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The article presents the comments and conclusions on the study of the life and works of developmental psychologist, philosopher and educator Jean Piaget. Diversity of inquiry marks Piaget's work. His work encompasses theory of the origins of intelligence, perception and thought, and child psychology. By using psychiatric examining procedures, he laid down the basis for the modern practice of clinical method of searching questions. Piaget is viewed as the cognitive psychologist who has come up with a theoretical alternative to the constraints of associationism.

The ubiquity and the antiquity of such inequality has given rise to the assumption that there must be something both inevitable and positively functional about such social arrangements. Clearly, the truth or falsity of such an assumption is a strategic question for any general theory of social organization. It is therefore most curious that the basic premises and implications of the assumption have only been most casually explored by American sociologists. The key term here is "functionally important." The functionalist theory of social organization is by no means clear and explicit about this term. The minimum common referent is to something known as the "survival value" of a social structure. This concept immediately involves a number of perplexing questions. Among these are: (a) the issue of minimum vs. maximum survival, and the possible empirical referents which can be given to those terms; (b) whether such a proposition is a useless tautology since any status quo at any given moment is nothing more and nothing less than everything present in the status quo.

The article focuses on American sociological criminologist Edwin Hardin Sutherland. It discusses his contributions in the field of sociology and highlights the sociological and criminological theories propagated by him. His orientation has always been that of sociologist analyzing the criminal behavior and crime from the standpoint of social processes and the impact of social organization and the cultural heritage. Sutherland who passed an active academic career held his first teaching position at the age of 21 at Sioux Falls College, South Dakota and taught in various other universities in the U.S. before moving to the University of Indiana as head of the sociology department in 1935.

Sociologists attempt to extend the ritual of natural science into fields of human experience which heretofore have been regarded as not amenable to such treatment. Sociologists are simply trying to deal scientifically with the phenomena of social systems. These phenomena exist indubitably, whether they can be described scientifically remains to be seen. Sociologists think so, many physicists, biologists, priests, and politicians doubt it, or even assert that it cannot be done. Sociologists observe that this doubt, or assertion, itself is a kind of repetitive regularity in the behavior of man. Sociologists have good grounds for thinking a societal science is possible, though as yet they have not done enough scientific work, they have talked too much. However, they have produced more valid science than most of his scientific and lay brethren recognize or will admit. They themselves are not discouraged because they know that an established science is a cultural phenomenon of slow, accretionary growth.

This article presents data drawn from a study of university sociologists in order to answer three basic questions which concern the correlation between the quantity and the quality of publications of a sociologist, the effect of the status of the graduate department where the sociologist earned his doctorate on the recognition attributed to his research output, and the relationship between early achievement of quality publications and continued achievement of research in the career of a sociologist. Sociologists of science have been concerned with the relationship between a researcher's number of publications and the merit or excellence of a sociologist's writings. In a number of disciplines, a high to moderate correlation is found between quantity and quality of publications. The population for this study consisted of all persons listed in the American Sociological Association Directory who had received their Ph.D. degrees in sociology between 1954 and 1963 and who were members of United States departments of sociology that offered graduate training. To have included sociologists whose degree dates preceded 1954 might have meant the exclusion of the articles from the quantity index. The upper limit of 1963 was applied since it can be assumed that there is a time lag between the period when a social scientist receives his degree and publishes and between such a publishing period and the time when the work is recognized and/or appropriately cited, as in the measure for quality.

The article presents information on various opportunities for employment. Four year liberal arts college requires sociologist to teach courses in methodology, social theory, anthropology, collective behavior, mass communication; flexible choice of additional courses to make up total load 9-12 credit hours; MA and some teaching experience minimum requirement; salary open depending on qualifications attractive campus. Department in leading eastern liberal arts college with growing program. adding faculty at various levels; 9 hour load or less; PhD; consideration will he given to a range of specialties although interest in methods and deviance in especially sought rank and salary dependent upon qualifications.

