What happens after prejudice is confronted in the workplace? How mindsets affect minorities' and women's outlook on future social relations

Organizations are increasingly concerned with fostering successful diversity. Toward this end, diversity research has focused on trying to reduce prejudice and biased behavior. But what happens when prejudice in the workplace inevitably occurs? Research also needs to focus on whether recovery and repair of social relations after incidents of prejudice are possible. To begin investigating this question, we develop a new framework for understanding reactions to prejudice in the workplace. We hypothesized that when women and minorities choose to confront a prejudiced comment in a workplace interaction (vs. remain silent) and hold a growth (vs. fixed) mindset — the belief that others can change — they remain more positive in their subsequent outlook in the workplace. Studies 1a, 1b, and 2 used hypothetical workplace scenarios to expose participants to someone who expressed bias; Study 3 ensured real-world relevance by eliciting retrospective accounts of workplace bias from African American employees. Across studies, women and minorities who confronted the perpetrator of prejudice exhibited more positive subsequent expectations of that co-worker when they held a growth mindset. Importantly, these more positive expectations were associated with reports of greater workplace belonging (Study 2), ratings of improved relations with co-workers who had displayed bias (Study 3), and greater workplace satisfaction (Studies 2-3). Thus, a growth mindset contributes to successful workplace diversity by protecting women’s and minorities’ outlook when they opt to confront expressions of bias

High-sensitivity troponin I concentrations are a marker of an advanced hypertrophic response and adverse outcomes in patients with aortic stenosis

Aims: High-sensitivity cardiac troponin I (cTnI) assays hold promise in detecting the transition from hypertrophy to heart failure in aortic stenosis. We sought to investigate the mechanism for troponin release in patients with aortic stenosis and whether plasma cTnI concentrations are associated with long-term outcome. Methods and results: Plasma cTnI concentrations were measured in two patient cohorts using a high-sensitivity assay. First, in the Mechanism Cohort, 122 patients with aortic stenosis (median age 71, 67% male, aortic valve area 1.0 ± 0.4 cm2) underwent cardiovascular magnetic resonance and echocardiography to assess left ventricular (LV) myocardial mass, function, and fibrosis. The indexed LV mass and measures of replacement fibrosis (late gadolinium enhancement) were associated with cTnI concentrations independent of age, sex, coronary artery disease, aortic stenosis severity, and diastolic function. In the separate Outcome Cohort, 131 patients originally recruited into the Scottish Aortic Stenosis and Lipid Lowering Trial, Impact of REgression (SALTIRE) study, had long-term follow-up for the occurrence of aortic valve replacement (AVR) and cardiovascular deaths. Over a median follow-up of 10.6 years (1178 patient-years), 24 patients died from a cardiovascular cause and 60 patients had an AVR. Plasma cTnI concentrations were associated with AVR or cardiovascular death HR 1.77 (95% CI, 1.22 to 2.55) independent of age, sex, systolic ejection fraction, and aortic stenosis severity. Conclusions: In patients with aortic stenosis, plasma cTnI concentration is associated with advanced hypertrophy and replacement myocardial fibrosis as well as AVR or cardiovascular death

Is education a fundamental right? People's lay theories about intellectual potential drive their positions on education

Does every child have a fundamental right to receive a high quality education? We propose that people’s beliefs about whether “nearly everyone” or “only some people” have high intellectual potential drive their positions on education. Three studies found that the more people believed that nearly everyone has high potential, the more they viewed education as a fundamental human right. Further, people who viewed education as a fundamental right, in turn, (1) were more likely to support the institution of free public education; (2) were more concerned upon learning that students in the country were not performing well academically compared to students in peer nations; and (3) were more likely to support redistributing educational funds more equitably across wealthier and poorer school districts. The studies show that people’s beliefs about intellectual potential can influence their positions on education, which can affect the future quality of life for countless students

Implicit theories of emotion shape regulation of negative affect

Mental contrasting of a desired future with the present reality strengthens the link between expectations and goal pursuit: The higher expectations of success, the more people engage in goal pursuit; the lower expectations of success, the more people let go or disengage from goal pursuit. In three studies, we tested if mental contrasting increases the link between expectations and goal pursuit by affecting the strength of mental associations between future and reality. We used lexical decision tasks to measure the strength of associations between future and reality for different domains of goal pursuit (i.e., interpersonal relations, achievement), and compared results in the mental contrasting condition to relevant control conditions (i.e., reverse contrasting and content control). In the mental contrasting condition but not in the control conditions emerged a strong link between expectations of success and the strength of associations between future and reality (Study 1, 2). The strength of associations between future and reality in turn mediated the link between expectations and self-reported as well as other-rated goal pursuit in the mental contrasting condition (Study 1, 2). Finally, the link between expectations and the strength of associations between future and reality in the mental contrasting condition vanished when the goal was attained (Study 3). Taken together, these results suggest that strength of future–reality associations are a mechanism specific to mental contrasting effects on goal pursuit

