Understanding Links Between Punitive Parenting and Adolescent Adjustment: The Relevance of Context and Reciprocal Associations

There is considerable debate regarding the extent to which punitive parenting adversely impacts youth well‐being. Using an ecological–transactional model of human development, we examined reciprocity and contextual variability in associations between maternal punitive discipline and adolescent adjustment among 1,147 low‐income, urban youth followed through adolescence. Longitudinal structural equation modeling results indicated that delinquency and depressive symptoms during pre‐ and early adolescence (Time 1) were associated with increased punitive discipline about a year later (Time 2). When mothers reported less Time 2 neighborhood disorder, punitive discipline at Time 2 was associated with increased delinquency (for boys) and depressive symptoms (for girls) during mid‐ to late adolescence (Time 3). The costs of punitive discipline for adolescent adjustment are best understood considering the dynamic, transactional, and contextual nature of development.     

Differential gaze behavior towards sexually preferred and non-preferred human figures

The gaze pattern associated with image exploration is a sensitive index of our attention, motivation, and preference. To examine whether an individual's gaze behavior can reflect his or her sexual interest, this study compared gaze patterns of young heterosexual men and women (M?=?19.94 years, SD?=?1.05) while they viewed photographs of plain-clothed male and female figures aged from birth to 60 years old. The analysis revealed a clear gender difference in viewing sexually preferred figure images. Men displayed a distinctive gaze pattern only when viewing 20-year-old female images, with more fixations and longer viewing times dedicated to the upper body and waist-hip regions. Women also directed more attention at the upper body on female images in comparison to male images, but this difference was not age-specific. Analysis of local image salience revealed that observers' eye-scanning strategies could not be accounted for by low-level processes, such as analyzing local image contrast and structure, but were associated with attractiveness judgments. The results suggest that the difference in cognitive processing of sexually preferred and non-preferred figures can be manifested in gaze patterns associated with figure viewing. Thus, eye-tracking holds promise as a potential sensitive measure for sexual preference, particularly in men.     

Preference for Flexibility and Random Choice

We study a two‐stage model where the agent has preferences over menus as in Dekel, Lipman, and Rustichini (2001) in the first period and then makes random choices from menus as in Gul and Pesendorfer (2006) in the second period. Both preference for flexibility in the first period and strictly random choices in the second period can be, respectively, rationalized by subjective state spaces. Our main result characterizes the representation where the two state spaces align, so the agent correctly anticipates her future choices. The joint representation uniquely identifies probabilities over subjective states and magnitudes of utilities across states. We also characterize when the agent completely overlooks some subjective states that realize at the point of choice.     

Book reviews

The Good Friday Agreement of 1998 gave an opportunity to remake not just political institutions, but ethno-religious distinction in Northern Ireland. This article looks at how individuals reconstruct their way of being Protestant in Ireland and Northern Ireland in the context of social and political change. It shows individuals renegotiating their ways of being Protestant, attempting sometimes successfully to change its socio-cultural salience, blurring ethnic boundaries, distinguishing religious and ethno-national narratives, drawing universalistic political norms from their particular religious tradition. It argues that these renegotiations are highly sensitive to the macro-political context. Changes in this context affect individuals through their changing cognitive understandings and strategic interests that, at least in this case, are as important to identification as social solidarities.     

“I Help the Ones that Want Help”: Emotion Work and the Victim Advocate Role

Using data gathered from participant observation and 32 individual in-depth interviews, this study examines how victim advocates achieve emotion management in their work with battered women. This research reveals that victim advocates often experience difficulty coping with occupational stress via daily “deep acting” strategies as they work to change their understandings of battered women and the advocate role from the “inside out.” The data reveal that the core of their ability to cope requires victim advocates to redefine their perceived role from “savior” to “options giver” to more accurately define their role interactions with battered women.     

An Integrative Framework for Developing Comprehensive Examinations to Measure Student Social Work Competencies

ABSTRACT

Social work and other professions are endeavoring to promote student proficiency with respect to core competencies of the discipline, and the attainment of these competencies must be demonstrated objectively in some way. This article provides an illustrative guide for social work educators seeking to develop comprehensive examinations to assess students’ acquisition of professional competencies, particularly at the master’s level and across generalist and specialization levels of practice. An integrative framework is presented, highlighting 5 central stages of examination development: planning, creating and implementing, evaluating, revising, and perpetuating. These stages are illustrated with a case example, followed by key conclusions, methodological considerations, and other implications for moving forward on efforts to effectively develop examinations to measure student social work competencies.     

BETWEEN BROADCASTING POLITICAL MESSAGES AND INTERACTING WITH VOTERS

Politicians across Western democracies are increasingly adopting and experimenting with Twitter, particularly during election time. The purpose of this article is to investigate how candidates are using it during an election campaign. The aim is to create a typology of the various ways in which candidates behaved on Twitter. Our research, which included a content analysis of tweets (n?=?26,282) from all twittering Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrat candidates (n?=?416) during the 2010 UK General Election campaign, focused on four aspects of tweets: type, interaction, function and topic. By examining candidates' twittering behaviour, the authors show that British politicians mainly used Twitter as a unidirectional form of communication. However, there were a group of candidates who used it to interact with voters by, for example, mobilizing, helping and consulting them, thus tapping into the potential Twitter offers for facilitating a closer relationship with citizens.     

The Self-serving Bias and Beliefs about Rationality

Most previous experiments attempting to establish the existence of the self-serving bias have confounded it with strategic behavior. We design an experiment that controls for strategic behavior (Haman effects) and isolates the bias itself. The self-serving bias that we measure concerns beliefs about the rationality of others. We find very limited support for the existence of the bias. To help understand why the bias seems to hold in some settings but not in others, we discuss a distinction between biases that are self-serving and those that are actually self-defeating. (JEL C92 )     

Common Mechanisms in Infant and Adult Category Learning

Computational models of infant categorization often fail to elaborate the transitional mechanisms that allow infants to achieve adult performance. In this article, we apply a successful connectionist model of adult category learning to developmental data. The Supervised and Unsupervised Stratified Adaptive Incremental Network (SUSTAIN) model is able to account for the emergence of infants' sensitivity to correlated attributes (e.g., has wings and can fly). SUSTAIN offers 2 complimentary explanations of the developmental trend. One explanation centers on memory storage limitations, whereas the other focuses on limitations in perceptual systems. Both explanations parallel published findings concerning the cognitive and sensory limitations of infants. SUSTAIN's simulations suggest that conceptual development follows a continuous and smooth trajectory despite qualitative changes in behavior and that the mechanisms that underlie infant and adult categorization might not differ significantly.     

Testing the Determinants of Income Distribution in Major League Baseball

Using data from U.S. Major League Baseball, this article compares parametric and nonparametric Gini coefficients for each team and year. We employ a panel-data model to investigate the time-series and cross-sectional factors affecting the Gini coefficients and the parameters of the preselected distribution. We find that much of within-team income distribution is determined by time-related variables, with the 1994 MLB strike having an especially strong effect. A team's market potential does not seem to affect its salary distribution, but the average age of the players on a team's roster does. Furthermore, inequality first increases with team payroll, then decreases before increasing again.