The aim of this study was to examine the relationships between Life Events, Social Support, Locus of Control, Sex, Polygamy (for the Saudi students), Culture, Identity and Health in British and Saudi students. Participants were 524 students. 173 British males and females mainly from London University and 351 Saudi males and females from King Saud University. Five measures were used in this study: (1) The List of Recent Experience, (2) The Cornell Medical Index, (3) The Locus of Control of Behaviour, (4) The Social Support Scale for University students and (5) The Identity Scale. The last two measures were especially developed for this study. Two methods of estimating the impact of experiences; subjective and objective and two designs: retrospective and longitudinal were used in this study. The retrospective data revealed that life events are significantly associated with health. The longitudinal data also revealed that this association between these two variables is significant when life events were combined with locus of control or social support for the British students, and that concurrent events only were significantly associated with health for the Saudi students. Social support, locus of control and identity were found to be significantly and independently related to health. Polygamy (for the Saudi students) was correlated with health only when combined with life events.Results also revealed that the relationships between life events, social support, locus of control, identity and health were similar in both cultures. Life events, social support, locus of control and identity were associated with health in a selective manner. They seem to be more related to some sections of health than to other sections. In general higher incidents of life events, low social support, externality and negative self concept were related to more symptoms. Subjective estimation of life events predicts variations in health more than objective estimation of life events. Sex was found to play a role in the relationships between psychosocial factors and health especially for the Saudi students. The relationships between life events, social support, locus of control, polygamy, identity, sex and health were discussed in the light of the present results and a model of these relationships was suggested in the last chapter of this study.

<p> This study investigated relationships between gender, mentoring, and leader self-efficacy in a sample of n = 188 managers working in the United States. Differences in self-reports of leader efficacy were examined based on manager gender, the presence of a mentor, mentor gender, mentor organizational level, type of mentoring (formal vs. informal), mentoring function (career support, psychosocial support, role modeling), the quality of the mentoring relationship, and the gender composition of the mentoring dyad. Counter to earlier research, women in the sample reported higher levels of leader self-efficacy when compared to men, though all but one of these mean differences were non-significant. Among managers with mentors at the top levels of the organization, women reported significantly higher levels of leader self-efficacy than men did. Mentored managers reported slightly higher, but non-significant, differences in mean leader self-efficacy compared to non-mentored managers. Among mentored managers significant differences in mean leader self-efficacy were found based on the organizational level of the mentor, primary mentoring function, and the quality of the mentoring relationship. A hierarchical multiple regression to predict leader self-efficacy from mentoring function was significant and predicted 34% of the variance in scores on leader self-efficacy. A hierarchical multiple regression to predict leader self-efficacy from mentoring function, mentor organizational level, type of mentoring, and the gender composition of the mentoring dyad, was significant and predicted 45% of the variance in scores of leader self-efficacy. Career support mentoring and mentor organizational level were the most significant predictors in the model.</p>

<p> A multiple case study was used to explore the experiences of senior leaders with vulnerability. The leaders selected for the study were seasoned executives who consciously used vulnerability as part of their leadership style and who had extensive experience with a variety personal development processes. Semi-structured in-depth interviews were conducted with 7 senior leaders from a variety of for-profit and non-profit sectors. The study provides insights that may be of practical use to leaders who wish to deepen their experience and expression of leadership, and to leadership development professionals who focus on helping leaders to be more emotionally genuine, relationally transparent, and able to take healthy risks. Though there are tangentially relevant theories such as emotional intelligence and authentic leadership, vulnerability is a new area of study especially as it concerns leadership, and this qualitative exploration may bring an important perspective to this emerging topic of academic and practical interest.</p>

