Interpreting the changeable meaning of hashtags: Toward the theorization of a model

This study contributes to the international debate on the hashtag's nature and characteristics and attempts to define it as a relational social form affected by morphogenetic-morphostatic processes. To develop this interpretative proposal, this study uses the dimensions of time and agency, drawing on Twitter hashtag studies. Subsequently, the article recalls elements of cultural morphogenesis, traces the points of contact between hashtag studies and cultural morphogenesis, constructs an interpretative proposal of the hashtag as a relational social form, and arrives at the formalization of a model for analyzing the changing meaning of hashtags.

Sustainability pedagogy: Understanding, exploring and internalizing nature's complexity and coherence

Online learning during the COVID-19 pandemic has affected student academic performance as well as mental, physical, and social wellbeing. During a lockdown at the University of Toronto in Canada (September 2020-April 2021), my students expressed an underlying sense of monotony yet uncertainty. I recalled a contrasting paradox from the teachings of Indigenous Cree on mental wellness in land-based experiences: a sense of stimulation and security that we can liken to variations of Appleton's prospect-refuge theory. I modified my Environmental Science and Pathways to Sustainability course to support stimulation and security through embodied, interactive pedagogy at student-selected individual field sites. My main goals were to (i) support student mental wellness and (ii) provide an alternative to experiential field trips for understanding and connecting with nature as an adaptive complex system. I prompted students with field activities contextualized by a course narrative that purposefully directed attention to nature through intrinsically motivated curiosity, exploration, and discovery; conditions more similar to evolutionary environments of adaptedness than "getting away" in passive retreats. Student weekly field observations and reflections culminated in a post-intervention Reflection Assignment (n = 15) which became the bases of thematic and narrative analysis. Other assignments were added to my evaluation of complexity comprehension. The intervention successfully instilled security and stimulation via purpose-directed attention to different aspects of nature in the same setting followed by periods of knowledge integration. This empowered students with sustainability mindsets indicated by greater self-reported: sense of coherence, change agency, cognitive and affective restoration, nature connectedness, nature relatedness, social connectedness, and pro-environmental values. Assignments demonstrated an understanding of the environment as an adaptive complex system that was not present at the beginning of the course. Some students' self-construct adopted nature and its complexity, empowering them with greater trait resilience. This work speaks to opportunities for merging psychological restoration and analytical curricula by integrating cognitive and sensory meaningfulness in sustainability narratives. It asks scholars to reflect on how we operationalize foundational theories of Environmental Psychology based on ancestral survival conditions and encourages empirical research to consider how sociocultural contexts can direct attention to nature through purposeful inquiry.

An integrative literature review and critical reflection on nurses' agency

The idea of agency has long been used in the nursing literature in the study of nurses' roles regarding the patients they take care of, but it has not often been used to study its relationship with nurses themselves and their status in the healthcare system. The purpose of this article is to analyze how the idea of agency is used in nursing research to better understand how we might advance our thinking around nurses' agency to shape nursing and healthcare with an emancipatory intent. Based on the results of a literature review focused on the study of conceptions, treatments, and applications of the concept of agency in nursing, we present a critical discussion to reflect on the need to consistently define the idea of nurses' agency, to guide research concerned with this topic in theoretical frameworks with emancipatory and social change tenets, and to make a call to develop the idea of agency as a central one to rework nurses' relationship with themselves. The idea of agency provides a valuable analytical framework for the study of a wide range of issues around nurses' status in healthcare organizations and in the healthcare system while offering a means for nurses' emancipation.

Who is expected to make contact? Interpretative repertoires related to an intergroup encounter between Finnish majority mothers and immigrant mothers

Although the benefits of contact for positive intergroup relations are widely acknowledged, less is known about how group members construct the agency and responsibility of contact participants in intergroup encounters. Using critical discursive psychology, we analysed the interpretative repertoires that Finnish majority mothers (N = 13) and mothers with an immigrant background (N = 10) used when talking about a hypothetical intergroup encounter among Finnish and immigrant mothers in a 'family café' (a group for mothers and children). Our analysis identified five interpretative repertoires that differed in terms of the levels of categorization used (individual, group, motherhood) and how agency and responsibility for initiating contact were discursively attributed to the parties in the intergroup encounter. Overall, constructing someone as agentic did not automatically result in their being portrayed as more responsible for making contact. Respondents described contact to occur with only two repertoires, in which both agency and responsibility for initiating contact were discursively attributed to the same party. This highlights the need to consider both agency and sense of responsibility as possible factors preceding intergroup contact.

