This study examined possible ways to ensure that participants provide fully informed consent for online surveys. Participants were randomly assigned to read either a traditional informed consent or one of three modified versions: enhanced, consent for each key element, or a combination of these two. Those who read the combination version scored higher on a comprehension quiz, guessed at fewer questions, and were more likely to read all of the informed consent than those who received the traditional version. These findings (...) suggest that comprehension can be improved by adopting alternatives to the traditional informed consent. (shrink)

Research shows that commitment-based interventions are among the most effective strategies to encourage pro-environmental behaviors, but methods to elicit commitments from a large number of individuals are often costly and unrealistic. Predictions requests—a commitment-type strategy—are an effective mass-communication strategy and have the potential to influence pro-environmental behavior among large audiences. This research is the first to demonstrate that prediction requests in a consumer behavior context influence preference for environmentally friendly products. In addition, this research examines the role of individual and (...) contextual factors in influencing the efficacy of prediction requests. Study 1 shows that exposure to an advertisement with a prediction request leads to increased preferences for environmentally sustainable household cleaning products, compared to a control advertisement, and that this effect is greater when the prediction request is paired with an audience cue . Study 2 indicates that the effect of prediction requests on preference for sustainable products is greater for individuals with interdependent self-construal. Substantive implications and directions for future research are discussed. (shrink)

Essays in Memory of Richard Helgerson: Laureations brings together new essays by leading literary scholars of the British and European middle ages and early modern period who have been influenced by the groundbreaking scholarship of Richard Helgerson. The contributors evince the ongoing impact of Helgerson's work in critical debates including those of nationalism, formal analysis, and literary careerism.

To address the issue of the growing need for measuring populist attitudes, researchers have proposed several instruments with different theoretical backgrounds in conceptualizing the construct. This study aimed to verify the psychometric properties of the recently developed Three-dimensional populist scale by Shultz and her associates. As opposed to scales which define populist attitudes as uni-dimensional constructs, this one is based on the presumption that it is a latent higher-order construct with three distinct first-order dimensions. The convenient sample was comprised of (...) 535 participants, all ethnic Macedonians (53.1% women) from 25 urban (52.6% from the capital city) and 15 rural areas of the country, with average age M = 36.2 (SD = 12.4) and mostly (65%) with completed high school. All participants voluntarily answered the set of selected instruments which included two populist attitudes scales, several other scales the measure related variables and demographic data. The psychometric characteristics of the instrument in this particular cultural context were explored by performing item-analysis, factor analysis and testing the proposed hypotheses generated on the basis of previous relevant research. Results confirmed the three-dimensional structure of the Shultz’s scale with excellent fit indicators, while the Alpha coefficients showed acceptable reliability of the scale and its subscales. The construct dimensions exhibit significant associations with other measures expected to be related to populist attitudes endorsement. It was concluded that the Shultz et al. three-dimensional scale on populist attitudes translated in Macedonian is adequate to be used as a measure of this variable and that its efficacy for predicting electoral choices should be further scrutinized. (shrink)