<p> There are many factors that influence the success of employees in organizations, one of which is the perception of interactional justice. Interactional justice combines two forms of justice: informational justice (the degree to which employees are given relevant information) and interpersonal justice (whether employees are treated with dignity and respect) (Bies &amp; Moag, 1986; Patient &amp; Skarlicki, 2014). The present study sought to explore how perceptions of interactional justice during a performance review influence appraisal satisfaction, workplace self-efficacy, and counterproductive work behaviors. A survey was designed to measure the degree to which 138 employees perceived interactional justice during their performance appraisal as well as their appraisal satisfaction, workplace self-efficacy, and their prevalence in engaging in counterproductive work behaviors. Correlational analyses revealed that employees who perceive high levels of interactional justice during their performance appraisal feel more satisfied with the appraisal, more capable or self-efficacious at work, and engage in counterproductive work behaviors less often than those who perceive low levels of interactional justice. Also, a mediated regression revealed that appraisal satisfaction partially mediated the relationship between interactional justice and self-efficacy. Ultimately, these findings demonstrate the impact that interpersonal exchanges have on employees and their work behaviors.</p>

<p> Money is generally assumed to be a good thing, but there is a downside to wealth. Research has shown that more money does not necessarily lead to greater happiness, but the reasons why remain unclear, and there is a paucity of studies comparing the wealthy to the non-wealthy. This study explored the effect of money on well-being, as well as the various problems associated with abundance. Having more money creates its own unique set of problems, as one must tend to one&rsquo;s money, protect it, and deal with the insatiable urge to accumulate more of it. It was proposed that those who have a lot of money exhibit more paranoia, higher levels of money addiction, and less quality of life, than those who have only have average amounts of money, which may explain why more money does not equal more happiness. Two groups, a wealthy &ldquo;target&rdquo; group and a non-wealthy &ldquo;control&rdquo; group, each completed the Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI-16), the Paranoia Checklist, the revised Workaholism scale, quality of life as indexed by the World Health Organization Quality of Life-BREF, the Flourishing scale, and a demographic questionnaire. On average, the wealthy in the target group were found to have greater quality of life than the control group, mostly due to greater reported physical health and environment than their less wealthy counterparts. The other variables did not demonstrate a significant relationship or difference; in fact, on the variables of narcissism and money addiction level, the two groups were found to be nearly identical. However, once age was controlled for, paranoia was found to have a statistically significant relationship with Income. In other words, as predicted in the hypothesis, those with wealth exhibited greater paranoia than those with only average amounts of income when their ages were held constant; paranoia predicted wealth. The present study suggests one possible explanation for why more money does not necessarily lead to more happiness &ndash; the wealthy are more paranoid and distrustful of others than the non-wealthy.</p>

<p> Religion as culture shapes the worldview of its subscribers and thence attitude formation and preferences of individuals towards many topics including the environment. Research interest in the impact of religion soared in the late 1960s, in response to White's (1967) article in Science claiming that a huge burden of guilt for the environment crisis rested on the shoulders of Christianity. Although this Dominion Hypothesis highlights the contrast between Christianity and other religions, the contrast has not been addressed in systematic comparative cross-national research assessing whether Christians hold more negative environmental attitudes than other world religions. This dissertation fills that research gap. The Dominion Hypothesis does not exhaust the potential impacts of religion on environmentalism. For example, social psychology posits the importance of experience as well as of culture on attitudes about matters one encounters directly, so the dissertation posits the Direct Experience Hypothesis and confirms the differentiation of local from global environmental attitudes. Moreover, social psychology also directs our attention to the Reverence Hypothesis, that a subjective side effect of religiosity is reverence and responsibility for nature. To address the Dominion Hypothesis that Christians hold less environmentalist attitudes than their peers in other religious traditions, the direct experience effect, and the Reverence Hypothesis, this dissertation includes descriptive analysis, psychometric scale evaluations, OLS regression, and multilevel modeling of data from the pooled World Values Survey/European Values Survey. Findings are mixed on the Dominion Hypothesis, but consistently support the Direct Experience and Reverence Hypotheses. </p>