On welfare pluralism, social policy and the contribution of sociology: Revisiting Robert Pinker

On occasion it makes sound sense to undertake a retrospective review of a late colleague's contribution to his or her subject area. This applies to Robert Pinker, Professor of Social Administration at the London School of Economics, who died at the age of 89 in February 2021. Over a long life he made a major impact on working for press freedom and to social work studies, but this article concerns his work on social policy, and particularly on the idea of welfare pluralism, a many-faceted idea the exploration of which powered two pathbreaking books Social Theory and Social Policy (1971) and The Idea of Welfare (1979). In the twentieth century many states including the United Kingdom had greatly expanded their welfare provisions for their citizens, and, in some, an academic subject area, often called social administration or social policy had grown in response. Pinker started writing in the 1960s, dissatisfied with the conventional approach of Richard Titmuss and others, almost exclusively concerned with the state and welfare. He made the case for a radical rebalance toward including everyday experiences of obligations and how familial informal welfare practices are strengthened, weakened or modified by formal social services. However, ahead of his time, Pinker was arguing for an enhanced sociological imagination in the study of social policy and on the very idea of "welfare". This article has sections reflecting the facets of Pinker's thinking about welfare pluralism, including "social policy's past", "exchange and stigma", "taking informal welfare seriously", "divergent views of altruism", "comparative studies", "on a mixture of means to welfare" and "aspects of Pinker's legacy". The idea of welfare pluralism is now familiar. But Pinker's crucial pioneering role, depth of understanding of the issues and grasp of their intertwining is seldom recalled. This article should help to meet the need for his contribution to be reinserted into the mainstream of sociological thought on welfare, so enriching new research.

Luck Egalitarianism and COVID-19: The Case for Compensating Children for School Closures

The Covid-19 pandemic resulted in school closures around the world, leaving lasting negative impacts on many children. Given that such closures are justified public health measures, this raises the question of compensating children for school closures. In this article I address the question of compensation from the perspective of a popular theory of justice: luck egalitarianism. In doing so, I examine a problem with applying luck egalitarianism to children, called the agency assumption. I then argue this assumption results in a dilemma for luck egalitarianism and suggest how this dilemma can be overcome. I argue that the resulting form of luck egalitarianism reveals something interesting about compensating children for school closures: luck egalitarianism requires us to address all bases of justice-relevant inequality among children—Covid-19-related and beyond. Although much of the current discussion of compensating children for such closures has focused narrowly on the need to make up for lost instruction time or to prevent reductions in educational achievement, I argue that a luck egalitarian conception of justice requires us to go beyond merely compensating children for educational losses and instead aim for radical equality in education.

Hope, agency, and adolescents' sexual and reproductive health: A mini review

Availability of and access to services that promote sexual and reproductive health (SRH) amongst adolescent girls have become a global priority. Yet, while researchers have explored factors that influence the uptake of SRH services in low-and-middle income countries, the roles that "agency" and "hope" play in adolescent SRH is less understood. To study this, this mini review systematically reviewed the literature across three databases, EBSCO-host web, Pubmed and South Africa (SA) epublications, for the period of January 2012 to January 2022. Findings showed that a paucity of studies identified the link between agency, hope and adolescent SRH respectively. Our review included 12 articles and found no studies that focused on hope and its role in adolescent SRH or seeking SRH services. However, the literature revealed the complexities of adolescent SRH agency and autonomy where female adolescents had limited autonomy to make SRH decisions. Limited access to adolescent friendly SRH services was also found to restrict girls' agency to prevent unintended pregnancies or to take up SRH support. Given the paucity of research, empirical studies are needed to further understand the extent to which hope, agency and other subjective factors implicate adolescent SRH in the African context.

Expectations of respect and appreciation in daily life and associations with subclinical cardiovascular disease

OBJECTIVE

To test whether expectations of respect and appreciation from others, assessed in daily life, are associated with preclinical vascular disease.

METHOD

Participants were an urban community sample of 483 employed adults (47% male, 17% Black, mean age = 42.8 years). Carotid intima-media thickness (IMT) was measured using B-mode ultrasound. Expectations of being treated with respect and appreciation were measured using the average of hourly assessments over the course of 4 days, and home and work averages were also examined separately.

