The Industrial Context of Occupational Mobility: Change in Structure

The neglect of a consideration of history has been a feature of mobility research. ‘History’ affects the results of analyses of social mobility by altering the occupational/industrial structure and by encouraging exchange mobility. Changes in industrial structure are rooted more directly in historical causes and can be seen as more fundamental than changes in occupational structure. Following a substantial review of the secondary literature on changes in industrial and occupational structure in Northern Ireland, loglinear analyses of intra- and intergenerational mobility tables for sociologically-derived cohort generations that incorporate occupational and industrial categories are presented. Structural and inheritance effects for industry are as significant as those for occupation. Given the well-established finding of ‘constant social fludity’ in mobility tables once structural effects are controlled, the inclusion of categorization by industry is necessary in order to reach an accurate understanding of occupational mobility and the role of historical change in mobility.

Making the law accessible to non-lawyers: effects of different kinds of expertise on perceived usability of online legal information services

To help design an environment in which professionals without legal training can make effective use of public sector legal information on planning and the environment - for Add-Wijzer, a European e-government project - we evaluated their perceptions of usefulness and usability. In concurrent think-aloud usability tests, lawyers and non-lawyers carried out information retrieval tasks on a range of online legal databases. We found that non-lawyers reported twice as many difficulties as those with legal training (p = 0.001), that the number of difficulties and the choice of database affected successful completion, and that the non-lawyers had surprisingly few problems understanding legal terminology. Instead, they had more problems understanding the syntactical structure of legal documents and collections. The results support the constraint attunement hypothesis (CAH) of the effects of expertise on information retrieval, with implications for the design of systems to support the effective understanding and use of information.

Line intensity enhancements in stellar coronal X-ray spectra due to opacity effects

Context. The I(15.01 Å)/I(16.78 Å) emission line intensity ratio in Fe xvii has been reported to deviate from its theoretical value
in solar and stellar X-ray spectra. This is attributed to opacity in the 15.01 Å line, leading to a reduction in its intensity, and was
interpreted in terms of a geometry in which the emitters and absorbers are spatially distinct.
Aims. We study the I(15.01 Å)/I(16.78 Å) intensity ratio for the active cool dwarf EV Lac, in both flare and quiescent spectra.
Methods. The observations were obtained with the Reflection Grating Spectrometer on the XMM-Newton satellite. The emission
measure distribution versus temperature reconstruction technique is used for our analysis.
Results. We find that the 15.01 Å line exhibits a significant enhancement in intensity over the optically thin value. To our knowledge,
this is the first time that such an enhancement has been detected on such a sound statistical basis. We interpret this enhancement
in terms of a geometry in which the emitters and absorbers are not spatially distinct, and where the geometry is such that resonant
pumping of the upper level has a greater effect on the observed line intensity than resonant absorption in the line-of-sight.

A Longitudinal Study of the Effects of Childhood Trauma on Symptoms and Functioning of People with Severe Mental Health Problems

This study examines the relationship between childhood trauma and the psychiatric symptoms and psychosocial functioning of adults with severe mental health problems. Participants (n = 31) were recruited from the caseloads of community mental health services in Northern Ireland and assessed at baseline, 9 months, and 18 months. More than half had a history of childhood trauma (n = 17). There were no differences between the no childhood trauma (n = 14) and childhood trauma groups on psychiatric symptoms, but a significant relationship was found between trauma history and all aspects of social functioning. Those with no history of trauma showed improved psychosocial functioning over time, whereas those with a history of trauma deteriorated. These findings have implications for current service provision.

Cue Competition Effects and Young Children's Causal and Counterfactual Inferences

The authors examined cue competition effects in young children using the blicket detector paradigm, in which objects are placed either singly or in pairs on a novel machine and children must judge which objects have the causal power to make the machine work. Cue competition effects were found in a 5- to 6-year-old group but not in a 4-year-old group. Equivalent levels of forward and backward blocking were found in the former group. Children's counterfactual judgments were subsequently examined by asking whether or not the machine would have gone off in the absence of I of 2 objects that had been placed on it as a pair. Cue competition effects were demonstrated only in 5- to 6-year-olds using this mode of assessing causal reasoning.

