Transition to Parenthood: How Does it Affect Men's and Women's Satisfaction in Various Life Domains? A 4-year Longitudinal Examination

Becoming a parent is a major, privotal life course event (Galdiolo& Roskam, 2012). While many people desire having children, research on parenthood and life satisfaction suggests that the emotional benefits of parenthood are outweighed by time, psychosocial stress and financial costs (Polmann-Schult, 2014). It has been suggested that parenthood has a more negative effect on life satisfaction for women as compared to men (Hansen, 2012). The aim of the current study is to extend findings regarding gender and life satisfaction across Transition to parenthood, by looking at changes in satisfaction in various life domains across a 4-year time period

Singles by choice differ from singles by circumstance in their perceptions of the costs and benefits of romantic relationships

Past research has found that the well-being of singles who desire a romantic relationship ("singles by circumstance") is poorer than that of singles who choose to remain single, in terms of loneliness, depression and self-esteem (Slonim& Schütz, 2015). Therefore, it is important to understand why some singles are satisfied with their relationship status while others are highly motivated to change it. Could it be that the two groups of singles differ regarding their expectations from romantic relationships

How does Sexual Orientation Affect Perceptions of Single People?

Past research has found that single people are perceived more negatively than coupled people. However, in past research, the target’s sexual orientation was not explicitly mentioned. The current experiment manipulated the sexual orientation of targets and also measured the sexual orientation of participants to test whether the relatively negative perceptions of single people are held about people and believed by people regardless of their sexual orientation. Three hundred ninety heterosexual and 226 gay and lesbian participants from Israel and the United States read descriptions of target people. Targets were described as heterosexual, gay, or lesbian; single or in a long-term relationship; and men or women. Although single people were consistently perceived more negatively than coupled people, F(1, 600) = 130.78, p < .001, η2 = .18, participants perceived the differences between coupled and single targets as being largest when they rated targets of the same sexual orientation as themselves, F(1, 600) = 10.38, p =.001, η2 = 0.02. Furthermore, regardless of their own sexual orientation, participants who expressed a stronger desire for a long-term romantic relationship held more negative views of single people compared to coupled people, r = .10, p < .01

Discrete profile comparison using information bottleneck

Sequence homologs are an important source of information about proteins. Amino acid profiles, representing the position-specific mutation probabilities found in profiles, are a richer encoding of biological sequences than the individual sequences themselves. However, profile comparisons are an order of magnitude slower than sequence comparisons, making profiles impractical for large datasets. Also, because they are such a rich representation, profiles are difficult to visualize. To address these problems, we describe a method to map probabilistic profiles to a discrete alphabet while preserving most of the information in the profiles. We find an informationally optimal discretization using the Information Bottleneck approach (IB). We observe that an 80-character IB alphabet captures nearly 90% of the amino acid occurrence information found in profiles, compared to the consensus sequence's 78%. Distant homolog search with IB sequences is 88% as sensitive as with profiles compared to 61% with consensus sequences (AUC scores 0.73, 0.83, and 0.51, respectively), but like simple sequence comparison, is 30 times faster. Discrete IB encoding can therefore expand the range of sequence problems to which profile information can be applied to include batch queries over large databases like SwissProt, which were previously computationally infeasible

By Choice or by Circumstance?: Stereotypes of and Feelings About Single People

The study examines stereotypes of and emotional reactions to singles by choice and singles not by choice. Participants (N = 480) read a scenario describing persons, who were either single by choice or single not by choice and rated their thoughts and feelings about these persons. Singles by choice are perceived as more lonely and miserable, and as less warm and sociable, than singles not by choice. However, they are perceived as more successful and potent. Anger and sympathy mediate the relations between choosing singlehood and stereotyping levels. These findings extend the way in which the Attribution Theory explains activation of stereotypes. In recent years, researchers have increasingly used the term " socially single " , which suggests that what matters most in everyday life is whether a person is in a significant romantic relationship or not, regardless of his or her legal marital status (DePaulo & Morris, 2006). The goal of our study was to examine whether " socially single " people are perceived differently than coupled people, and to determine whether a choice to remain single affected the intensity of stereotypes. In addition, we examined whether the emotions experienced regarding people who are single by choice and people who are single not by choice mediate the activation of stereotypes