RESULTS

Expectations of greater respect and appreciation from others were associated with significantly less carotid IMT even after adjustment for demographic factors, general positivity and negativity of social interactions, neuroticism, optimism, perceived discrimination, and concurrent biological risk factors. This association was similar across social contexts of work and home and also when expectations of respect and appreciation were examined separately. Lower expectations of respect and appreciation and more negative social interactions were both independently associated with greater IMT in fully adjusted models and effect sizes were similar to traditional biological risk factors such as BMI.

CONCLUSIONS

Midlife adults who anticipate greater respect and appreciation from others in everyday life evidence less preclinical vascular disease. Consistent with the literature showing that anticipation of social threats and unfair treatment may increase cardiovascular risk, expectations of being valued and treated with respect by others is associated with decreased risk. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Religion and Responsibility-Taking Among Offenders in Colombia and South Africa: A Qualitative Assessment of a Faith-Based Program in Prison

This paper examines whether religion contributes to offenders taking responsibility for crimes. Specifically, we assessed whether participation in The Prisoner's Journey (TPJ), a bible study program, increased or decreased responsibility-taking. We also examined whether religious offenders that did not participate in TPJ were likely to take responsibility for their offenses. For this study, we conducted a quasi-experiment in two Colombian and five South African prisons from 2018 to 2019, collecting data from personal interviews with a total of 73 inmates-42 TPJ participants and 31 non-participants-before and after the program. Offenders frequently offered subtle accounts of responsibility that incorporated their own agency with other factors. Highly religious offenders were equally likely to take responsibility, and in some cases participation in TPJ heightened responsibility. In sum, this paper presents evidence that religious beliefs and practice are commensurate with responsibility-taking and desistance from crime.

Interpersonal problems and recognition of facial emotions in healthy individuals

Background

Recognition of emotions in faces is important for successful social interaction. Results from previous research based on clinical samples suggest that difficulties in identifying threat-related or negative emotions can go along with interpersonal problems. The present study examined whether associations between interpersonal difficulties and emotion decoding ability can be found in healthy individuals. Our analysis was focused on two main dimensions of interpersonal problems: agency (social dominance) and communion (social closeness).

Materials and methods

We constructed an emotion recognition task with facial expressions depicting six basic emotions (happiness, surprise, anger, disgust, sadness, and fear) in frontal and profile view, which was administered to 190 healthy adults (95 women) with a mean age of 23.9 years (SD = 3.8) along with the Inventory of Interpersonal Problems, measures of negative affect and verbal intelligence. The majority of participants were university students (80%). Emotion recognition accuracy was assessed using unbiased hit rates.

Results

Negative correlations were observed between interpersonal agency and recognition of facial anger and disgust that were independent of participants' gender and negative affect. Interpersonal communion was not related to recognition of facial emotions.

Discussion

Poor identification of other people's facial signals of anger and disgust might be a factor contributing to interpersonal problems with social dominance and intrusiveness. Anger expressions signal goal obstruction and proneness to engage in conflict whereas facial disgust indicates a request to increase social distance. The interpersonal problem dimension of communion appears not to be linked to the ability to recognize emotions from facial expressions.

Active self-motion control and the role of agency under ambiguity

Purpose

Self-motion perception is a key factor in daily behaviours such as driving a car or piloting an aircraft. It is mainly based on visuo-vestibular integration, whose weighting mechanisms are modulated by the reliability properties of sensory inputs. Recently, it has been shown that the internal state of the operator can also modulate multisensory integration and may sharpen the representation of relevant inputs. In line with the concept of agency, it thus appears relevant to evaluate the impact of being in control of our own action on self-motion perception.

Methodology

Here, we tested two conditions of motion control (active/manual trigger versus passive/ observer condition), asking participants to discriminate between two consecutive longitudinal movements by identifying the larger displacement (displacement of higher intensity). We also tested motion discrimination under two levels of ambiguity by applying acceleration ratios that differed from our two "standard" displacements (i.e., 3 s; 0.012 m.s^-2 and 0.030 m.s^-2).

