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Personal political salience (PPS) is proposed as a personality characteristic that assesses individuals' linkage of political events with their personal identities. Its role in facilitating the development of politicized collective identity and action is examined. In four samples of midlife and activist women, we show that PPS was consistently related both to politicized gender identity and political participation. Further analyses show similar results for PPS, politicized racial identity, and political participation. Politicized gender identity mediated the relationship between PPS and women's rights activism, and politicized racial identity mediated the relationship between PPS and civil rights activism. PPS is demonstrated to independently predict political action and also to provide a personality link between group memberships, politicized collective identity, and political participation.

Human cytomegalovirus (HCMV) generates a significant clinical burden worldwide, particularly among the immune compromised. In approximately 30% of untreated HIV/AIDS patients without access or sufficient response to antiretroviral therapies, for example, HCMV causes a sight-threatening retinitis. To study the mechanisms of AIDS-related HCMV retinitis, our lab has for many years used a mouse model in which a mixture of mouse retroviruses induces murine AIDS after approximately 10 weeks, rendering otherwise resistant mice susceptible to opportunistic pathogens. This immunodeficiency combined with subretinal inoculation of murine cytomegalovirus yields a reproducible model of the human disease, facilitating the discovery of many clinically relevant virologic and immunologic mechanisms of retinal destruction which we summarize in this review.

The New Research on Gender in Political Psychology Conference brought together new and experienced teachers with interests in gender politics. The conference session “Teaching Gender throughout the Curriculum” generated a great deal of discussion concerning the pedagogical practice of gender mainstreaming. Gender mainstreaming—the integration of gendered content into courses required for a major—was recognized as one of 11 recommendations for reforming the undergraduate political science curriculum in the 1991 APSA report “Liberal Learning an The Political Science Major: A Report to the Profession” (popularly referred to as the Wahlke Report). Little information is available on the prevalence of gender courses in the undergraduate curriculum, but the data that does exist suggest such courses are uncommon (Brandes et al. 2001). We found virtually no data on the practice of gender mainstreaming in political science and little data in the way of assessing the impact of gendered content when students are exposed to it. This absence of data suggests gender mainstreaming has not emerged as a serious priority for curricular reform.

Prior research on political activism focused on direct predictors of collective action (e.g., life experiences), with little attention paid to what psychologically motivates individuals to act. The group consciousness literature provides an obvious psychological motive for activism, but ignores individual difference variables that differentiate people who develop group consciousness from those who do not. This article integrates the two literatures on activism and group consciousness, and presents a model whereby group consciousness mediates relationships between collective action and personality and life experiences. The general model was evaluated empirically by examining feminist consciousness and women's rights activism in two samples. Feminist consciousness was found to mediate relationships between activism and a number of personality and life experience variables, including low authoritarianism, political salience, sexual oppression, and education about women's position in society. The possible extension of this model to other kinds of political activism is discussed.

Aging is characterized both by developmental maturity, as well as beliefs and ideas about growing older. This study examines relationships between successful aging, as defined by Rowe and Kahn (Science 237(4811):143–149, 1987 ), and two aspects of personality that are particularly salient in late midlife—generativity and concerns about aging—in three samples of college-educated women in their early sixties. Relationships between generativity and successful aging and concerns about aging and successful aging are assessed cross-sectionally and over time using multiple linear modeling. Concerns about aging and generativity are associated within time with successful aging; in addition, increased concerns about aging are associated with decreased successful aging, while increased generativity is associated with increased successful aging over time. Our findings highlight the value of examining changes in adult personality developmental preoccupations as a potential contributor to successful aging.

This article presents a case study of faculty members in a psychology department whose shared questions about pedagogy and learning informed a data-driven curricular review and revision using an open-ended assessment that privileged deep learning. The authors describe the development of this assessment and how its results across the arc of the major led to a revision of the department's curriculum, including the creation of new courses that focused on developing students' abilities to “think like psychologists.” The study indicates that faculty intuitions of potential problems in student learning can be successfully assessed and then addressed through curricular changes.

Personal political salience (PPS), or the propensity to attach personal meaning to social and historical events, is an individual difference variable that is related to civic participation and participation in political activism. PPS is conceptualized as a self-schema and hypothesized to be related to efficient processing of political data. In two samples, PPS was positively related to number of political interest descriptors endorsed, unrelated to number of personality descriptors endorsed, and positively related to quick processing of information about political positions, party identification, and political ideology. Conceptualizing PPS as a self-schema is useful because it provides a cognitive mechanism whereby people connect personal experiences to their wider social, historical, and political contexts.

This study examined four areas of teacher perceptions of students using data from the eighth-grade wave of the ECLS-K:1998. First, this study examined whether teachers’ perceptions, as proxied by teachers’ ratings of student academic effort and behavior, vary by extracurricular involvement, and whether differential teacher ratings between extracurricular and non-extracurricular-involved students are mediated by students’ social belonging. Second, this study examined the relationship between teachers’ academic and behavior ratings and students’ academic self-concept, and whether relationships between academic self-concept and teacher ratings are mediated or moderated by extracurricular involvement. This study found that teacher ratings of behavior and academic effort for students involved in extracurricular activities are higher relative to those for students not involved in extracurricular activities. Family SES was the strongest predictor of academic effort. Student sex was the strongest predictor of behavior. Academic self-concept was found to be more strongly associated with teacher ratings of student academic effort than either extracurricular involvement or teacher ratings of student behavior. Additionally, extracurricular involvement significantly mediates and moderates relationships between teacher ratings and academic self-concept.