Food cooperatives play a central role in the local food movement. In addition to supporting the local economy, the cooperative movement lists "concern for the community" among their seven core principles (Healthy Foods Healthy Communities Report, 2012). Food cooperatives, however, are typically consumer-owned and primarily assert democratic control over buying practices rather than workplace operation (University of Wisconsin Center for Cooperatives, 2009). Therefore, unless allocated a separate means for advocacy, cooperative workers often have less autonomy than they would if they were organized and had the means to collectively negotiate their benefits and work environment. This article argues that the efforts of worker-run governance bodies are integral for securing worker citizenship yet are often excluded from the efforts of consumer cooperatives. Using a mixed methods approach that includes focus groups, individual interviews, and textual and policy analyses, this study looks at the impact of unions on the social, political and civil rights of workers in two unionized food cooperatives in Vermont. Specifically, it examines the relationship between cooperative and union governance structures and the role of each institution in generating citizen engagement both in and outside the workplace. In this study, citizenship is defined as access to social, political, and civil rights. Study findings suggest that workers view management and the union as the prime decision-making bodies and the benefits of consumer membership as mainly consumer-oriented and vaguely community-based. Interview data generated with workers and stakeholders indicates that the union plays a pivotal role in promoting citizen engagement and workplace democracy in food cooperatives.

<p> Research investigating the impact of religion and religiosity on aggression and prosocial behavior is mixed. The reason for these inconsistent results may be due to the multifaceted nature of religion. This study was the first to investigate both the impact of different aspects of religion (e.g., spirituality, institutional religion, good and evil supernatural agents, etc.) as well as views of God as punitive on subsequent aggressive behavior. Results indicated that more punitive perceptions of God were correlated with lower levels of aggression. Furthermore, there was a marginal interaction between religious orientation and type of religious priming. Although simple effects and subsequent post-hoc tests did not reach standard levels of statistical significance, the direction of the effect for Christian participants was that priming with evil supernatural agents reduced aggressive behavior but this trend was in the opposite direction for non-Christians.</p>

Professional identity is a complex construct that describes how an individual develops a sense of self-concept within a chosen profession. Professional identity refers to a self definition within a professional role based on attributes, beliefs, values, motives, and experiences (Ibarra, 1999). This study explored the relationships between the professional identity of gerontology graduates and age, career stage, student typology, occupation, and value of experiential learning both quantitatively and qualitatively. Survey results indicate that experiential learning opportunities provide a framework for all gerontology students to gain and apply the skills and knowledge necessary for professional identity development in the field of aging. Findings indicate that experiential learning and mentorship represent important, but different outcomes for students who are new to the field of gerontology vs. students who are already employed in an aging-related profession prior to enrollment in a graduate gerontology program.

It has been established that much of the disparity in health outcomes between blacks and whites can be explained by accounting for education and income. Once education and income have been taken into consideration, research has found racial disparities in health outcomes for low-income populations are small, and in some cases no longer significant. For middle and upper income populations, however, a significant racial disparity in health outcomes persists even after accounting for education and income. Seeking to explain this variation, I analyze the literature concerning health disparities, race and class, the prevalence and distribution of black physicians, and issues and trends surrounding physician-patient communication and discrimination. I find that black physicians tend to be concentrated in low-income, minority-dense areas, therefore, the likelihood of a black middle or upper class person seeing a doctor of their same race may be less than that for lower class blacks. I hypothesize that doctor-patient racial concordance, and the associated possibility of diminished communication and cultural hurdles endured by black patients visiting a black doctor, may explain some of this variation in the magnitude of racial health disparities along the education/income spectrum, explaining the larger racial health disparities in middle and upper-income populations. Using data from the 2006 Commonwealth Fund Health Care Quality Survey (N=1591), I conducted bivariate (chi-sq/t-tests) and step-wise multivariate, logistic regression statistical tests to explore if doctor-patient racial concordance affects the self-rated health of American adults. This analysis showed concordance as a significant predictor of self-rated health in the unadjusted model, but not in the full model. Simply put, concordance is a significant predictor of self-rated health, but not independent of socioeconomic factors. My modeling is consistent with the literature in showing education and income as the most significant predictors of health status.

