The beliefs that underlie autonomy-supportive and controlling teaching: A multinational investigation

We investigated the role of three beliefs in predicting teachers’ motivating style toward students—namely, how effective, how normative, and how easy-to-implement autonomy-supportive and controlling teaching were each believed to be. We further examined national collectivism–individualism as a predictor of individual teachers’ motivating style and beliefs about motivating style, as we expected that a collectivistic perspective would tend teachers toward the controlling style and toward positive beliefs about that style. Participants were 815 full-time PreK-12 public school teachers from eight different nations that varied in collectivism–individualism. All three teacher beliefs explained independent and substantial variance in teachers’ self-described motivating styles. Believed effectiveness was a particularly strong predictor of self-described motivating style. Collectivism–individualism predicted which teachers were most likely to self-describe a controlling motivating style, and a mediation analysis showed that teachers in collectivistic nations self-described a controlling style because they believed it to be culturally normative classroom practice. These findings enhance the literature on the antecedents of teachers’ motivating styles by showing that teacher beliefs strongly predict motivating style, and that culture informs one of these beliefs—namely, normalcy.     

Do Employees Know How Their Supervisors View Them? A Study Examining Metaperceptions of Job Performance

This study investigated employees’ views about how their supervisors would rate their job performance (i.e., employees’ metaperceptions). Two hundred forty employees from a high-tech firm provided self- and metaperception job performance ratings, and their supervisors also provided ratings of the employees’ performance. The study produced several notable findings, including that metaperceptions were more strongly related to supervisory ratings than were self-ratings, that meta-accuracy was stronger for task versus contextual performance, and that employees who engaged in more impression management behavior exhibited higher meta-accuracy. Discussion focuses on the theoretical and practical implications of these findings.     

Generating Multivariate Ordinal Data via Entropy Principles

When conducting robustness research where the focus of attention is on the impact of non-normality, the marginal skewness and kurtosis are often used to set the degree of non-normality. Monte Carlo methods are commonly applied to conduct this type of research by simulating data from distributions with skewness and kurtosis constrained to pre-specified values. Although several procedures have been proposed to simulate data from distributions with these constraints, no corresponding procedures have been applied for discrete distributions. In this paper, we present two procedures based on the principles of maximum entropy and minimum cross-entropy to estimate the multivariate observed ordinal distributions with constraints on skewness and kurtosis. For these procedures, the correlation matrix of the observed variables is not specified but depends on the relationships between the latent response variables. With the estimated distributions, researchers can study robustness not only focusing on the levels of non-normality but also on the variations in the distribution shapes. A simulation study demonstrates that these procedures yield excellent agreement between specified parameters and those of estimated distributions. A robustness study concerning the effect of distribution shape in the context of confirmatory factor analysis shows that shape can affect the robust \(\chi ^2\) and robust fit indices, especially when the sample size is small, the data are severely non-normal, and the fitted model is complex.     

Does survival context enhance memory for source? A within-subjects comparison

ABSTRACT

Nairne, Thompson, and Pandeirada [2007. Adaptive memory: Survival processing enhances retention. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 33, 263–273] demonstrated that processing words according to their relevance to a survival scenario enhanced their subsequent retrieval in recall and recognition tasks compared to a variety of control scenarios. From an adaptive perspective, it is maintained that processing words in a survival context should also enhance memory for source; however, evidence in the literature is rather mixed regarding a survival context advantage for source memory. In the current study, we conducted four experiments to systematically investigate the survival advantage in source memory, when the context itself is the source, with both recall (Experiments 1A and 1B) and recognition tests (Experiments 2A and 2B). Results showed a survival advantage for item memory over the control contexts in all experiments. The survival context advantage was not extended to source memory performance in Experiment 1A. Results from all other experiments, however, indicated a survival context advantage for both item and source memory. Findings are discussed in relation to possible proximate mechanisms underlying the survival processing effect.     