Are Shy Adults Really Bolder Online? It Depends on the Context

We examined whether individual differences in shyness and context influenced the amount of computer-mediated self-disclosure and use of affective language during an unfamiliar dyadic social interaction. Unfamiliar young adults were selected for high and low self-reported shyness and paired in mixed dyads (one shy and one nonshy). Each dyad was randomly assigned to either a live webcam or no webcam condition. Participants then engaged in a 20-minute online free chat over the Internet in the laboratory. Free chat conversations were archived, and the transcripts were objectively coded for traditional communication variables, conversational style, and the use of affective language. As predicted, shy adults engaged in significantly fewer spontaneous self-disclosures than did their nonshy counterparts only in the webcam condition. Shy versus nonshy adults did not differ on spontaneous self-disclosures in the no webcam condition. However, context did not influence the use of computer-mediated affective language. Although shy adults used significantly less active and pleasant words than their nonshy counterparts, these differences were not related to webcam condition. The present findings replicate and extend earlier work on shyness, context, and computer-mediated communication to a selected sample of shy adults. Findings suggest that context may influence some, but not all, aspects of social communication in shy adults.

Is shyness context specific? Relation between shyness and online self-disclosure with and without a live webcam in young adults

The Internet provides a new tool to investigate old questions in experimental social psychology regarding Person x Context interaction. We examined the interaction of self-reported shyness and context on computer-mediated communication measures. Sixty female undergraduates unfamiliar were paired in dyads and engaged in a 10 min free chat conversation on the Internet with and without a live webcam. Free chat conversations were archived, transcripts were objectively coded for communication variables, and a linear mixed model used for data analysis of dyadic interaction was performed on each communication measure. As predicted, increases in self-reported shyness were significantly related to decreases in the number of prompted self-disclosures (after controlling for the number of opportunities to self-disclose) only in the webcam condition. Self-reported shyness was not related to the number of prompted self-disclosures in the no webcam condition, suggesting that shyness was context dependent. The present study appears to be the first to objectively code measures of Internet behaviour in relation to the study of personality in general and shyness in particular. Theoretical and clinical implications for understanding the contextual nature of shyness are discussed. (C) 2006 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Right-wing authoritarianism, social dominance orientation and prejudice against threatening and competitive ethnic groups

This research rests on the assumption that individual differences approaches to prejudice benefit from all integration of intergroup factors. Following Duckitt (2001), we assumed that two prominent individual differences variables, right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) and social dominance orientation (SDO), would differentially predict majority members' levels of ethnic prejudice depending on specific factors of the intergroup context: RWA as all index of motivational concerns about social cohesion, stability and security should drive prejudice against outgroups perceived as socially threatening, and SDO as an index of concerns about ingroup superiority and dominance should predict prejudice against outgroups perceived as potential competitors for power-status. Across two studies (Ns = 82, 176), using between-participants and within-participants experimental designs, the effects of RWA on prejudice were particularly powerful when the outgroup was manipulated to be socially threatening, but the effects of SDO on prejudice appeared not to increase when the outgroup was manipulated to be competitive. In Study 2, presenting the outgroup as having low status also increased the effect of RWA, but not the effect of SDO. These results support the differential prediction assumption for RWA, but not for SDO. Implications for the conceptualisation of RWA and SDO are discussed. Copyright (C) 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Do dynamic work instructions provide an advantage over static instructions in a small scale assembly task?

Recent studies exploring the effects of instructional animations on learning compared to static graphics have yielded mixed results. Few studies have explored their effectiveness in portraying procedural-motor information. Opportunities exist within an applied (manufacturing) context for instructional animations to be used to facilitate build performance on an assembly line. The present study compares build time performance across successive builds when using animation, static diagrams or text instructions to convey an assembly sequence for a handheld device. Although an immediate facilitating effect of animation was found, yielding a significantly faster build time for Build 1, this advantage had disappeared by Build 3. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Interpersonal Aspects of Thinking Skills in an Intercultural Language Learning Context

Asking and answering certain types of questions are thought to develop thinking skills in all types of classrooms. Previous research has demonstrated that asking higher order questions and answering with elaborated responses are associated with high achievement in first, second, and foreign language contexts. Typically more attention is paid to question frequency or achievements inferred from individual performances than to the dialogues in which asking and answering occurs. This paper argues for a focus on the construction of responses in interaction as an alternative to the investigation of questions, effects of training or individual measurements of performance. Drawing on interactional data from an adult English as a Second Language classroom, it is argued that constructing an answer to a critical question appears to be a highly collaborative and evaluative affair. The thinking skills literature suggests that responding to higher order questions is an individual higher cognitive function, however it is argued in this paper that in attempting to construct evaluative answers language learners are involved not only in a cognitive task, which may or may not be helpful to language learning, but also in a complex social task in which perspectives need to be negotiated, stances taken and identities navigated. It is suggested that higher order thinking cannot be separated from the social and cultural knowledge through which it is brought into being. It is argued that any implementation of thinking skills in an English language teaching context ought to consider interpersonal and social aspects, particularly in intercultural settings.