This article focuses on the recollections of the author on the life of Henry D. Shapiro, former member of the editorial board of the periodical "Appalachian Journal," who died in 2004. He first met Shapiro at the Cratis D. Williams Symposium in 1976. Shapiro submitted a paper for consideration, along with a host of other young scholars and activists who were destined to lead the Appalachian Studies movement and advance the cause. The paper came out, and everyone rushed to read it, and discovered as dense a prose as existed at that time in any discipline this side of educational psychology. After the symposium, the author and Henry D. Shapiro started a correspondence that lasted for over 25 years.

In some countries, government policies to combat Covid-19 have been based on the notion that behavioral fatigue prevents people maintaining self-isolation and other restrictions to their life styles for more than a short time. By 16 March 2020, 681 United Kingdom behavioral scientists had signed an open letter to their government asking it to reveal the evidence that shows that behavioral fatigue exists. Nothing was forthcoming. The provenance of concept remains a mystery but modelers have argued that the delay in implementing lockdown policies, for which it was at least partly responsible, led to the loss of at least 20,000 lives. Here, I consider whether behavioral fatigue is a real phenomenon by assessing (a) direct evidence consistent and inconsistent with its existence and (b) indirect evidence drawn from other domains. I conclude that evidence for it is not sufficient to constrain policy. It is reasonable to conclude that behavioral fatigue is either a naïve construct or a myth that arose during the development of policy designed to tackle the Covid-19 crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Behavioral science , once a hypernym for a collection of fields, is becoming a hyponym of itself. Nonacademic and academic practitioners alike increasingly discuss a "behavioral science," a discipline that consolidates research from the other behavioral sciences to improve humans' (and organizations') predictive and manipulative powers. Despite the usefulness of a shared understanding of behavioral science , few can agree on a definition. After a brief overview of what behavioral scientists do and produce, I provide an inexhaustive list of the predicates behavioral scientists use to interpret the objects, people, and signs of their field and explore the grounding phase parts of objects' or signs' existence that behavioral scientists read to categorize objects or signs. I propose that behavioral scientists have begun to define behavioral science work by classifying objects or signs (which make up their work) using a partonomy in which a behavioral science-ness of a sign is directly positively correlated with the strength of its relation to the signs psychology and economics. Finally, I discuss what this definitional practice suggests for the behavioral science field now and in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rapid advances in Ribonucleic Acid sequencing (or RNA-seq) technology for analyzing entire transcriptomes of desired tissue samples, or even of single cells at scale, have revolutionized biology in the past decade. Increasing accessibility and falling costs are making it possible to address many problems in biology that were once considered intractable, including the study of various social behaviors. RNA-seq is opening new avenues to understand long-standing questions on the molecular basis of behavioral plasticity and individual variation in the expression of a behavior. As whole transcriptomes are examined, it has become possible to make unbiased discoveries of underlying mechanisms with little or no necessity to predict genes involved in advance. However, researchers need to be aware of technical limitations and have to make specific decisions when applying RNA-seq to study social behavior. Here, we provide a perspective on the applications of RNA-seq and experimental design considerations for behavioral scientists who are unfamiliar with the technology but are considering using it in their research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is an increasing imperative for psychologists and other behavioral scientists to understand how people behave on social media. However, it is often very difficult to execute experimental research on actual social media platforms, or to link survey responses to online behavior in order to perform correlational analyses. Thus, there is a natural desire to use self-reported behavioral intentions in standard survey studies to gain insight into online behavior. But are such hypothetical responses hopelessly disconnected from actual sharing decisions? Or are online survey samples via sources such as Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) so different from the average social media user that the survey responses of one group give little insight into the on-platform behavior of the other? Here we investigate these issues by examining 67 pieces of political news content. We evaluate whether there is a meaningful relationship between (i) the level of sharing (tweets and retweets) of a given piece of content on Twitter, and (ii) the extent to which individuals (total N = 993) in online surveys on MTurk reported being willing to share that same piece of content. We found that the same news headlines that were more likely to be hypothetically shared on MTurk were also shared more frequently by Twitter users, r =.44. For example, across the observed range of MTurk sharing fractions, a 20 percentage point increase in the fraction of MTurk participants who reported being willing to share a news headline on social media was associated with 10x as many actual shares on Twitter. We also found that the correlation between sharing and various features of the headline was similar using both MTurk and Twitter data. These findings suggest that self-reported sharing intentions collected in online surveys are likely to provide some meaningful insight into what content would actually be shared on social media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a commentary on an article about the protection of human subjects in field social science research. The paper raises some important questions regarding limitations place on field researchers in the form of policies concerning the protection of human subjects. Most social scientists would agree that field research strategies occupy an important role in attempts to explain and predict human behavior. The paper does little to enlighten readers about the reality of any such threats by such policies regarding human subjects protection in general, and policies concerning approval of field studies in particular. One common misconception held by many sociologists is that researchers must routinely obtain signed statements of informed consent. Alternatively, the requirement of informed consent may be waived when the existence of a signed consent document would be the only record linking the subject and the research and that the only significant risk would be potential harm resulting from breach of confidentiality. The protection of human subjects is a difficult and complex task. However, the importance of such issue for the discipline requires a careful examination of the facts and acquaintance with various procedures on a first-hand-basis.