<p> This dissertation presents a Bayesian generative modeling approach for complex dynamical systems for emotion-interaction patterns within multivariate data collected in social psychology studies. While dynamical models have been used by social psychologists to study complex psychological and behavior patterns in recent years, most of these studies have been limited by using regression methods to fit the model parameters from noisy observations. These regression methods mostly rely on the estimates of the derivatives from the noisy observation, thus easily result in overfitting and fail to predict future outcomes. A Bayesian generative model solves the problem by integrating the prior knowledge of where the data comes from with the observed data through posterior distributions. It allows the development of theoretical ideas and mathematical models to be independent of the inference concerns. Besides, Bayesian generative statistical modeling allows evaluation of the model based on its predictive power instead of the model residual error reduction in regression methods to prevent overfitting in social psychology data analysis. </p><p> In the proposed Bayesian generative modeling approach, this dissertation uses the State Space Model (SSM) to model the dynamics of emotion interactions. Specifically, it tests the approach in a class of psychological models aimed at explaining the emotional dynamics of interacting couples in committed relationships. The latent states of the SSM are composed of continuous real numbers that represent the level of the true emotional states of both partners. One can obtain the latent states at all subsequent time points by evolving a differential equation (typically a coupled linear oscillator (CLO)) forward in time with some known initial state at the starting time. The multivariate observed states include self-reported emotional experiences and physiological measurements of both partners during the interactions. To test whether well-being factors, such as body weight, can help to predict emotion-interaction patterns, We construct functions that determine the prior distributions of the CLO parameters of individual couples based on existing emotion theories. Besides, we allow a single latent state to generate multivariate observations and learn the group-shared coefficients that specify the relationship between the latent states and the multivariate observations. </p><p> Furthermore, we model the nonlinearity of the emotional interaction by allowing smooth changes (drift) in the model parameters. By restricting the stochasticity to the parameter level, the proposed approach models the dynamics in longer periods of social interactions assuming that the interaction dynamics slowly and smoothly vary over time. The proposed approach achieves this by applying Gaussian Process (GP) priors with smooth covariance functions to the CLO parameters. Also, we propose to model the emotion regulation patterns as clusters of the dynamical parameters. To infer the parameters of the proposed Bayesian generative model from noisy experimental data, we develop a Gibbs sampler to learn the parameters of the patterns using a set of training couples. </p><p> To evaluate the fitted model, we develop a multi-level cross-validation procedure for learning the group-shared parameters and distributions from training data and testing the learned models on held-out testing data. During testing, we use the learned shared model parameters to fit the individual CLO parameters to the first 80% of the time points of the testing data by Monte Carlo sampling and then predict the states of the last 20% of the time points. By evaluating models with cross-validation, one can estimate whether complex models are overfitted to noisy observations and fail to generalize to unseen data. I test our approach on both synthetic data that was generated by the generative model and real data that was collected in multiple social psychology experiments. The proposed approach has the potential to model other complex behavior since the generative model is not restricted to the forms of the underlying dynamics.</p>

