Abusive Supervision and Well-Being of Filipino Migrant Workers in Macau: Consequences for Self-Esteem and Heritage Culture Detachment

Abusive supervision in the workplace has been shown to have important direct consequence in work and work relationship, and also indirect consequences to workers’ well-being and relationships outside work. Consequences of abusive supervision have not been studied among migrant workers whose status in the host country of work is dependent on maintaining the work contract. This study investigates abusive supervision in 247 Filipino migrant workers in Macau, who hold temporary work contracts and work visas to engage in various low-skilled work (e.g., domestic helper, security guard, etc.). The study tests a model representing the indirect consequences of abusive supervision on the self-esteem and acculturation orientation of migrant workers, in particular, on the tendency to reject their heritage culture in their attempt to acculturate in the host country. Mediation analysis indicated that abusive supervisory perceptions led to lower self-esteem (b = ?.19), which in turn relates to tendency to reject their heritage culture as part of acculturation (b = ?.45) [indirect effect = .08, 90 % CI .04, .15]. The rejection of heritage culture is interpreted as a coping response to the negative indirect consequences of abusive supervision perceptions that may be partly attributed to being a migrant Filipino worker. The results are discussed in terms of how the acculturation of migrant workers reflects aspects of their well-being that may be adversely affected by vocational-related stress in the host country.     

Multiple event times in the presence of informative censoring: modeling and analysis by copulas

Motivated by a breast cancer research program, this paper is concerned with the joint survivor function of multiple event times when their observations are subject to informative censoring caused by a terminating event. We formulate the correlation of the multiple event times together with the time to the terminating event by an Archimedean copula to account for the informative censoring. Adapting the widely used two-stage procedure under a copula model, we propose an easy-to-implement pseudo-likelihood based procedure for estimating the model parameters. The approach yields a new estimator for the marginal distribution of a single event time with semicompeting-risks data. We conduct both asymptotics and simulation studies to examine the proposed approach in consistency, efficiency, and robustness. Data from the breast cancer program are employed to illustrate this research.

     

Has Opposition to Immigration Increased in the United States after the Economic Crisis? An Experimental Approach

We employ two population‐level experiments to accurately measure opposition to immigration before and after the economic crisis of 2008. Our design explicitly addresses social desirability bias, which is the tendency to give responses that are seen favorably by others and can lead to substantial underreporting of opposition to immigration. We find that overt opposition to immigration, expressed as support for a closed border, increases slightly after the crisis. However, once we account for social desirability bias, no significant increase remains. We conclude that the observed increase in anti‐immigration sentiment in the post‐crisis United States is attributable to greater expression of opposition rather than any underlying change in attitudes.     

Assessment of Distraction From Erotic Stimuli by Nonerotic Interference

Distraction from erotic cues during sexual encounters is a major contributor to sexual difficulties in men and women. Being able to assess distraction in studies of sexual arousal will help clarify underlying contributions to sexual problems. The current study aimed to identify the most accurate assessment of distraction from erotic cues in healthy men (n = 29) and women (n = 38). Participants were assigned to a no distraction, low distraction, or high distraction condition. Distraction was induced using an auditory distraction task presented during the viewing of an erotic video. Attention to erotic cues was assessed using three methods: a written quiz, a visual quiz, and a self-reported distraction measure. Genital and psychological sexual responses were also measured. Self-reported distraction and written quiz scores most accurately represented the level of distraction present, while self-reported distraction also corresponded with a decrease in genital arousal. Findings support the usefulness of self-report measures in conjunction with a brief quiz on the erotic material as the most accurate and sensitive ways to simply measure experimentally-induced distraction. Insight into distraction assessment techniques will enable evaluation of naturally occurring distraction in patients suffering from sexual problems.     

Behavioral responses of rural and urban greater white-toothed shrews (Crocidura russula) to sound disturbance

Urban Ecosystems - The development of urban areas imposes challenges that wildlife must adapt to in order to persist in these new habitats. One of the greatest changes brought by urbanization has...     

Inference and Decision Making for 21st-Century Drug Development and Approval

ABSTRACT

The cost and time of pharmaceutical drug development continue to grow at rates that many say are unsustainable. These trends have enormous impact on what treatments get to patients, when they get them and how they are used. The statistical framework for supporting decisions in regulated clinical development of new medicines has followed a traditional path of frequentist methodology. Trials using hypothesis tests of “no treatment effect” are done routinely, and the p-value < 0.05 is often the determinant of what constitutes a “successful” trial. Many drugs fail in clinical development, adding to the cost of new medicines, and some evidence points blame at the deficiencies of the frequentist paradigm. An unknown number effective medicines may have been abandoned because trials were declared “unsuccessful” due to a p-value exceeding 0.05. Recently, the Bayesian paradigm has shown utility in the clinical drug development process for its probability-based inference. We argue for a Bayesian approach that employs data from other trials as a “prior” for Phase 3 trials so that synthesized evidence across trials can be utilized to compute probability statements that are valuable for understanding the magnitude of treatment effect. Such a Bayesian paradigm provides a promising framework for improving statistical inference and regulatory decision making.