The article presents comments of various sociologist on issues related to sociology, presented in the American Sociological Association (ASA) roundtable conference. On the question of general agreement of sociologists on what and how to study, Stanford M. Lyman commented that much of conventional sociology has abandoned the discipline's original interest in providing an empirically-tested theory of social reality in the name of a reified conception of methodology. On another question related to conception of order, Herbert Blumer said that, from the standpoint of symbolic interactionism, human group life is a process in which objects are being created, affirmed, transformed and cast aside. Guy Oakes, commented on Weberian rule.

The article presents a report on demography as the discipline. As a field with its own body of interrelated, concepts, techniques, journals, and professional associations, demography is clearly a discipline. But by the nature of its subject matter and methods demography is just as clearly an “interdiscipline,” drawing heavily on biology and sociology for the study of fertility; oil, economics and geography for studies of migration;, and on the health sciences for analyses of mortality. Despite the fact that population theory flourished in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, demographers in the earlier part of the twentieth century tended to eschew theory, which they left to economists and sociologists. Assessing the state of the field almost three decades ago, Philip Hauser and Otis Dudley Duncan noted a number of problems, among which were "the marginal role of the demographer in his discipline of origin." In part this has been due to the demographer's high degree of specialization, which has stimulated an affinity toward disciplines less familiar to sociologists. Within the academe it has led to a number of natural organizational experiments wherein demography has been variously located in departments ranging from public health to rural sociology; even on occasion constituting quasi departments.

This article, a cultural history, attempts to answer the question of how John B. Watson's presence at J. Walter Thompson "made sense" from the standpoint of the actors involved. At the time Watson joined the agency, he had achieved a national reputation as a psychologist, a researcher, and the leader of behaviorist psychology. His doctrine, which recognized prediction and control as the goal of psychology, meshed well not only with broader Progressive concerns of social control, but more particularly with the goals of the business community, and at J. Walter Thompson, with the goals of Stanley B. Resor. Watson's presence at the agency became a "mechanism" through which Resor could implement his philosophy into advertising practice. Watson's work was to help rationalize the advertising process, but at the same time, spoke directly to the admirers of science, legitimating a reality in which decision making based upon "scientific" methods assumed a role of prominence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article the author discusses the need for a reexamination and expansion of the research domain of scholars and practitioners in the field of production/operations management (P/OM). The author notes that while many organizational sociologist accept the idea that P/OM tools are dependent upon organizational design, the actual evidence for this is not very strong. He suggests researching the reverse of this view, noting that many organizations design themselves around a core technology that is known to work and then hire people and pursue markets based on this design.

The article presents the message of the author as the outgoing editor of the journal "The Sociological Quarterly." The author acknowledges the opportunity that he was granted as the editor of this journal. Further, the author also thanks the members and readers of the journal for their support to him. The author found that during his tenure as the editor of this journal, he acquired knowledge on various facets of sociology as a discipline. Besides, he also came across the new developments that took place in the field of sociological research.

