Ethnicity as cognition

This article identifies an incipient and largely implicit cognitive turn in the study of ethnicity, and argues that it can be consolidated and extended by drawing on cognitive research in social psychology and anthropology. Cognitive perspectives provide resources for conceptualizing ethnicity, race, and nation as perspectives on the world rather than entities in the world, for treating ethnicity, race, and nationalism together rather than as separate subfields, and for re-specifying the old debate between primordialist and circumstantialist approaches.     

A Rank-Sum-Type Test for Paired Data with Multiple Endpoints

Clinical trials and other types of studies often examine the effects of a particular treatment or experimental condition on a number of different response variables. Although the usual approach for analysing such data is to examine each variable separately, this can increase the chance of false positive findings. Bonferroni's inequality or Hotelling's T² statistic can be employed to control the overall type I error rate, but these tests generally lack power for alternatives in which the treatment improves the outcome on most or all of the endpoints. For the comparison of independent groups, O'Brien (1984) developed a rank-sum type test that has greater power than the Bonferroni and T² procedures when one treatment is uniformly better (i.e. for all endpoints) than the other treatment(s). In this paper we adapt the rank-sum test to studies involving paired data and demonstrate that it, too, has power advantages for such alternatives. Simulation results are described, and an example from a study measuring the effects of sleep loss on glucose metabolism is presented to illustrate the methodology.     

Social Transformation in the Age of Globalization. A Challenge to Reduce Anomie and to Increase Social Capital

Anomie is one of few social scientific terms with a wide claim to explain aspects of social change, in different cultures at different stages of modernization not to say globalization. In the early 1990s the Scientific Board of the Swiss Academy of Development commenced a research project which is still continuing with most of the same researchers but under the name of The International Network for the Assessment of Social Transformation (INAST), based in the Institute of Sociology, University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland. The work was importantly influenced by Robert K. Merton, an honorary member of the group.     

The meaning of empowerment: the interdisciplinary etymology of a new management concept

Empowerment has become a widely used management term in the last decade or so, though, in practical terms, it shares the ambiguity of its predecessors in the HRM tradition. This paper sets out to unravel the web of meaning surrounding empowerment to show what a contested concept it is, and hence why its application in organizational settings is fraught with misunderstanding and tension. It does so by taking an approach that contributes to the examination of HRM discourse and management rhetoric. To demonstrate the ambiguity of empowerment as a concept, the paper reviews the various ways in which the term has been used across non-management disciplines (women, minority groups, education, community care, politics), culminating with a review of the use of empowerment in contemporary management theory. The paper concludes that organizations and managers have chosen to coin a phrase which is open to different, sometimes contradictory, meanings and which, when applied, evokes both subjective attitudes and objective behaviour, means different things in varying contexts, and is affected fundamentally by individual differences in perception and experience. Unless organizations offer clear operational definitions when using empowerment, instead of purely acquiescing to a vague and seductive version of the concept, they are abdicating responsibility for the unpredictable consequences that result.     

THE HYBRID CRITICISM OF PATRIARCHY: Rereading Kate Millett's Sexual Politics

While much might be said about the exclusion of feminist texts from the canon of sociological classics, I instead want to offer a rereading of Kate Millett's Sexual Politics to show how the development of feminist theory has depended on rereading disciplinary canons, thereby re-opening the borders between the disciplines, especially the border between literary criticism and social science. At a time when sociologists are participating in or at least attending to the debates over the relationship of fantasy and reality, fiction and history, polemic and academic discourse, rereading Sexual Politics offers an understanding of how these debates have arisen in relationship to feminist theory's ongoing challenge to the canonical distinction of social science from literary criticism. Thus, rather than press for the canonization of Sexual Politics as a sociological classic, I want to suggest that feminist theorizing needs to sustain itself as a social criticism that includes a transdisciplinary criticism of canonicity.     

Emotional Empathy as Related to Mimicry Reactions at Different Levels of Information Processing

The hypotheses of this investigation were based on conceiving of facial mimicry reactions in face-to-face interactions as an early automatic component in the process of emotional empathy. Differences between individuals high and low in emotional empathy were investigated. The parameters compared were facial mimicry reactions, as represented by electromyographic (EMG) activity, when individuals were exposed to pictures of angry or happy faces. The present study distinguished between spontaneous facial reactions and facial expressions associated with more controlled or modulated emotions at different information processing levels, first at a preattentive level and then consecutively at more consciously controlled levels: 61 participants were exposed to pictures at three different exposure times (17, 56, and 2350 ms). A significant difference in facial mimicry reactions between high- and low-empathy participants emerged at short exposure times (56 ms), representing automatic, spontaneous reactions, with high-empathy participants showing a significant mimicking reaction. The low-empathy participants did not display mimicking at any exposure time. On the contrary, the low-empathy participants showed, in response to angry faces, a tendency to an elevated activation in the cheek region, which often is associated with smiling.     

Assessing the Effect of Model Misspecifications on Parameter Estimates in Structural Equation Models

Model misspecifications may have a systematic effect on parameters, causing biases in their estimates. In the application of structural equation models, every interesting model is fallible. When simultaneously evaluating a model, it is of interest to study whether all parameters are affected by a misspecification. This paper provides three procedures for evaluating such an effect: (1) analyzing the path, (2) using a functional relationship, and (3) using a significance test. Analyzing the path is illustrated through a confirmatory factor model. This method is ad hoc but intuitive. A more rigorous approach is built upon the concept of orthogonality of two sets of parameters. When parameter a is orthogonal to parameter b, omitting parameter b will not affect the estimation of parameter a. The functional relationship of two sets of parameters is used to check their orthogonality. The distribution of the difference between estimates based on different models is obtained, which provides a Hausman–like way to check significant parameter differences that are due to biases. Examples illustrate that these procedures can provide valuable information on identifying parameter estimates that are systematically affected by a model misspecification.     

The Uniqueness of the Child–Father Attachment Relationship: Fathers' Sensitive and Challenging Play as a Pivotal Variable in a 16-year Longitudinal Study

This longitudinal study of forty‐four families explored fathers’ as compared to mothers’ specific contribution to their children's attachment representation at ages 6, 10, and 16 years. In toddlerhood, fathers’ and mothers’ play sensitivity was evaluated with a new assessment, the sensitive and challenging interactive play scale (SCIP). Fathers’ SCIP scores were predicted by fathers’ caregiving quality during the first year, were highly consistent across 4 years, and were closely linked to the fathers’ own internal working model of attachment. Qualities of attachment as assessed in the Strange Situation to both parents were antecedents for children's attachment security in the Separation Anxiety Test at age 6. Fathers’ play sensitivity and infant–mother quality of attachment predicted children's internal working model of attachment at age 10, but not vice versa. Dimensions of adolescents’ attachment representations were predicted by fathers’ play sensitivity only. The results confirmed our main assumption that fathers’ play sensitivity is a better predictor of the child's long‐term attachment representation than the early infant–father security of attachment. The ecological validity of measuring fathers’ sensitive and challenging interactive play behavior as compared to infant proximity seeking in times of distress is highlighted. Findings are discussed with respect to a wider view on attachment in that both parents shape their children's psychological security but each in his or her unique way.