Gender role perspectives and job burnout

Review of Economics of the Household - Women are more likely than men to report physical and emotional exhaustion related to paid work. While this gender gap in job burnout is common in the...     

Is it God or Just the Data that Moves in Mysterious Ways? How Well-Being Research may be Mistaking Faith for Virtue

Opinion is mixed regarding the link between spiritual faith-based beliefs (SFBBs) and psychological well-being—however, most published field studies suggest a positive link. Controlled experiments demonstrate that spirituality promotes social cohesion and deters excessive self-interested behaviour. Yet past research has largely overlooked virtues (which are related to, yet distinct from, SFBB) as a rival explanation for these observations. Reviewed papers almost exclusively employed bi-variate designs incapable of answering the question “Is it God, or just missing variables?” This paper redresses this oversight by simultaneously including virtue (e.g., kindness, etc.,) and SFBB as predictors of well-being. Although simple analyses (.02 ≤ β ≤ .28) replicate the typical SFBB findings, multivariate analyses reveal that virtues (spirituality) positively (negatively) predict well-being. Since multivariate analyses (which are rarely conducted in this field) are appropriate for testing competing theories, past claims that SFBBs improve well-being appear spurious.     

The Perils of a Public Intellectual

In 1939 George W. Hartmann was Chairman of the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues (SPSSI) and a prominent activist-scholar. By the end of World War II, his teaching career and psychological health lay in ruin, and he never reestablished his influence as a psychopolitical expert. Thisarticle traces the rise and fall of Hartmann's career and its unique mixture of Gestalt psychology, socialism, and anti-Communism. Unpublished correspondence, family papers, and files from the FBI and other intelligence agencies are used to recreate Hartmann's political personae—including Socialist electoral candidate, chairman of Peace Now, and leader of the War Resisters League. His life as a public intellectual is used to reflect upon the nature of psychological expertise at midcentury.     

Statistical data integration using multilevel models to predict employee compensation

This article considers the case where two surveys collect data on a common variable, with one survey being much smaller than the other. The smaller survey collects data on an additional variable of interest, related to the common variable collected in the two surveys, and out-of-scope with respect to the larger survey. Estimation of the two related variables is of interest at domains defined at a granular level. We propose a multilevel model for integrating data from the two surveys, by reconciling survey estimates available for the common variable, accounting for the relationship between the two variables, and expanding estimation for the other variable, for all the domains of interest. The model is specified as a hierarchical Bayes model for domain-level survey data, and posterior distributions are constructed for the two variables of interest. A synthetic estimation approach is considered as an alternative to the hierarchical modelling approach. The methodology is applied to wage and benefits estimation using data from the National Compensation Survey and the Occupational Employment Statistics Survey, available from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Department of Labor, United States.     

The influence of radical right populist parties on law and order policy-making

In many countries, be it in America (Trump), in Europe (Le Pen), or in Asia (Duterte), radical right populist leaders or parties succeed in gaining power. To what extent would they be able to influence policy-making? Do they really weight upon public decision-making? While the literature on populism and radical right populist parties (RRPP) is abundant, few authors have addressed the relationship between populist promises and policy-making. Yet it is crucial to assess the influence of RRPP nowadays. This article investigates the influence of a most likely case – the Schweizerische Volkspartei (SVP) – on law and order policy-making. The focus is set on a traditional policy sector and on a party with a long institutionalized participation in power. Based on process-tracing, the results show that the SVP influence varies according to the stages of policy-making and to its instruments. Agenda-setting is more significantly influenced, and popular initiatives are an important component of the populist strategy. Results may be generalized to different countries beyond the Swiss case, as shown in the discussion and the conclusion.     

Spousal Network Overlap as a Basis for Spousal Support

The role social network structure plays in facilitating flows of support between spouses is often overlooked. This study examined whether levels of support between spouses depended on the degree of overlap between spouses' networks. Network overlap may enhance spouses' support capacities by increasing their understanding of each other's support needs and their ability to coordinate support for each other. Data on 1,490 married older adults from the National Social Life, Health, and Aging Project were examined. Analyses revealed that when one's spouse had more contact with one's other network members, one was more likely to (a) view the spouse as a reliable source of support, (b) open up to the spouse, and (c) discuss health issues with the spouse. These results suggest that spousal support is not only a function of relationship quality or obligations-it also is a structural phenomenon that depends on spouses' connectedness to each other's networks.     

The failure of the “localisationist project” in mental medicine in nineteenth century France and the emergence of the neurological clinic

During the nineteenth century, neuroanatomical knowledge and the clinical practice of treating mental illnesses develop at the same time. Some practitioners of mental medicine try to combine the clinical practice of treating mental diseases with neuroanatomical knowledge using the idea of cerebral localisations. This point of view is advocated by Gall and the field of phrenology. But there is no obvious success of such a “localisationist project” before Broca and Wernicke’s works on aphasia. This discovery will provoke a revival of the desire to localise the cerebral zones involved in mental diseases. However, the cerebral localisation project progressively decreases during the end of the nineteenth century while neurological clinical practice emerges. Moreover, neurological clinical practice aims to localise anatomical lesions through clinical examination. From a philosophy of science point of view, this segment of history brings into question the relation between a scientific object (the cerebral localisation of zones involved in diseases) and a scientific subject (psychiatry and neurology). It stresses how a scientific project can migrate from one subject to another.