The present study aimed to expand on previous research that explains when affect can influence subsequent judgments in an incongruent way. It also investigated a context where a negative emotion may have been maintained in order to achieve a subsequent goal. Participants in a guilt, shame, and control condition visualized past events. Those in the guilt and shame condition wrote about a time when they committed a moral transgression and were instructed to write an apology letter to a person they hurt. They then rated themselves on a number of interpersonal traits as a way to measure self-enhancement. I hypothesized that those in the guilt condition would self-enhance on interpersonal traits as a result of feeling guilt, which is a repair-focused emotion that has been shown to benefit interpersonal relationships. I also hypothesized that participants in the guilt condition would express a desire to maintain their feelings of guilt as a strategy to help them write an apology letter. The present findings do not support my hypotheses.

Epidemiological data suggest that alcohol use and related problems have increased among college women. The current study examined psychosocial predictors of risk drinking in a sample of college women (N=360), whether race moderated this relationship. Potential predictors included: daily smoker; premenstrual syndrome (PMS) symptom severity; age at first alcohol use, negative affect, parental history of alcohol problems and minority status. Analyses found that somatic PMS symptom severity score, age of first alcohol use, daily smoking, age of first alcohol use and non-minority status were related. Findings suggest that minority group membership was associated with low risk drinking, while somatic PMS severity scores were associated with high-risk alcohol use among White women. While further research is needed, current study findings suggest that screening college women for somatic symptoms of PMS and alcohol use may identify women at greater risk of developing alcohol use disorders.

This study examined (1) how verbal self-instruction (VSI) affects behavioural self-restraint and (2) individual differences in impulsiveness and verbal regulation of behaviour (VRB) in children. The review of Luria's interpretation of VRB and other related works suggested that VRB can be examined at different levels of generality. The elementary level concerns the execution and inhibition of simple motor responses; the intermediate level involves control of more complicated behaviour by detailed self-instructions, while the highest level of abstraction relates to the role of speech in the socio-cultural development in Man. The first three experiments focussed on the elementary motor responses and demonstrated that self-instruction was detrimental to motor performance. There was no evidence to support the assumption that verbal responses were superior to motor responses. However, verbal and motor responses tended to co-ordinate with each other temporally and this feature was utilized in differential-reinforcement-of-low-rate (DRL) experiments, which showed that self-instruction aided behavioural restraint. However, the content of self-instruction was not important, but how it was said. Behavioural measures of self-restraint and responsiveness to verbal instructions were related to individual differences in cognitive style (measured by the Matching Familiar Figures Test) and personality (measured by self-rated questionnaires and a teacher'srating scale designed for the purpose). Whereas the use of self-instructions tended to override any individual differences related to behavioural self-restraint, the results supported the hypothesis that cognitive impulsivity was related to measures of anxiety, and behavioural impulsiveness to anxiety and psychoticism. There was no evidence that impulsiveness was related to extraversion. In view of the theoretical discussion on cognitive impulsivity by Kagan and Block, and on impulsiveness in personality by Eysenck and Gray, it seems that behavioural, cognitive and personality impulsiveness cannot be conceptualized as a unitary concept.

