Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Political leaders have the difficult role to make a political synthesis of international and domestic problems. Their vision of the world may shape goals and perceptions, judgments of events, crisis, and othersâ?? leadersâ?? behaviours interpretations. Strategies could be planned and actions launched according to these internal schemas entwined with a supreme aim to be confirmed in the office by their constituencies. Leadersâ?? cognitions, emotions, and motivation may certainly influence the political context. Emotions have a social functions in enabling individuals to respond adaptively to the problems and opportunities that define human social living. Emotion is intended, in this paper, from a social functional perspective, to be a management tool in conflicting situations in order to better co-ordinate interactions between actors in trying to resolve interpersonal relationshipsâ?? problems. We will also apply concepts of affective neuroscience to the study of international relations because the modern study of neuroscience is helping us in exploring the biological bases of consciousness and mental processes into the field of decision-making processes. Leading neuroscientists have been demonstrating the role of emotion and feeling in decision-making process; this input and its influence may not even be noticed at a conscious level, but it nonetheless shapes human beings' decisions and judgement in important ways. We think it would be interesting to better analyses the way how leaders and their direct advisers perceive and interpret information, events, and constraints in their international and domestic environments. The challenge is to find ways to co-ordinate psychological expertise with the expertise afforded through other disciplinary perspectives and to renew the role of political psychology.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: This study examined the influence of poverty, perceived discrimination, and sense of mastery over one’s life on the health status of US adults 40-41 years of age (N=969). It used data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, the 1979 Cohort. Subjects were 40-41 years old in 1998, the most recent year of data available at the time of the study. When controlling for a variety of social characteristics and personal attributes, only sense of mastery over one’s life, measured by the Pearlin Mastery Scale, affected physical and mental health statuses. Perceived discrimination affected only mental health status. The number of years the study subjects reported that they lived in families whose income fell below official US poverty thresholds had no effect on either physical or mental health. Findings affirmed the efforts of professions like social work that stress self-determination and empowerment enabling individuals to enhance their own social functioning and improve conditions in their communities and in society at large. They also suggested that in regard to mental health advocacy efforts to decrease health disparities can find social justice related grounds based on gender.

Publication Type: Research Reports
Abstract: An examination of the relationships between preservice teachers' exposure to the practices of teaching ELLs and culturally responsive teaching self-efficacy beliefs. Implications for preparing teachers to teach ELLs are discussed.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to assess the ways in which legislators’ approaches to electoral, policy-making and organizational politics shifted between the 1980s and 1990s as the highly professionalized California State Legislature experienced substantial 'de-professionalization' while the citizen-oriented Indiana State Legislature moved towards a more professionalized structure.

The first part of the paper explores the goals, skills and behavior patterns that characterized California and Indiana legislators in the 1980s, based on original interviews with sixty to eighty lower-house legislators in each state in the mid 1980s. Taken together, these interviews identify the distinctly different ways that representatives approach 'legislative mastery' in professionalized versus the citizen legislatures.

Based on this baseline study, the second half of the paper examines the ways in which goals, skills and behavior patterns of legislators changed as the Indiana state legislature embraced reforms that professionalized its electoral and organizational structures while the California state legislature experienced term limits. Again, sixty to eighty lower-house legislators were interviewed in the mid to late 1990s in each state, following enactment of reforms in each state, using the same questions as in the 1980s.

The resulting analysis provides an extensive assessment of the ways in which a professionalized versus a citizen-oriented legislative structure can shape goals, strategies and behavior patterns and a close examination of the extent to which such patterns of legislative mastery can then be reshaped through organizational, electoral and constitutional reform.