Navigating Trauma in Joseph Conrad's Victory: A Voyage From Sigmund Freud to Philip M. Bromberg

In Victory, Joseph Conrad (1915/1924) revises his earlier treatment of trauma as a singular cataclysmic event in the life of a potentially heroic adult, usually male (as depicted in Heart of Darkness [1898], Lord Jim [1900], and Under Western Eyes [1911]), to a conception of trauma as the corrosive effect of a child's repeated exposures to emotionally invalidating caregivers. Abandoning a view of trauma that would accord with Freud's account of a single shocking incident, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Conrad adopts instead a view that parallels Philip Bromberg's account of trauma as a series of toxic childhood occurrences. Thus Conrad's novel Victory presciently anticipates the corrective vision of contemporary relational psychoanalytic theory, which has largely supplanted Freud's more dramatic narratives with a subtle and nuanced understanding of trauma as a long-term lack of validation in childhood that forecloses adult possibilities. In Victory's portraits of two characters whose lives are constricted by pathological dissociation, Conrad presents literary examples that confirm and illumine Bromberg's clinical and theoretical explications of this pervasive psychological phenomenon.     

Moral Motivation Based on Multiple Developmental Structures: An Exploration of Cognitive and Emotional Dynamics

Intrapersonal variability and multiplicity in the complexity of moral motivation were examined from Dynamic Systems and Self-Determination Theory perspectives. L. Kohlberg's (1969) stages of moral development are reconceptualized as soft-assembled and dynamically transformable process structures of motivation that may operate simultaneously within person in different degrees. Moral motivation is conceptualized as the real-time process of self-organization of cognitive and emotional dynamics out of which moral judgment and action emerge. A detailed inquiry into intrapersonal variation in moral motivation is carried out based on the differential operation of multiple motivational structures. A total of 74 high school students and 97 college students participated in the study by completing a new questionnaire, involving 3 different hypothetical moral judgments. As hypothesized, findings revealed significant multiplicity in the within-person operation of developmental stage structures, and intrapersonal variability in the degrees to which stages were used. Developmental patterns were found in terms of different distributions of multiple stages between high school and college samples, as well as the association between age and overall motivation scores. Differential relations of specific emotions to moral motivation revealed and confirmed the value of differentiating multiple emotions. Implications of the present theoretical perspective and the findings for understanding the complexity of moral judgment and motivation are discussed.     

The effect of cue Relevance,Ambiguity, and self-reported hostility on tat responses

The interaction of cue relevance and ambiguity was studied. Ss high or low in self-reported hostility were administered 8 T A T cards, half of which were high in hostility cue relevance, half low. Half of each subset, in turn, was high in ambiguity, half low. Highly relevant cards tended to elicit more aggressive content than low relevant cards, and stories to ambiguous cards tended to contain more aggressive themes than unambiguous ones, independent of hostility relevance. Hostile Ss tended to be best discriminated from non-hostile Ss on highly relevant cards, where they responded with more aggressive themes. Results were contrasted with previous findings and it was concluded that consistent with findings where hostility is defined by observation or arousal, highly relevant cues are most sensitive to hostility level. While greater expression of negative content, increments in ambiguity did not add to the sensitivity of the stimuli.     

A Note on the Stability of TAT Interjudge and Intrajudge Ambiguity Scores

The stability of TAT ambiguity values, based either on interjudge, or intrajudge response variability, was investigated. Interjudge variability was estimated from dispersion of the first response emitted to each stimulus; intrajudge variability utilized multiple associations by Ss. Multiple association yielded highly stable values in comparisons over time, and neither method resulted in stability across S samples. It was concluded that the definition of ambiguity must include intrajudge variability in order to achieve a reliable ordering of stimuli for a given respondent.     

“Voices of the People”: Linguistic Research Among Germany's Prisoners of War During World War I

This paper investigates the history of the Royal Prussian Phonographic Commission, a body that collected and archived linguistic, ethnographic, and anthropological data from prisoners‐of‐war (POWs) in Germany during World War I. Recent literature has analyzed the significance of this research for the rise of conservative physical anthropology. Taking a complementary approach, the essay charts new territory in seeking to understand how the prison‐camp studies informed philology and linguistics specifically. I argue that recognizing philological commitments of the Phonographic Commission is essential to comprehending the project contextually. My approach reveals that linguists accommodated material and contemporary evidence to older text‐based research models, sustaining dynamic theories of language. Through a case study based on the Iranian philologist F. C. Andreas (1846–1930), the paper ultimately argues that linguistics merits greater recognition in the historiography of the behavioral sciences.