<p> Coupons are a marketing tool used to entice consumers to try a new brand or product in the hopes that they will then become loyal users after trial (Boundless, n.d.). Issuing coupons is a common practice for many businesses because it is relatively inexpensive to begin, and can be used for general advertising purposes in addition to attracting new customers. Digital coupons have been introduced in the last few years and their acceptance is growing, with redemptions in 2010 increasing by 10 times the 2009 rates and projected to increase exponentially with each year (Savings.com, n.d.). </p><p> Early coupon academic studies in the promotional literature examine profitability maximization through manipulating coupon characteristics or the coupon process such as the timing of release, length of expiration dates, amount of the cents-off, and other related monetary factors. Despite the ability to adjust coupon features to maximize revenue and redemption, the effect is not strong enough to generate the motivation required to elicit new use from non-users being targeted nor improve the overall low redemption rates. </p><p> Basic characteristics such as demographic and socioeconomic variables as well as some predisposing motivational characteristics have also been studied to predict coupon use. While some of these characteristics demonstrate differences between consumers who do and do not use coupons, characteristics provide little insight into why non-users choose not to coupon. Furthermore, the findings cannot be generalizable to the population as a whole when the redemption rate persists at 2%. With digital coupons a rapidly growing practice, it is important to determine whether or not this new coupon format might contribute to behavior change in current non- or infrequent users of coupons. </p><p> While most previous research has concentrated on characteristics of the consumer, characteristics of the coupon, and predisposing motivational constructs, this study examined why consumers rejected coupons by examining their narratives on the various stages of the coupon process to narrow down the factors contributing the most to deterring coupon use. </p><p> The Phase 1 study included 58 participants, 29 frequent users and 29 infrequent users. Participants completed a set of questionnaires measuring previously identified predisposing characteristics, given guidance on the selection of digital coupons loaded onto shopper loyalty cards and were provided with Sunday circulars. Each participant had 1 week to try and redeem the digital coupons and complete follow up questionnaires to determine any changes post-trial. Participants were invited to participate in 1 of 6 focus groups to determine themes related to the digital coupon trial. </p><p> The Phase 2 study included 10 individuals who participated in depth interviews focusing on the processes, motivations and decisions related to coupon use during grocery shopping. The interview was broken out into 5 stages: 1 is an ice-breaker introduction to the study; 2 involves rapport building and setting the tone; 3 is the depth interview that attempts to elicit understanding into the motivation, timing, and rationale behind rejection of coupon use; 4 presents some popular emerging technologies based on emerging applications of interest to the Association of Coupon Professional Board; and 5 includes a brief discussion of different type of coupon and verification. </p><p> Overall, , the consumer&rsquo;s perceived purpose of the coupon is to save money through item cost reduction whereas from a marketing perspective the coupon is intended to entice consumers new to the brand or to encourage trial of a new product (Boundless, n.d.). This difference in perception could be a major contributor to the valuation process and resistance/rejection themes of infrequent users. Interestingly, very few infrequent users rejected the practice of coupons outright and were far more likely to resist or postpone the practice. More research should be conducted to identify when, how and why infrequent users re-evaluate coupons or try the process again. </p><p> Coupon industry members should review the coupon practice and make a decision to either abandon or overhaul the process as it currently does not provide value to either the manufacturers issuing the coupons or the consumers, even those actively using coupons. If the decision is to overhaul the practice then a decision should be made whether or not to adapt to the current perceptions that coupons are a means to reduce product price or re-educate consumers and industry members alike on the coupon as a means to solicit trial. Lastly, many of the existing apps do not address any of the coupon-related barriers, incongruities, or infrequent user needs. A disruptive technology is needed to change consumer perceptions, encourage coupon use and provide value added utility beyond just bypassing the coupon process to make the practice relevant in today&rsquo;s mobile culture. (Abstract shortened by ProQuest.)</p>

No description available.

The concept of self-presentation plays a critical role in much sociological and psychological theorizing about human behavior. Although a number of experimental studies of self-presentation have been conducted, until recently theorizing about self-presentation has not been translated into testable hypotheses. This paper attempts to fill this void with an empirical examination of self-presentation as it applies to religious verbal self-presentation related to salient religious role-identity and religious attitude. This research on self-presentation was guided by two major theories: structural symbolic interactionism and trait psychology. The data, obtained from a sample of undergraduates to a questionnaire, provide an examination of the relationship between salient role-identity, attitude, and self-presentation taking into account individual differences in self-monitoring and situation. Two causal models were estimated with weighted least square (WLS) method using the program LISREL 7. The most important findings are that salient role-identity is more strongly associated with self-presentation for high self-monitors than for low self-monitors in both formal and informal situations; attitude is more strongly associated with self-presentation for low self-monitors than for high self-monitors in both types of situations; and situation and self-monitoring interact, so that the stronger association between attitude and self-presentation occurs for low self-monitors in formal situations, and the stronger association between salient role-identity and self-presentation exists for high self-monitors in informal situations. Implications and limitations of the findings are discussed.