The article focuses on strategic planning with organizational development (OD) programs and behavioral science consultants or change agents. OD objectives include increasing trust among organizational members and recognition of problems, opening communication, and creating an environment where authority is based on role and knowledge. This is done with a T-Group method for improving awareness of self, role, and organizational objectives. The basic assumptions in OD concerning people, groups, and organizational systems are discussed, as well as five values and beliefs of behavioral scientists. Synergistic solutions, "Win-Lose" strategy, six key aspects in the action research model, and "Theory Y" are mentioned.

The article presents the author's comments on the proper role of a political scientist or an economist in politics, war, and taxation. The author believes that these experts should look for problems in the society and not merely wait for the questions that are asked of them, for indeed, there will likely be a biased selection of the questions, which would lead the people farther from the truth than biased answers. Furthermore, in order to maximize their value as economists, they should not be loyal to any leader or party, but rather strive with the skills they have and should always seek to improve, to be true to themselves and the people to which they are serving as economists.

Of the social sciences which deal with man and society, only economics, psychology, and sociology have been widely used in marketing. Economics is at the core of much of the content of marketing; psychology has yielded a variety of interviewing and protective testing procedures; sociology has contributed concepts like social class. Marketers have been relatively slow in using anthropological insights and approaches, even though anthropology is also concerned with man and society. This article considers why anthropology has been used relatively seldom, and how it has been and might be employed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a large amount of cross-sectional evidence for a midlife low in the life cycle of human happiness and well-being (a 'U shape'). Yet no genuinely longitudinal inquiry has uncovered evidence for a U-shaped pattern. Thus, some researchers believe the U is a statistical artefact. We re-examine this fundamental cross-disciplinary question. We suggest a new test. Drawing on four data sets, and only within-person changes in well-being, we document powerful support for a U shape in longitudinal data (without the need for formal regression equations). The article's methodological contribution is to use the first-derivative properties of a well-being equation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social sciences are experiencing an anticipatory turn. A core issue of this turn are the so-called 'weak signals'. In order to speak of this type of signals, we must use the distinction between weak and strong. The question may be raised, who handles this distinction? That is, who is the observer? It seems that only two answers are possible: the observer is either outside or inside, i.e., either he is a world-observer, or he is a extra-world-observer. In the latter case, the problem of weak signals disappears; after the fact, everybody is able to say 'I told you!'. In the former case, the system has to face the dilemma of warning signals. As social systems cannot observe themselves from the outside, the issue of weak signals should be explained as the outcome of a self-referential dynamics that finally leads to the paradox of knowing the unknown. In fact, the difference between weak and strong refers not to the future as such (to what is signalized), but to the observing system itself. The main hypothesis of this contribution is that a signal is weak for a lack of redundancy that hinders the system to combine a reference to an environmental event with a concomitant reference to a systemic cognitive map. By means of a system theory of sign, it should be possible to see the difference between weak and strong as an unfolding device for temporal paradoxes arising in social systems, and to support the hypothesis that, since in social systems cognitive maps are contingent on time, signals can be only weak, never strong. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article1, I investigate a special type of argument regarding the role of development in theorizing about psychological processes and cognitive capacities. Among the issues that developmental psychologists study, discovering the ontogenetic trajectory of mechanisms or capacities underpinning our cognitive functions ranks highly. The order in which functions are developed or capacities are acquired is a matter of debate between competing psychological theories, and also philosophical conceptions of the mind - getting the role and the significance of the different steps in this order right could be seen as an important virtue of such theories. Thus, a special kind of strategy in arguments between competing philosophical or psychological theories is using developmental order in arguing for or against a given psychological claim. In this article, I will introduce an analysis of arguments from developmental order, which come in two general types: arguments emphasizing the importance of the early cognitive processes and arguments emphasizing the late cognitive processes. I will discuss their role in one of the central tools for evaluating scientific theories, namely in making inferences to the best explanation. I will argue that appeal to developmental order is, by itself, an insufficient criterion for theory choice and has to be part of an argument based on other core explanatory or empirical virtues. I will end by proposing a more concerted study of philosophical issues concerning (cognitive) development, and I will present some topics that also pertain to a full-fledged 'philosophy of development.' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the interpretation of the replication crisis in psychology as a social dilemma for early-career researchers. Topics covered include two fundamental characteristics of social dilemmas, structural and motivational solutions to social dilemmas, and the reason why behavioral scientists are not interested in conducting replication studies. Also provided are proposals for structural solutions, including the establishment of specific forums in which to publish replications.