Communicative Understandings of Women's Leadership Development: From Ceilings of Glass to Labyrinth Paths, edited by Elesha L. Ruminski and Annette M. Holba, weaves the disciplines of communication studies, leadership studies, and women's studies to offer theoretical and practical reflection about women's leadership development in academic, organizational, and political contexts. This work claims a space for women's leadership studies and acknowledges the paradigmatic shift from discussing women's leadership using the glass ceiling to what Eagly and Carli identify as the labyrinth of (...) leadership. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 479 Saint Thomas au XXe siecle: Actes du colloque du Centenaire de la "Revue thomiste." Paris: Saint-Paul, 1994. Pp. 475 (paper). In March of 1993 the Revue thomiste marked its centenary by sponsoring a three-day colloquium at the lnstitut Catholique of Toulouse on "St. Thomas in the 20th century." The commemoration resumed the following month with a conference at the University of Fribourg (Switzerland), site of the (...) journal's foundation. This volume assembles the papers presented at the Toulouse colloquium and a selection of those read in Fribourg. All of the contributions are in French. The volume opens with a letter (dated 11 March 1993) that His Holiness John-Paul II addressed to the Prior Provincial of the Toulouse Dominicans, under whose aegis the Revue thomiste is now published. The Pope pays tribute to the "lucid discernment" that has guided this journal in a "critical and constructive reflection on the major problems of our epoch, assuring it a place of choice in Catholic intellectual life" (p. 7). Next follows an editorial introduction by Serge-Thomas Bonino, O.P., who examines the pertinence of the Revue's motto vetera novis augere. Acknowledging that the Thomistic revival of this century has largely proven to be unsuccessful, to judge by the extent of its cultural impact, he concludes nevertheless that this failure may pave the way for an eventual renewal, on condition that the past achievements and deficiencies of Thomism come to be adequately understood. The present volume thus aims to assess the efforts of Francophone philosophers and theologians to advance the thought of Thomas Aquinas; it thereby provides us with a valuable status quaestionis, enabling Aquinas's contemporary disciples to measure better the challenge that lies before them. The first of the volume's three sections is devoted to historical studies on the Revue thomiste's role in the formation of contemporary Neo-Thomism and its contribution to some of the important theological controversies in the first half of this century. Francesco Baretta narrates the vicissitudes of the journal's inception and first years (1893-1905). Not until the establishment in 1907 of the Revue des sciences philosophiques et theologiques by members of the Dominican order's Paris province (the reasons that motivated the foundation of a rival journal are taken up by Andre Duval in a paper wholly devoted to this topic [pp. 96108 ]) did the Revue thomi~te come to be closely affiliated with the Toulouse province. Prior to this time it enjoyed the active collaboration of the order's three French provinces: Lyon, Paris, and Toulouse. Inspired by the recently promulgated Aeterni Patris (1879), the founders of the Revue thomiste sought to implement the encyclical's recommendation that the doctrine of Thomas Aquinas be brought into fruitful dialogue with modern science. Yet in so doing the Revue thomiste encountered serious obstacles, both theoretical and practical. Theoretically, the journal's chief collaborators were unable to recognize the originality of the hypothetico-deductive method and thus persisted 480 BOOK REVIEWS in thematizing modem science according to the epistemological categories of Aristotle's Posterior Analytics. Practically, they were unable (some exceptions aside) to enlist the support of contributors competent in both experimental science and scholastic thought. Thomism's engagement with modernity is taken up anew by Henry Donneaud, who charts the Revue thomiste's role in the nascent modernist crisis. During this period (1900-1908) the journal's rapprochement with the physical sciences attenuated, giving way to a preoccupation with modernism and its attendant controversies: the evolution of Catholic dogmas, the nature and role of apologetics, etc. Far from presenting a united front in the face of these theological developments, the principal collaborators of the Revue thomiste diverged in the fundamental orientation of their responses. Gradually, two very different Thomisms emerged: one, markedly conservative, refused any compromise with the new trends, condemning them in toto by appeal to a literalist, a-historical reading of the master; the other, progressive, sought to confront the modernists on their own terrain by drawing on the resources of a Thomistic doctrine open to amendment. After a period of internal strife the latter orientation became the more dominant of the two. The very... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Critical Tales: New Studies of the Heptaméron and Early Modern CultureDora E. PolachekCritical Tales: New Studies of the Heptaméron and Early Modern Culture, edited by John D. Lyons and Mary B. McKinley; xii & 296 pp. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993, $36.95.What a difference a decade can make. In 1983 H. P. Clive’s slim Marguerite de Navarre: An Annotated Bibliography made pointedly clear the marginal position of (...) this author in the French Renaissance literary canon, and the relative obscurity of her Heptaméron (there were less than 200 entries dealing with her unfinished collection of stories that first appeared in 1558). The 500th anniversary of Marguerite’s birth in 1992 brought with it a remarkable outpouring of reflections on this neglected masterpiece. Critical Tales ranks among the best of such undertakings. Eclectic in its approach, the volume comprises fifteen articles by scholars whose analyses advance the reader’s appreciation of the Heptaméron in all “its inexhaustible complexity” (p. 279).As complex as Marguerite’s tales may be, Lyons and McKinley have done an admirable job making their volume’s contents as accessible as possible to the growing number of scholars interested in the work both as text and as important artifact in the history of the evolution of narrative. All the articles are in English (with three translated from French). Citations from the Heptaméron appear in French, but for each, the editors include the corresponding page numbers in the most accessible English translation. In addition to a selected bibliography, the volume provides a useful index.The volume’s introduction presents the dominant issues, as well as a sketch of each article’s vantage point. The editors then divide the book into three sections: “Generic Transformations and Graphic Transgressions” (with articles by Robert D. Cottrell, Hope Glidden, Marcel Tetel, Donald Stone, and Tom Conley); “Narrative Systems and Structures” (with articles by Michel Jeanneret, Cathleen M. Bauschatz, François Cornilliat and Ullrich Langer, McKinley herself, Philippe de Lajarte, and André Tournon); “Character and Community” (with articles by Daniel Russell, François Rigolot, Paula Sommers, and Edwin M. Duval). The epilogue that follows, by virtue of its length and quality, could easily be considered the sixteenth article in the collection. It shows how these heterogeneous pieces relate to issues of narrative and narrative theory.Just how radical an upheaval did the Reformation cause? The contributions bear witness to the major changes in ways of thinking and writing that played themselves out even in secular texts. The theological tensions caused by the evangelical movement are evident in all three sections of the volume, and the introduction will lead readers to the relevant essays. Among them, Rigolot’s striking allegorical reading of novella 32 in terms of “The Magadelen Controversy” (i.e., was she really one person or a conflation of three different women?) demonstrates why the discoveries of the intellectually driven philological projects of such humanists as Lefèvre d’Etaples posed such pragmatic [End Page 392] quagmires for the late medieval church. Another piece likely to cause discussion is Duval’s “Et puis, quelles nouvelles?” His lexical findings on the Renaissance meaning of nouvelle lead him to conclude that the ten characters assembled at Saint-Serrance “do no tell tales” but rather “report news” (p. 245). For Duval the evangelical resonances of the “Good News” highlight the fundamental philosophical dilemma in the discussions of the frame story characters: how to reconcile living in the world of news while still abiding to the Word of the Good News.For articles more specifically on narrative theory, readers will benefit from the epilogue by using its insights and directional signs to locate those essays particularly relevant to their interests. Among these, two focus on the interplay between the revolution in printing and narrative strategies. In “Modular Narrative and the Crisis of Interpretation,” Jeanneret shows how the short tale structure of the Heptaméron was part of an important Renaissance trend favoring creation of “modules,” defined as moveable segments of discourse that could be reassembled and put to other uses, while at the same time allowing for the intercalation of commentary. In his “The Graphics of... (shrink)

First published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The present stage in the development of the Marxist-Leninist theory of esthetics cannot but be recognized as productive in the sense that there has been a noticeable expansion of the sphere of studies in esthetics, which has come to embrace ever newer problems that heretofore were virtually or entirely ignored by scholarship in our country. Unfortunately, the problem identified in the title of the present article has not been among those treated. The subject of art and personality differences has had (...) no single monograph or even a chapter in those inclusive works of recent years in which attempts have been made at a systematic presentation of the entire content of the esthetic teachings of Marxism . It is only certain aspects of this subject that have attracted the attention of theoreticians, and then they have been examined only in passing, within the context of other problems. (shrink)

In the article Kobryn Mykhaylo «Symbiosis okcydental and oriental greek-catholic group as a identity of the UGCC» has been investigated the evolution of Okcydental and Oriental identity groups within the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church. The concept of «religious identity» has been determined. The interaction and relationship of Okcydental and Oriental Greek- Catholic groups has been analyzed. The method of combining pro-Western and pro-Eastern identity groups in the creation of a common identity of the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church has been considered.