and Mother– Toddler Role Reversal on the Development of Behavior Problems in Kindergarten

Role reversal is a relationship disturbance in which a parent looks to a child to meet a parent's need for comfort, parenting, intimacy or play, and the child attempts to meet these needs. The current study examined, within a developmental psychopathology framework, the effect of father and mother role reversal with toddlers on the development of attention problems, externalizing symptoms, internalizing symptoms, and social problems in kindergarten. In a normative sample, N=57, role reversal was assessed in an observational paradigm, and teachers rated behavior problems. Father role reversal predicted attention problems and externalizing symptoms, whereas mother role reversal predicted social problems. Gender was an important moderator such that father role reversal predicted social problems for boys and mother role reversal predicted social problems for girls. The importance of a developmental psychopathology perspective, the role of fathers, and implications for the development of diagnosable disorders and for preventive interventions are discussed.     

When Emotion Work is Doomed to Fail: Ideological and Structural Constraints on Emotion Management

This paper explores how workers try to manage their emotions under conditions that doom them to fail. The workers in question—floor instructors at a sheltered workshop for people with developmental disabilities—were expected to infuse clients with positive feelings about work and to help transform them into committed workers. But structural conditions—boring, poorly paid assembly work and long gaps between contract jobs—forced them to obtain clients' compliance through coercive and confrontational emotion management techniques that contradicted their ideological beliefs. The floor instructors sought to peacefully increase their control over clients through “preventive emotion management” but most often they experienced a loss of control, leading some of them to experience “burnout.” This paper defines burnout as “occupational emotional deviance” that workers experience when they cannot manage their own and other's emotions according to organizational expectations.     

Why the silence on population?

The tripling of the world’s population growth since 1960 has received little public attention the past decade. Six reasons for the silence around this subject constitute a “perfect storm”. The first five are: visibility of actual fertility decline in the developed countries as well as a number of the developing ones; well justified attention to the impact of high levels of consumption on the environment; an implicit welcome by conservative political and religious forces to reduced needs for family planning; the tragedy of AIDS dominating international health concerns; and the 1994 Cairo conference’s focus on examples of coercive family planning while nearly ignoring the coercion of women forced into unwanted childbearing. These five relatively new developments have been supported by standard demographic theory containing an assumption that couples naturally want many children, making it difficult to see the many barriers blocking women’s options to manage their own childbearing.     

‘Pure’ Farsi and political sensitivities: Language and ideologies in Farsi complementary language classrooms in Denmark

This paper presents an insight into two Farsi complementary language classrooms in Copenhagen, Denmark, characterised by political sensitivities. We illustrate a number of characteristic features of the classrooms concerning language use, pedagogical methods and cultural phenomena, which were related to key adults’ preferences, and we consider possible interpretations of them as indexical signs. In particular, we emphasise ideological interpretations (e.g. the monolingualism norm and language purism) and we relate the classroom characteristics to the contemporary state of Iran as well as to the time and place in which the classes occurred. We analyse both explicit metapragmatic messages and implicit ways of indicating ideologies, and see both types as characterised by avoidance of particular referents, that is, by unmentionables.     

Perceived violence climate: A new construct and its relationship to workplace physical violence and verbal aggression, and their potential consequences

Workplace accidents and violence are both potential sources of employee injuries that have been dealt with in entirely separate literatures. In this study we adapted the concept of safety climate from the accident/injury literature to violence in developing the concept of perceived violence climate. A scale was developed to assess perceived violence climate, including items about management attention, concern, and policies designed to keep employees safe from violence. Data were collected from a sample of 198 nurses from a US Hospital. Perceived violence climate was found to correlate significantly with both physical violence and verbal aggression experienced by the nurses, injury from violence, and perceptions of workplace danger. Furthermore, regression analyses showed that climate explained additional variance in psychological strain and perceptions of danger over experienced violence. These results have implications for interventions aimed at producing a good perceived violence climate in order to reduce the incidence of violence and aggression within an organization.     

A Risk Management Procedure for the Washington State Ferries

The state of Washington operates the largest passenger vessel ferry system in the United States. In part due to the introduction of high-speed ferries, the state of Washington established an independent blue-ribbon panel to assess the adequacy of requirements for passenger and crew safety aboard the Washington state ferries. On July 9, 1998, the Blue Ribbon Panel on Washington State Ferry Safety engaged a consultant team from The George Washington University and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute/Le Moyne College to assess the adequacy of passenger and crew safety in the Washington state ferry (WSF) system, to evaluate the level of risk present in the WSF system, and to develop recommendations for prioritized risk reduction measures, which, once implemented, can improve the level of safety in the WSF system. The probability of ferry collisions in the WSF system was assessed using a dynamic simulation methodology that extends the scope of available data with expert judgment. The potential consequences of collisions were modeled in order to determine the requirements for onboard and external emergency response procedures and equipment. The methodology was used to evaluate potential risk reduction measures and to make detailed risk management recommendations to the blue-ribbon panel and the Washington State Transportation Commission.     

Structural and Supportive Changes in Couples' Family and Friendship Networks Across the Transition to Parenthood

This article prospectively examined the patterns of change in couples' family and friend networks and supports across the transition to parenthood as well as stability in individual differences over time. Additionally, parental adjustment and depression were examined with respect to changes in couples' social systems. Participants included a total of 137 couples recruited prior to the birth of their first child from prenatal clinics in rural North Carolina. Couples were interviewed about their social networks and supports at four different time periods: prenatally and when target children were 3, 12, and 24 months of age. Couples also completed measures of depression and adjustment at each of the time periods. Across‐time correlations computed for the social network, support, and parental functioning variables revealed that there was considerable stability in the rank ordering of husbands and wives from the prenatal period through 24 months postpartum documenting continuity in parental networks in the context of change. However, growth curve analyses revealed dynamic changes in mothers' and fathers' social systems during this transition and that many of these changes were related to parental adjustment and depression. The discussion highlights the contribution of these data to understanding continuities and discontinuities in mothers' and fathers' social networks over time.