Understanding the nature and influence of social relationships is of increasing interest to behavioral economists, and behavioral scientists more generally. In turn, this creates a need for tractable, and reliable, tools for measuring fundamental aspects of social relationships. We provide a comprehensive evaluation of the 'Inclusion of the Other in the Self' (IOS) Scale, a handy pictorial tool for measuring the subjectively perceived closeness of a relationship. The tool is highly portable, very easy for subjects to understand and takes less than 1 minute to administer. Across our three online studies with a diverse adult population (n = 772) we show that six different scales designed to measure relationship closeness are all highly significantly positively correlated with the IOS Scale. We then conduct a Principal Component Analysis to construct an Index of Relationship Closeness and find that it correlates very strongly (ρ = 85) with the IOS Scale. We conclude that the IOS Scale is a psychologically meaningful and highly reliable measure of the subjective closeness of relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A universal challenge faced by developing countries these days is the inequitable distribution of health professionals, which compromises the capacity of the health system to deliver efficient and effective health care. Availability of reliable data on medical graduates is important for health planning and development of policies and plans dealing with health workforce labour market. Objectives: To determine the proportion of medical graduates who remained affiliated with the profession three to six years after graduation from a private medical school, To find out the specialty selection and practice location of these graduates, and to determine the association between their gender and affiliation with the profession. Methods: A cross-sectional study was undertaken at the Lahore Medical & Dental College from March to May 2014 selecting graduates through convenience sampling. The graduates were contacted through e-mail, Facebook and telephone. After obtaining voluntary informed consent from the respondents, a pre-tested structured questionnaire was used to collect information.The data was recorded and analysed using the statistical package for social sciences version 16.0. Chi-square test is used to test statistical significance between respondent's gender and their affiliation with the medical profession at p ≤ 0.05. Results: A large proportion 98(88%) of medical graduates remained affiliated with the profession. Those who didn't pursue it were all females (p ≤0.05). Majority 86(88%) were located in Pakistan. A greater proportion worked in the tertiary health care facilities 65(94%). The popular specialty being pursued was medicine 24(24%). Conclusion: Female medical graduates should be provided opportunities for part time work.Medical schools should provide early and prolonged exposure of students to primary health care facilities, in order to increase their uptake of rural postings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents comments on "Chemists in British Universities: A Study of the Reward System in Science," by sociologists S.S. Blume and Ruth Sinclair. The author finds many flaws in their study. Blume and Sinclair do not report tests for the significance of gamma. Such tests might have indicated a need to re-interpret the their conclusion that "when productivity is held constant the association between recognition and industrial involvement falls substantially. They might have tried an even more appropriate strategy to determine the effect of the third variable (Productivity). James A. Davis (1967) has suggested a procedure for computing a partial gamma, a statistic that has a "proportionate reduction in error" interpretation. When computed for the data this partial gamma has a value of .33. Again, although there has been a decrease in the size of the coefficient, the original relationship has by no means been destroyed. Statistical refinement mentioned would yield plausible alternate interpretations of the data.