Results

We found an effect of control condition, but not of the level of ambiguity on the way participants perceived the standard displacement, i.e., perceptual bias (Point of Subjective Equality; PSE). Also, we found a significant effect of interaction between the active condition and the level of ambiguity on the ability to discriminate between displacements, i.e., sensitivity (Just Noticeable Difference; JND).

Originality

Being in control of our own motion through a manual intentional trigger of self-displacement maintains overall motion sensitivity when ambiguity increases.

Animals in flow - towards the scientific study of intrinsic reward in animals

The concept of flow, a state of complete absorption in an intrinsically rewarding activity, has played a pivotal role in advancing notions of human well-being beyond minimising suffering towards promoting flourishing and thriving. While flow has played a fundamental role in human positive psychology, it has not yet been explored in non-human animals, leaving an enormous void in our understanding of intrinsic motivation in animals. As ethology and related fields keep progressing in uncovering complex cognitive and affective capacities of non-human animals, we propose the time is ripe to translate the concept of flow to animals. We start by embedding flow in the topic of intrinsic motivation and describe its impact on positive human psychology and potentially positive animal welfare. We then disambiguate flow from related concepts discussed in the animal literature. Next, we derive experimental approaches in animals from the canonical characteristics of flow in humans and provide guidelines for both inducing and assessing flow by focusing on two characteristics that do not necessarily depend on self-report, namely resistance to distraction and time distortion. Not all aspects of the human flow experience are (yet) translatable, but those that are may improve quality of life in captive non-human animals.

Vulnerability, Disability, and Agency: Exploring Structures for Inclusive Decision-Making and Participation in a Responsive State

By unpacking some of the dichotomies inherent in the concepts of vulnerability and disability, the article problematises some of the current legal approaches to disability in Finland. It argues that where used to single out population groups or individuals due to their embodied characteristics, the vulnerability paradigm can be seen to create binaries both among the persons with disabilities, and between the "vulnerable" persons with disabilities and the perception of a rational, self-standing and autonomous human being. To mitigate such binaries, the article explores an agency-centred discourse of vulnerability, one that recognises the co-existence of agency and vulnerability and sees agency as dynamic and responsive to the societal support structures that surround all of us. One of the central arguments of the article is that generalised approaches do, however, not suffice to make agency a reality for all persons with disabilities. Given the extensive diversity of intra-group variations between persons with disabilities, individualised solutions are needed for agency to be possible for all. To overcome objectification and de-agencification - and to enhance agency - this diversity of situations, needs and contexts of lived-in realities of individuals also needs to be expressly reflected in the legal language in addressing disability.

Measuring embodiment: A review of methods for prosthetic devices

The development of neural interfaces to provide improved control and somatosensory feedback from prosthetic limbs has initiated a new ability to probe the various dimensions of embodiment. Scientists in the field of neuroprosthetics require dependable measures of ownership, body representation, and agency to quantify the sense of embodiment felt by patients for their prosthetic limbs. These measures are critical to perform generalizable experiments and compare the utility of the new technologies being developed. Here, we review outcome measures used in the literature to evaluate the senses of ownership, body-representation, and agency. We categorize these existing measures based on the fundamental psychometric property measured and whether it is a behavioral or physiological measure. We present arguments for the efficacy and pitfalls of each measure to guide better experimental designs and future outcome measure development. The purpose of this review is to aid prosthesis researchers and technology developers in understanding the concept of embodiment and selecting metrics to assess embodiment in their research. Advances in the ability to measure the embodiment of prosthetic devices have far-reaching implications in the improvement of prosthetic limbs as well as promoting a broader understanding of ourselves as embodied agents.

Unpacking Motivational Culture: Diverging Emphasis on Communality and Agency Across STEM Domains

The current research examined whether life sciences vs. engineering/physical sciences vary in the visibility and value of communality and agency. Overall, we find an emphasis on agency in engineering/physical sciences and a greater balance between communality and agency in the life sciences. We examine motivational culture as represented in environmental structures (Study 1), in signals sent and received in academic displays (Studies 2A-B), and in individual-level motives and cognitions (Studies 3-4). Study 1 analyzed archival course data to find that courses (N=11,222) in engineering/physical sciences included fewer collaborative assignments than courses in life sciences. Study 2A's content analysis documented that bulletin boards (N=68) in engineering/physical sciences academic buildings conveyed less communal purpose, and Study 2B found that participants (N=44) perceived greater communal purpose when viewing novel bulletin boards experimentally manipulated to include the cues identified in Study 2A. In Studies 3 (N=326) and 4 (N=110), engineering/physical science majors reported a strong agentic focus, compared to life science majors' more balanced focus. Further, the strong agentic focus of engineering/physical science students waned over time. This investigation of motivational cultures highlights the daily practices and institutional contexts that can shape individual-level motives and cognition related to engagement in STEM, both within and across different STEM pathways.