The rapid spread of interest and experimental work in early experience has led to confused and contradictory claims. This thesis reviews the literature to assess these claims and investigates certain hypotheses. Experiments were designed to test (1) the effects of neonatal stimulation, (2) the effects of pre v post-weaning environments, and (3) the effects of handling in the golden hamster. This experimental animal was used to determine cross-species applicability of infantile stimulation theory. Experimental work consisted of submitting litters to early "burrow" or laboratory environments preweaning, and to laboratory or free-enriched environments post weaning. Other litters were subjected to various handling schedules - days 1-21, days 5-21 and "non-handled" controls in order to understand the contradictory results reported. Dependent variables included, physiologically, growth observation, brain and adrenal weight analysis, and plasma cortisol assay; and, behaviourally, open-field behaviour, response to novel objects and discrimination learning ability: all variables typically used in this field. The data were subjected to analysis of variance. Results show early stimulation in the golden hamster to have none of the "beneficial" effects found in the rat; rather it leads to increased emotionality, neophobia, impaired learning and poor physical development. These effects cannot solely be attributed to impaired hypothalamic maturation nor alteration in maternal care, as demonstrated by the handling conditions. Both early "burrow" environments and later free-enriched experience effect clear adaptation in the subjects with decreased emotionality, faster reactivity and good learning ability; the early environment affected physiological changes within the animal, whilst the enrichment produced its effect via experiential factors. Wider usage of species, taking into account their known natural history, and a more ethological experimental approach appears necessary to gain a true understanding of mediators and their consequences in this field. No extrapolation to higher organisms is valid at this stage.

It was considered from the relevant literature that the most satisfactory explanation of the behavioural effects of noise would be in terms of an arousal/distraction model (Teichner et al, 1966), Monetary incentives appeared to have the most satisfactory physiological and behavioural evidence as an arouser. An explanation of incentives and other arousers was offered by Kahneman (1973), in his model of effort and attention. The first experiment was designed to examine Kahneman's model more closely. Monetary incentives, 3 task difficulty levels, incidental learning (the colour of the word) and intentional learning (free recall of item) were incorporated in a two by three factorial design. The results favoured incentives as an arouser but not in the way envisaged by Kahneman. The data suggested that incentives increased capacity above and beyond the demands of the task (a la Davies and Jones, 1975). Further, the increased use of order recall coupled with increased item recall was not consistent with Domic's conception of order as a lower memory process. On the contrary, order appeared to be a successful STM retrieval strategy. The personality analysis could not make any distinctions between Eysenck's (1967) and Gray's (1972) theories. However, it did support the notion of incentives operating an arousal mechanism (extraversion).The second experiment was of a similar design but three levels of noise (60db, 80db and l00db), instead of incentives, were the main arousers. There was no significant evidence for noise acting as a distractor. Noise only appeared to affect neurotics significantly, particularly in the harder task where they appeared to "give up" (cf. Wiener and Schnieder 1970).The third, fourth and fifth experiments were designed to examine the role of order and other retrieval cues under incentives and noise. The results suggested that order enhances recall in both noise and incentive conditions. However, word locations were only successfully utilised by incentive groups. This again suggests that incentives 'broaden' attention whilst noise 'narrows' attention. The final chapter discussed the differential role of order under noise and incentives, and also the possibility that an explanation of many of the effects may lie in the masking properties of noise.

The long and short term effects of brief handling of laboratory rats between birth and weaning have so far been shown to be mainly physiological in nature. Recent evidence indicates, however, that investigatory behaviour in adult animals may also be affected. The area of exploratory behaviour is receiving increasing attention, but there have been comparatively few studies relating this to early experience. Following a brief review of each topic, a series of studies is therefore reported in which the behaviour of handled and non-handled rats is compared in a variety of experimental situations. These range from situations giving considerable opportunity for locomotor investigation to others in which responses to specific aspects of the environment can be observed. In addition, the behaviour of males and females is compared and responses to each situation recorded over a number of trials. Results from these experiments indicate that a variety of tests can distinguish behaviourally between handled and non-handled animals, but that the locomotor measures were least satisfactory in this respect and also revealed fewer interactions between the variables of Handling, Sex and Trials, although females had higher locomotor scores than males. However, handledanimals tended to approach novel objects more rapidly and to spend more time investigating them than did non-handled; they also scored higher on tests of home cage emergence. Statistical interactions in these situations were frequently found, indicating the complexity of the effects of early handling. In addition, differences between the groups tended to persist over repeated trials. It is concluded that early handling is capable of producing effects upon subsequent investigatory behaviour, either in addition to or in place of the lower-level processes of emotionality and locomotor activity.