Hereditary factors are increasingly attracting the interest of behavioral scientists and practitioners. Our aim in the present article is to introduce some state-of-the-art topics in behavioral genetics, as well as selected findings in the field, in order to illustrate how genetic makeup can modulate the impact of environmental factors. We focus on the most-studied polymorphism to date for antisocial responses to adversity: the monoamine oxidase A gene. Advances, caveats, and promises of current research are reviewed. We also discuss implications for the use of genetic information in applied settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, economists and behavioral scientists have studied the pattern of human well-being over the lifespan. In dozens of countries, and for a large range of well-being measures, including happiness and mental health, well-being is high in youth, falls to a nadir in midlife, and rises again in old age. The reasons for this U-shape are still unclear. Present theories emphasize sociological and economic forces. In this study we show that a similar U-shape exists in 508 great apes (two samples of chimpanzees and one sample of orangutans) whose well-being was assessed by raters familiar with the individual apes. This U-shaped pattern or "midlife crisis" emerges with or without use of parametric methods. Our results imply that human well-being's curved shape is not uniquely human and that, although it may be partly explained by aspects of human life and society, its origins may lie partly in the biology we share with great apes. These findings have implications across scientific and social-scientific disciplines, and may help to identify ways of enhancing human and ape well-being. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The disagreement between philosophers about the scientific worth of the evolutionary behavioral sciences (evolutionary psychology, human behavioral ecology, etc.) is in part due to the fact that critics and advocates of these sciences characterize them very differently. In this article, by analyzing quantitatively the citations made in the articles published in Evolution & Human Behavior between January 2000 and December 2002, we provide some evidence that undermines the characterization of the evolutionary behavioral sciences put forward by their critics. 1 Four Claims about the Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences 1.1 The disparaging characterization 1.2 Evolutionary behavioral scientists’ acquaintance with the biological sciences and with evolutionary biology 1.3 Evolutionary behavioral scientists and the evolutionary biology of the 1960s and 1970s 1.4 Evolutionary behavioral scientists and sociobiology 1.5 The homogeneity of the evolutionary behavioral sciences2 Quantitative Citation Analysis 2.1 The usual philosophical method 2.2 Quantitative citation analysis 2.3 Operationalizing the controversy 2.4 A plea for quantitative analyses3 Methods and Preliminary Analyses 3.1 Methods 3.2 Analysis by publication date 3.3 Analysis by authors’ disciplinary affiliation4 Hypothesis 1: Are Evolutionary Behavioral Scientists Sufficiently Influenced by Biology in General and by Evolutionary Biology in Particular?5 Hypothesis 2: Are Evolutionary Behavioral Scientists Unduly Influenced by the Evolutionary Biology of the 1970s?6 Hypothesis 3: What is the Relation between Sociobiology and the Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences?7 Hypothesis 4: Do the Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences Divide into Competing Paradigms?8 An Evidence-based Characterization of the Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Was Durkheim an apologist for the authoritarianism? Is the sociology founded upon his work incapable of critical perspective; and must it operate under the presumption that social agents, including sociologists themselves, are incapable of reflexivity? Certainly some have said so, but they may be wrong. In this essay, I address these questions in the light of Durkheim's revisionary . I elaborate on unfinished elements in Durkheim's abruptly concluded (because of his early and unexpected death) scholarship, pointing out Durkheim's recognition that co-present moral spheres always exist in an organically complex society, and explaining how these co-present spheres obligate social agents to untether from any absolute moral affiliations. Ultimately, then, the argument shows how the solidarity/social-order relationship is transcended within Durkheim's sociology, even by Durkheim himself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Advances in the science and observation of climate change are providing a clearer understanding of the inherent variability of Earth’s climate system and its likely response to human and natural influences. The implications of climate change for the environment and society will depend not only on the response of the Earth system to changes in radiative forcings, but also on how humankind responds through changes in technology, economies, lifestyle and policy. Extensive uncertainties exist in future forcings of and responses to climate change, necessitating the use of scenarios of the future to explore the potential consequences of different response options. To date, such scenarios have not adequately examined crucial possibilities, such as climate change mitigation and adaptation, and have relied on research processes that slowed the exchange of information among physical, biological and social scientists. Here we describe a new process for creating plausible scenarios to investigate some of the most challenging and important questions about climate change confronting the global community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Logistic regression estimates do not behave like linear regression estimates in one important respect: They are affected by omitted variables, even when these variables are unrelated to the independent variables in the model. This fact has important implications that have gone largely unnoticed by sociologists. Importantly, we cannot straightforwardly interpret log-odds ratios or odds ratios as effect measures, because they also reflect the degree of unobserved heterogeneity in the model. In addition, we cannot compare log-odds ratios or odds ratios for similar models across groups, samples, or time points, or across models with different independent variables in a sample. This article discusses these problems and possible ways of overcoming them. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the 'canonical' status achieved in recent British sociology by four writers: Zygmunt Bauman, Ulrich Beck, Pierre Bourdieu and Anthony Giddens. Along with other key thinkers of the later 20th century such as Foucault and Habermas, these four sociologists, from different geographical and theoretical bases, transformed the shape of British sociology and its relation to social theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article has two broad objectives: (a) It reviews the theoretical and practical literature on the use of games to facilitate social and emotional learning (SEL). (b) Based on this review, it argues that games are a powerful way of developing social and emotional learning in young people. In addition, we draw on our collective experience as educational psychologists to identify effective practice when using games to teach SEL. The social and emotional skills needed to play successfully with others are those needed to succeed at work and in adult life. Prosocial skills involve regulating negative emotions, taking turns and sharing, support orientations to others that are fair, just, and respectful. The natural affiliation between children, play, and the desire to have fun with others makes games an ideal vehicle for teaching SEL. Circle Time games are used to support universal programs for teaching SEL to whole classes. Therapeutic board games provide an effective intervention for young people who have been targeted for further guided practice in small group settings. Verbatim quotations from students and teachers demonstrate ways in which SEL has generalized to real-life situations. The role of facilitator is crucial to the success of this approach, both in modeling appropriate skills and making the learning connections for students. In this article, facilitation and debriefing are deconstructed and the value of collaborative, rather than competitive, aspects of games highlighted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we argue that, in order for white racial consciousness and practice to shift toward an antiracist praxis, a relational understanding of racism, the “self,” and society is necessary. We find that such understanding arises from a confluence of propositional, affective, and tacit forms of knowledge about racism and one's own situatedness within it. We consider the claims sociologists have made about transformations in racial consciousness, bringing sociological theories of racism into dialogue with research on whiteness and antiracism. We assert that sociological research on white racism and “whiteness” tends to privilege propositional and tacit/common sense knowledge, respectively, as critical to shifting white racial consciousness. Research on antiracism privileges affective knowledge as the source of antiracist change. We examine some of Perry's recent ethnographic research with white people who attended either multiracial or majority white high schools to argue that the confluence of these three types of knowledge is necessary to transform white racial praxis because it produces a relational understanding of self and “other,” and, by extension, race, racism, and antiracist practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The witness has become a key figure of our time, whether as the survivor testifying to what he has lived through or as the third party telling what he has seen or heard. Publicly bearing witness of suffering and injustice is precisely what departs the first (International Red Cross) and second (Doctors without Borders, Doctors of the World) ages of humanitarianism. Based on an etymological inquiry of the word in Greek and Latin and on an ethnographical investigation into the production of documents on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, this analysis of the politics of testimony shows how the humanitarian agents define the legitimate manner to tell the world the “victims' truth.” In particular, the increasing presence of psychiatrists and psychologists on the field introduces a new vision in which trauma appears less as a clinical category than as a political argument. This process of subjectification of Palestinians but also of Israelis as victims, which institutes their experience and condition as shared, leaves aside both the individual and collective histories of the subjects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Jeffrey Alexander’s recent book on cultural sociology argues that sociologists must grant the realm of ideas autonomy to determine behavior, unencumbered by interference from instrumental or material factors. He criticizes the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu as “weak” for failing to give autonomy to culture by reducing it to self-interested behavior that immediately reflects class position. However, Alexander’s arguments seriously distort and misstate Bourdieu’s theory, which provides for the relative autonomy of culture through the concepts of habitus and field. Because habitus is a set of durable dispositions conditioned by past structures, it may contradict the changed structures of the present. Further, the influence of the habitus is always mediated by the structure and strategies of the field of contest in which it is deployed, so that the same habitus may motivate different actions in different circumstances. However, Alexander is correct to argue that in Bourdieu’s theory culture generally