Finding agency in limbo: A qualitative investigation into the impact of occupational engagement on the mental health and wellbeing of asylum seekers in the UK

The process of seeking asylum is complex and often leads to extended periods of uncertainty and liminality for people awaiting decisions on their status. Occupational engagement-defined as meaningful activities and roles that bring purpose and agency to one's life-may be a key driver for mental health recovery for marginalized populations, including asylum seekers with traumatic experiences pre- and post-migration. This study aimed to clarify how occupational engagement impacts on mental health and wellbeing and how asylum seekers maintain engagement in occupation in the context of socio-political constraints of the asylum process. We explored the occupational experiences of 12 clients of one human-rights charity, utilizing community-based participatory research methods. Participants completed group mapping sessions where they depicted routine journeys taken to perform occupations in London, which included discussion around the significance of their journeys. Four participants also completed additional "walking maps"-semi-structured interviews which occurred along a selected "occupational journey" they identified as meaningful to their wellbeing. All data were analyzed using thematic network analysis. Findings revealed that engagement in routine occupations within safe, social spaces positively affects the mental wellbeing of asylum seekers by promoting competence, agency, and feelings of belonging. The liminal space of the asylum process meant that participants' occupational engagement was limited to 'leisure' activities but was still critical to establishing forms of agency associated with their wellbeing. Implications for programs and interventions responding to the needs of asylum seekers are discussed.

Understanding Women's Resistance to Intimate Partner Violence: A Scoping Review

Scholars widely acknowledge that women oppose male violence and control in intimate relationships. Yet there is limited comprehensive knowledge of how resistance features in intimate partner violence (IPV) research across the social sciences. Our scoping review helps fill this gap, analyzing and synthesizing 74 research articles published in English-language scholarly journals between 1994 and 2017. Our review is guided by the following questions: (1) How is research on IPV and resistance designed and executed? (2) How do IPV researchers define the term resistance? (3) What specific types of resistance do IPV researchers discuss in their work? (4) What policy and practice implications are provided by current literature on women's resistance to IPV? We find that scholarship on resistance to IPV is varied, spanning 10 scholarly disciplines with research samples drawn from 19 countries. Studies overwhelmingly used qualitative data, gathered through a range of techniques. The 42 articles that explicitly or implicitly defined resistance either conceptualized the term in the context of power relations, defined it as a form of agency, or understood resistance as a mechanism of physical, economic, and existential survival. Articles also identify several subtypes of resistance strategies including avoidance, help-seeking, active opposition, violent action, and leaving a violent relationship. In terms of practice and policy, articles identify several ways in which institutions fail to meet women's needs, and recommend training so providers and legal personnel may better assist IPV victims.

Exploring intimate partner violence among pregnant Eswatini women seeking antenatal care: How agency and food security impact violence-related outcomes

Women with agency (i.e. the ability to make choices and act on them) may experience reduced food insecurity (FI) and intimate partner violence (IPV). Reducing FI and IPV among women are global goals; however, research focused on agency among Eswatini women has been overlooked, though they experience high rates of FI and IPV. We analysed cross-sectional data from 406 Swazi women who sought care at one rural and one urban-public antenatal clinic in 2013-2014 to understand how FI and agency, our independent variables, are associated with IPV. We assessed the incidence rate ratio (IRR) of number of violent events (including emotional, physical and sexual IPV) in the previous 12 months using Poisson regressions. We found significant relationships between FI and IPV, where higher levels of FI were associated with IPV risk (weekly: IRR = 2.18, 95% CI = 1.82-2.61; Daily: IRR = 3.53, 95% CI = 2.89-4.32) and constrained agency increased women's risk of IPV (IRR = 1.44; 95% CI = 1.22-1.70). Our findings suggest that FI and agency independently impact women's experience(s) of IPV. Interventions focused on women simultaneously experiencing severe FI and constrained agency may have the highest impact; however, providing focused and moderate FI relief (e.g. reducing FI daily to monthly) could potentially reduce women's risk of experiencing violence.

