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A seemingly universal lesson is that anything taken to its extreme is detrimental. Indeed, there has been growing interest in testing this idea within psychology. These studies have often been framed in terms of Aristotle’s doctrine of the golden mean or the idea that virtue lies between the vices of deficiency and excess. Recent explicit reviews of this hypothesis in the psychological literature have led to the paradoxical conclusion that one can have too much virtue (i.e., the too-much-of-a-good-thing effect) despite virtue being identified by the golden mean. We argue in this article that this conclusion is due to a reductionist account of virtues in psychology and the resultant measurement of virtues as general dispositional tendencies in behavior. We review philosophical theory on the golden mean to show that the relationship between virtue and relevant behavior is fundamentally about situation-specific optimality. Using schematic models, we contrast the former measurement approach against the latter to explain the too-much-of-a-goodthing effect and further demonstrate why virtues cannot be properly measured as general tendencies in behavior. We conclude with methodological implications of our theory-informed approach to virtue measurement for research design, evaluation, and conceptualization.

Procedural justice theory increasingly guides policing reforms in the United States and abroad. Yet the primary sources of perceived police procedural justice are still unclear. Building on social schema research, we posit civilians’ perceptions of police procedural justice only partly reflect their personal and vicarious experiences with officers. We theorize perceptions of the police are anchored in a broader “relational justice schema,” composed of views about how respectful, fair, and unbiased most people are in their dealings with others. Individuals’ experiences with certain nonlegal actors and neighborhood environments should directly affect their relational justice schema and indirectly affect their evaluation of police. Nevertheless, experiences with police, especially mistreatment by officers, should also affect perceived police procedural justice and may moderate the effects of relational justice schema endorsement. We test our hypotheses in two studies with national samples. The findings strongly support a social schematic model of perceived police procedural justice.

This article describes the control-value theory of achievement emotions and its implications for educational research and practice. The theory provides an integrative framework for analyzing the antecedents and effects of emotions experienced in achievement and academic settings. It is based on the premise that appraisals of control and values are central to the arousal of achievement emotions, including activity-related emotions such as enjoyment, frustration, and boredom experienced at learning, as well as outcome emotions such as joy, hope, pride, anxiety, hopelessness, shame, and anger relating to success or failure. Corollaries of the theory pertain to the multiplicity and domain specificity of achievement emotions; to their more distal individual and social antecedents, their effects on engagement and achievement, and the reciprocal linkages between emotions, antecedents and effects; to the regulation and development of these emotions; and to their relative universality across genders and cultures. Implications addressed concern the conceptual integration of emotion, motivation, and cognition, and the need to advance mixed-method paradigms. In closing, implications for educational practice are discussed.

It is common knowledge that physical activity leads to numerous health and psychological benefits. However, the relationship between children's physical activity and academic achievement has been debated in the literature. Some studies have found strong, positive relationships between physical activity and cognitive outcomes, while other studies have reported small, negative associations. This study was a comprehensive, quantitative synthesis of the literature, using a total of 59 studies from 1947 to 2009 for analysis. Results indicated a significant and positive effect of physical activity on children's achievement and cognitive outcomes, with aerobic exercise having the greatest effect. A number of moderator variables were also found to play a significant role in this relationship. Findings are discussed in light of improving children's academic performance and changing school-based policy. Verf.-Referat.

Although research has clearly established that low family income has negative impacts on children's cognitive skills and social-emotional competence, less often is a family's experience of material hardship considered. Using the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 1998-1999 (N = 21,255), this study examined dual components of family income and material hardship along with parent mediators of stress, positive parenting, and investment as predictors of 6-year-old children's cognitive skills and social-emotional competence. Support was found for a model that identified unique parent-mediated paths from income to cognitive skills and from income and material hardship to social-emotional competence. The findings have implications for future study of family income and child development and for identification of promising targets for policy intervention.

Using structural equation modeling, this study attempted to untangle the underlying mechanisms among student-faculty interaction, classroom engagement, and cognitive skills development by examining the role played by students' academic selfchallenge and sense of belonging on the relationships among the variables. The study utilized data from the 2010 University of California Undergraduate Experience Survey and a sample of 5169 senior students across 10 campuses. This study found that student-faculty interaction is related to greater levels of classroom engagement, which in turn facilitates students' cognitive skills development and that students' academic self-challenge and sense of belonging mediate the relationship between faculty interaction and classroom engagement. Thus, the findings suggest that the pathways from student-faculty interaction to a desired college outcome seem more complex than those hypothesized in traditional college impact theories or models. The study discusses the theoretical and practical implications of the findings.

The high catalytic activity of gold clusters on oxides has been attributed to structural effects (including particle thickness and shape and metal oxidation state), as well as to support effects. We have created well-ordered gold monolayers and bilayers that completely wet (cover) the oxide support, thus eliminating particle shape and direct support effects. High-resolution electron energy loss spectroscopy and carbon monoxide adsorption confirm that the gold atoms are bonded to titanium atoms. Kinetic measurements for the catalytic oxidation of carbon monoxide show that the gold bilayer structure is significantly more active (by more than an order of magnitude) than the monolayer.

Persistent school segregation means not only that children of different racial and ethnic backgrounds attend different schools but also that their schools are unequal in performance. This study documents the extent of disparities nationally in school performance between schools attended by whites and Asians compared with those attended by blacks, Hispanics, and Native Americans. It further examines the geography of school inequality in two ways. First, it analyzes the segregation of students between different types of school profiles based on racial composition, poverty, and metropolitan location. Second, it estimates the independent effects of these and other school and school district characteristics on school performance, identifying which aspects of school segregation are the most important sources of disadvantage. A focus on schools at the bottom of the distribution, as in No Schools Left Behind, would not ameliorate wide disparities between groups that are found across the whole spectrum of school performance.

The purpose of this paper is to highlight three recent contributions of the affective turn: moving beyond the emotion/reason dichotomy; highlighting the politics of emotion and affect; and, strengthening the intersections of the psychic and the social. While these contributions are not necessarily paradigmatic of scholarship in the affective turn, they do highlight some important threads of thinking about affect theory in several fields of study, and thus they can be insightful in the context of science education as well. This discussion is motivated by the notion that science teaching and learning can benefit theoretically from these latest developments of affect theory. Although the question of why science teaching and learning has not paid so much attention to emotion and affect in the past is no less important, this paper will move past this in an effort to focus on the openings that are created for pedagogy in general.

Background Thoracentesis yields valuable insights in pleural effusion diagnosis by accurately interpreting pleural fluid analysis results and can cause several complications, which emphasizes the importance of training in a simulated environment. There are many expensive simulators related to this procedure and few validated scenarios. This study aimed to build and validate a low-cost simulator and a clinical simulation scenario for teaching the thoracentesis procedural technique to undergraduate medical students. Methods This is a methodological study carried out at a public university in the interior of the state of São Paulo, Brazil. It was carried out in three methodological stages, namely: 1) Construction of the simulator, which involved planning, surveying, pricing, and use of material resources 2) Construction of a simulated thoracentesis scenario, based on literature and a simulation script and 3) Validation by experts and pilot study of the simulator and scenario. Experts were selected according to Fehring criteria. Results The simulator proved to be suitable and low-cost (US $18). Modifications to the scenario were suggested by the experts and students in the pilot study, with 100.0% agreement. Conclusions In conclusion, a low-tech, handmade, and low-cost simulator was built and evaluated for training in the thoracentesis procedural technique, as well as a clinical simulation scenario for the management of patients with pleural effusion, which can be included in various medical teaching contexts.