serves to reproduce, not contradict social structures. Yet Bourdieu addresses this and other problems in his later work, in which he argues for the existence of certain cultural universals transcending particular structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Academic popularizers of the new field of evolutionary psychology make notable appeals to William James to bolster their doctrine. In particular, they cite James’ remark that humans have all the “impulses” animals do and many more besides to shore up their claim that people’s “instincts” account for their flexibility. This essay argues that these scholars misinterpret James on the instincts. Consciousness (which they find inscrutable) explains cognitive flexibility for James. The evolutionary psychologists’ appeal to James is, therefore, unwarranted and, given the conditions relevant to the public and professional audiences they address, also ineffective as a rhetorical tool for enlisting new recruits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political psychologists have typically argued that ideological commitments are structured in a bipolar fashion, where a positive evaluation of conservative objects implies a negative evaluation of liberal objects (and vice versa). Individual differences in conformity to this pattern are usually attributed to an ability-related variable, i.e., political expertise. Departing from this strict focus on ability, this study examines the hypotheses that an important motivational variable—the need to evaluate, or the desire to form opinions of objects as “good” or “bad”—would (1) predict deviations from ideological bipolarity, even controlling for expertise; and (2) moderate the relationship between expertise and deviations from bipolarity. Data from two national surveys provided evidence for these hypotheses and indicated that the results extended to deviations from bipolarity in evaluations of presidential candidates and political parties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that in an age of knowing capitalism, sociologists have not adequately thought about the challenges posed to their expertise by the proliferation of 'social' transactional data which are now routinely collected, processed and analysed by a wide variety of private and public institutions. Drawing on British examples, we argue that whereas over the past 40 years sociologists championed innovative methodological resources, notably the sample survey and the in-depth interviews, which reasonably allowed them to claim distinctive expertise to access the 'social' in powerful ways, such claims are now much less secure. We argue that both the sample survey and the in-depth interview are increasingly dated research methods, which are unlikely to provide a robust base for the jurisdiction of empirical sociologists in coming decades. We conclude by speculating how sociology might respond to this coming crisis through taking up new interests in the 'politics of method'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article revisits the much neglected work of Viola Klein, one of the first sociologists of women in Britain. Her contribution to sociology lies both in her innovative work on patriarchal conceptions of seemingly scientific knowledge about women, undertaken under the tutelage of Karl Mannheim, and in her empirical studies of women's changing position in the labour market.The article places her work in a biographical as well as theoretical context and raises issues about the impact of her triple marginality as a Jewish refugee to Britain, a woman in search of an academic career, and as a public sociologist in women's studies, at the time not seen as a mainstream field in sociology, nor uniformly understood by later waves of feminist theorists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reviews the empirical research on prayer and health and offers a research agenda to guide future studies. Though many people practice prayer and believe it affects their health, scientific evidence is limited. In keeping with a general increase in interest in spirituality and complementary and alternative treatments, prayer has garnered attention among a growing number of behavioral scientists. The effects of distant intercessory prayer are examined by meta-analysis and it is concluded that no discernable effects can be found. The literature regarding frequency of prayer, content of prayer, and prayer as a coping strategy is subsequently reviewed. Suggestions for future research include the conduct of experimental studies based on conceptual models that include precise operationally defined constructs, longitudinal investigations with proper measure of control variables, and increased use of ecological momentary assessment techniques. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author reflects on the study by psychologists Mario Mikulincer and Phillip R. Shaver on the positive effects of security-enhancing interventions. He focuses his attention on some of the remaining questions the researchers identify. In particular, Mikulincer and Shaver point out that much research remains to be done to identify the precise mechanisms whereby security primes have their effects and to work toward interventions that might be long lasting.

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Kwiatkowski, Duncan and Shimmin (2006) wrote a provocative essay that touches upon a number of issues. The primary thesis of the article is that occupational and organizational (or I-O) psychology lacks a historical memory and, more pointedly, neglects British contributions. I am delighted that their essay is being published in the Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, and I am pleased to have an opportunity to provide one Yank's perspective on these important issues. My commentary reacts to the main arguments, but also touches upon some other issues raised by the authors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]