The agency of fertility plans

Fertility plans are a prominent area for agency research, and are a clear example of a misalignment between resources and agency capacity. We relied both on the idea of conversion factors of the Capability Approach and the pragmatist tradition of temporal-oriented agency to propose a framework for the study of fertility agency as the conversion process of resources into plans and behavior. We outlined said framework by using a unique dataset on fertility plans composed of open and closed questions from an Italian sample. Economic factors and imaginaries related to children and family represented the vast majority of (hindering and enabling) conversion factors. The notion of conversion factors is crucial for disentangling the network of heterogeneous elements involved in fertility agency: it allows focus to be shifted from structural factors related to social position and psychological characteristics to more situated elements that enable agency capacity.

Exploring agency and entrainment in joint music-making through the reported experiences of students and teachers

This qualitative interview-based study draws on the reported experiences of students and teachers to explore how agency and entrainment resource and constrain each other in joint music-making. The participants were 23 students of Grades 6 and 11 music teachers from different primary schools. The qualitative content analysis of the 11 student pair interviews and 11 one-to-one teacher interviews indicated that experiences of music-related interpersonal entrainment intertwine with different dimensions of agency. In the analysis, four themes were identified as follows: presence, belonging, safety, and continuity. These findings provide insights into the relationship between agency and entrainment in classroom-based joint music-making and provide a novel lens through which to examine the complementary experiences of students and teachers. This study builds bridges between the concepts of agency and entrainment in the context of music education, offering theoretical clarification as to how and why joint music-making can be considered an intersubjective activity that fosters group cohesion and social interaction. The findings further present a view of the constitutive nature of the relationship among agency, entrainment, and intersubjectivity in joint music-making. The findings offer educators concrete grounds for using joint music-making as a platform for an agency.

Integrating Patient-reported Experience (PRE) in a multistage approach to study access to health services for women with chronic illness and migration experience

BACKGROUND

Patient-reported Experience (PRE) is an emerging concept integrating patient perspectives and amplifying voices often marginalized in discussions surrounding health systems. However, it remains a challenge to use and integrate PREs when studying patient agency and access to quality services, particularly with data from multiple sources. In this article, using study materials from the Swiss MIWOCA project, we present and reflect upon a multistage PRE approach to study healthcare access.

METHODS

The MIWOCA project, a study on healthcare access and quality among immigrant women with chronic illnesses living in Switzerland, provided data from multiple sources for the integration of PRE data. These sources included interviews with women (n = 48), two focus group discussions with women (n = 15), interviews with service providers (n = 12) and observations from stakeholder dialogues (n = 3). In addition, we utilized field notes, focus group illustration maps, patient vignettes and policy briefs to develop a multistage data linking model. PRE data served as starting themes and reference topics in each of the interlinked stages of knowledge production.

RESULTS

Deploying PREs, we coherently linked the data from preceding stages and used them to inform subsequent stages. This, in turn, enabled us to identify, reflect and rectify factors limiting immigrant women's agency and access to quality services. Ultimately, the approach engaged patients as knowledge co-producers for system-level changes. This knowledge was transformed into a set of practice recommendations and a policy brief addressing ways to improve health systems to better serve immigrant women in Switzerland.

CONCLUSIONS

Building on PREs to systematically combine multiple data sources and engage patients continuously can improve our understanding of barriers in health systems. Beyond individual patient-doctor encounters, a multistage PRE approach can identify structural problems and provide clues for resolving them at the systems level. The PREs approach presented may serve as an example and encourage more public health experts to consider PREs in future research and practice.

PATIENT AND PUBLIC CONTRIBUTION

Women with chronic illness and immigration experience contributed to interview-guideline development, provided PREs in interviews, identified priority areas for health-service change and actively participated in the development of practice recommendations.