Aortic valve stenosis-multimodality assessment with PET/CT and PET/MRI

Aortic valve disease is the most common form of heart valve disease in developed countries and a growing healthcare burden with an ageing population. Transthoracic and transoesophageal echocardiography remains central to the diagnosis and surveillance of patients with aortic stenosis, providing gold standard assessments of valve haemodynamics and myocardial performance. However, other multimodality imaging techniques are being explored for the assessment of aortic stenosis, including combined PET/CT and PET/MR. Both approaches provide unique information with respect to disease activity in the valve alongside more conventional anatomic assessments of the valve and myocardium in this condition. This review investigates the emerging use of PET/CT and PET/MR to assess patients with aortic stenosis, examining how the complementary data provided by each modality may be used for research applications and potentially in future clinical practice

Perserverance measures and attainment in first year computing science students.

We investigate the link between concepts of perseverance such as conscientiousness and grit, and the academic attainment of first year computing students. We review the role that perseverance plays in learning models, as well as describing the trait of conscientiousness in the Five Factor Model of personality. We outline research that links this trait with academic success, before focussing on more recent, narrower conceptualisations of perseverance such as academic tenacity and grit. We describe one of the questionnaire tools that have been used to assess the construct of grit. We give details of an investigation that looked for correlations between student responses to Duckworth's Grit Survey, the Big Five Inventory (BFI) Personality Survey and summative attainment scores in a first year programming course. The results suggest a weak but significant correlation between conscientiousness, grit and programming achievement. We discuss these results as well as the limitations of the method used. Finally, we make some observations about the importance of these concepts in Computer Science education and outline further work in this area

'I would rather die': reasons given by 16-year-olds for not continuing their study of mathematics

Improving participation rates in specialist mathematics after the subject ceases to be compulsory at age 16 is part of government policy in England. This article provides independent and recent support for earlier findings concerning reasons for non- participation, based on free response and closed items in a questionnaire with a sample of over 1500 students in 17 schools, close to the moment of choice. The analysis supports findings that perceived difficulty and lack of confidence are important reasons for students not continuing with mathematics, and that perceived dislike and boredom, and lack of relevance, are also factors. There is a close relationship between reasons for non-participation and predicted grade, and a weaker relation to gender. An analysis of the effects of schools, demonstrates that enjoyment is the main factor differentiating schools with high and low participation indices. Building on discussion of these findings, ways of improving participation are briefly suggested

I doubt very seriously whether anyone will hire me; factors predicting employability perceptions in higher education

Understanding what makes people feel employable is enhanced by studying both the structural and individual dimensions of human behaviour. This paper examines the relative impact of three variables on perceptions of the employability of students in Higher Education (18–25); the way in which students think about themselves (mindset), their ability to overcome adversity (resilience) and the relationships and values that govern their interactions (social capital). It is reported that perceptions of employability are predicted largely by two subscales of the CD-RISC scale; “support” (p < .01, ηp2 = .07) and, “goal orientation” (p < .01 ηp2 = .29) and social capital “bridging” (P < .01, ηp2 = .05). Whilst mindset had no direct effect on perceived employability, both the fixed and growth mindsets have significant roles to play in personal resilience. We argue that contrary to previous findings, having a fixed mindset possibly supports the building of self-trust, self-respect and an acceptance of why you may be different from others. Results suggest that developing goal-oriented attitudes in students will support stronger beliefs about the extent to which they are employable.Published onlin

Academic achievement : the role of praise in motivating students

The motivation of students is an important issue in higher education, particularly in the context of the increasing diversity of student populations. A social-cognitive perspective assumes motivation to be dynamic, context-sensitive and changeable, thereby rendering it to be a much more differentiated construct than previously understood. This complexity may be perplexing to tutors who are keen to develop applications to improve academic achievement. One application that is within the control of the tutor, at least to some extent, is the use of praise. Using psychological literature the article argues that in motivating students, the tutor is not well served by relying on simplistic and common sense understandings of the construct of praise and that effective applications of praise are mediated by students' goal orientations, which of themselves may be either additive or interactive composites of different objectives and different contexts