Emotional Intelligence and Transformational Leadership: Meta-Analysis and Explanatory Model of Female Leadership Advantage

Emotional intelligence is a second-stratum factor of general intelligence (MacCann et al. 2014) that: (a) has been popularly touted as an essential individual difference for effective leadership (Goleman 1998), but also (b) exhibits large gender group differences favoring women (Joseph and Newman 2010). Combining these insights, we propose that emotional intelligence is a key mechanism in the so-called female leadership advantage (Eagly and Carli 2003-which emphasizes the finding that women are rated slightly higher in transformational leadership compared to men). The current study seeks to explain this gender leadership gap by specifying three personality-based theoretical mechanisms that enhance transformational leadership: (a) emotional intelligence (favoring women), (b) communion (stereotypical femininity; favoring women; Hsu et al. 2021), as well as an offsetting effect of (c) agency (stereotypical masculinity; favoring men). Meta-analytic data (including original meta-analyses among the leader's ability-based emotional intelligence, transformational leadership, communion, and agency) are used to test our theorized model. Results confirm the full mediation model of female leadership advantage. Because the three unique mechanisms operate in different directions, their individual indirect effects are notable, but their cumulative indirect effect is small and near-zero. In conclusion, we emphasize incorporating emotional intelligence with other personality-based explanations of gender effects in leadership perceptions.

The Generic Inhibitory Function of Corollary Discharge in Motor Intention: Evidence from the Modulation Effects of Speech Preparation on the Late Components of Auditory Neural Responses

The importance of action-perception loops necessitates efficient computations linking motor and sensory systems. Corollary discharge (CD), a concept in motor-to-sensory transformation, has been proposed to predict the sensory consequences of actions for efficient motor and cognitive control. The predictive computation has been assumed to realize via inhibiting sensory reafference when actions are executed. Continuous control throughout the course of action demands inhibitory function ubiquitously on all potential reafference when sensory consequences are not available before execution. However, the temporal and functional characteristics of CD are unclear. When does CD begin to operate? To what extent does CD inhibit sensory processes? How is the inhibitory function implemented in neural computation? Using a delayed articulation paradigm with three types of auditory probes (speech, nonspeech, and nonhuman sounds) in an electroencephalography experiment with 20 human participants (7 males), we found that preparing to speak without knowing what to say (general preparation) suppressed neural responses to each type of auditory probe, suggesting a generic inhibitory function of CD in motor intention. Moreover, power and phase coherence in low-frequency bands (1-8 Hz) were both suppressed, indicating that inhibition was mediated by dampening response amplitude and adding temporal variance to sensory processes. Furthermore, inhibition was stronger for sounds that humans can produce than nonhuman sounds, hinting that the generic inhibitory function of CD is regulated by the established motor-sensory associations. These results suggest a functional and temporal granularity of corollary discharge that mediates multifaceted computations in motor and cognitive control.

A Qualitative Investigation Into Chinese International Doctoral Students' Navigation of a Disrupted Study Trajectory During COVID-19

This study delves into emic perceptions of Chinese international doctoral students' navigation of a disrupted study trajectory during the 2019 coronavirus pandemic. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with students and the conceptual framework of bioecological systems theory and needs-response agency, the article reveals a nuanced picture of how activities, relations and roles nested in a PhD study trajectory are impacted by and respond to the crisis. Specifically, the pandemic has instigated a ripple effect upon PhD study that is embedded within a complex system of person-environment factors in the microsystem, mesosystem, exosystem and macrosystem. Confronting these changes and challenges, the students enact needs-response agency to cope with these impacts so as to restore stability. The study concludes with some practical implications for related stakeholders in the bioecological system to generate conditions and support for students to harness possibilities for growth amidst and beyond the health crisis.

(Re)shaping Amazon labour struggles on both sides of the Atlantic: the power dynamics in Germany and the US amidst the pandemic

With the initial context of COVID-19 fuelling Amazon's exponential growth, this article investigates how the pandemic (re)defined labour struggles, i.e., cultivating labour's structural, associational and institutional powers in two case study countries, Germany and the US. By analysing these power resources in its two largest markets, I argue that Amazon's structural conditions by which it organises its warehouse labour, which predate the pandemic, have continued to act as obstacles to collective labour action. While in Germany, ver.di continues to mobilise its workplace power but has been unable to get Amazon to sign a collective agreement, the pandemic triggered unprecedented workplace mobilisations and the pursuit of associational power in the US, albeit with varying outcomes. Despite their different industrial relations systems and labour struggles, these two cases highlight the key role of shop-floor organising to put pressure on Amazon, while Amazon's continued rejection of unions as negotiating partners further underlines the importance of regulating Amazon's union-busting tactics.