Are fluctuations in personality states more than fluctuations in affect?

People fluctuate in their behavior as they go about their daily lives, but little is known about the processes underlying these fluctuations. In two ecological momentary assessment studies (Ns = 124, 415), we examined the extent to which negative and positive affect accounted for the within-person variance in Big Five states. Participants were prompted six times a day over six days (Study 1) or four times a day over two weeks (Study 2) to report their recent thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. Multilevel modeling results indicated that negative and positive affect account for most, but not all, of the within-person variance in personality states. Importantly, situation variables predicted variance in some personality states even after accounting for fluctuations in affect, indicating that fluctuations in personality states may be more than fluctuations in state affect.     

Are we all less risky and more skillful than our fellow drivers?

In this study subjects were asked about their competence as drivers in relation to a group of drivers. The results showed that a majority of subjects regarded themselves as more skillful and less risky than the average driver in each group respectively. This result was compared with similar recent findings in other fields. Finally, the consequences for planning and risk taking of seeing oneself as more competent than others were discussed briefly.     

Still servants of work? Exploring the role of the critic in work and organizational psychology

This paper situates the burgeoning movement of critical work and organizational psychology (CWOP) within a broader and ongoing effort to rehabilitate work in a broken society. Drawing upon Loren Baritz's seminal critique of the field, The Servants of Power, the argument is made that while CWOP scholars clearly militate against pandering to the “power elite,” they nonetheless risk becoming servants of work, defined as the propensity to perpetuate work's outsized psychological significance. To support such an argument, a core yet neglected theme in Baritz's book is revisited, that of the role of the critic, to demonstrate how CWOP scholars might navigate their own entanglements with servitude while at the same time contest work's symbolic power. The paper also addresses the charge of intellectual elitism that can result from holding such a position of “critical distance” not just from mainstream scholarship, but from work itself. Implications for the future of CWOP are discussed.     

The role of cognitive resources in determining our moral intuitions: Are we all liberals at heart?

Recent research provides evidence that one important difference between liberals and conservatives is their basic moral intuitions. These studies suggest that while liberals and conservatives respond similarly to considerations of harm/care and fairness (what Graham and Haidt call the “individualizing” foundations), conservatives also respond strongly to considerations of in-group, authority, and purity (the “binding” foundations) while liberals do not. Our study examined two alternative hypotheses for this difference—the first being that liberals cognitively override, and the alternative being that conservatives cognitively enhance, their binding foundation intuitions. Using self-regulation depletion and cognitive load tasks to compromise people's ability to monitor and regulate their automatic moral responses, we found support for the latter hypothesis—when cognitive resources were depleted/distracted, conservatives became more like liberals (de-prioritizing the binding foundations), rather than the other way around. This provides support for the view that conservatism is a form of motivated social cognition.     

What is the role of affect in the spacing effect?

In Experiments 1 and 2, after studying a list containing connotatively neutral words that were presented once or were presented at various spacing intervals, subjects either attempted free recall or made affective judgments of the study-list targets along a pleasant/unpleasant dimension. Spacing effects occurred in recall, and massed items were judged to be more unpleasantthan once-presented and spaced words. In the third experiment, subjects studied homogeneous lists composed of either connotatively good words or connotativelybad ones. Spacing effects were absent in the recall of both types of words because massed-practice words were recalled at a high level, one that was about the same as that for spaced-practice words. Affective judgments were unrelated to presentation condition, and both good and bad massed words were judged to be positive in affect. Although the data suggest that different study conditions can lead to different affective reactions, the results are moot with regard to the relationship between affect and the magnitude of spacing effects.     

Why do we think? Consequences of regarding thinking as behavior

Cognitive psychologists have made significant progress in explaining how people think. However, relatively little time and energy have been invested in understanding why we think--the factors that make us start or stop thinking, choose and change strategies and solutions. Such questions are linked to motivation and to discriminative and reinforcing stimuli. In this article, the idea that studying thinking as a form of behavior closely connected to antecedent stimuli and consequences leads to potentially important questions that are not presently being studied in the field of cognitive psychology. This is not an argument for reverting to behaviorism--rather, the argument is made that integrating a behavioral perspective on thinking would enrich cognitive psychology.     

Who is more utilitarian? Negative affect mediates the relation between control deprivation and moral judgment

Current Psychology - This research tried to examine the effect of sense of control on moral judgments and the mediating roles of positive and negative affect. Sixty-one Chinese college students...     

Are you sure? the role of uncertainty in career

Although uncertainty is a fundamental human experience, professionals in the career field have largely overlooked the role that it plays in people's careers. The changed nature of careers has resulted in people experiencing increased uncertainty in their career that is beyond the uncertainty experienced in their job. The author explores the role of uncertainty in people's experience of their careers and examines the implications for career counseling theory and practice. A review of the career theory and career counseling literature indicates that although contemporary approaches have been offered to respond to the changed nature of career, none of the approaches have identified uncertainty as a core part of individuals' experience of their career. The broader literature on uncertainty is then reviewed at the societal, organizational, and individual levels.     

Are children more accurate than adults? Spontaneous use of metaphor by children and adults

This study examined an observation in which children outscored adults on a series of test questions, which included unusual items such as, "Do you see with your ears?" We assumed that the adults were treating the questions metaphorically because the literally correct answer was so obvious, an assumption consistent with Grice's theory. In Study 1, we tested this assumption by manipulating pretest and test items so as to suggest, or not suggest, a metaphorical or factual response. In Study 2, we used a similar manipulation involving the order of questions of various sorts and we more directly tested the Gricean hypothesis by giving college students a reason to treat the question literally. The results replicated the previous finding in which college students' scores were lower than those of children, and the condition effects suggested that the college students' performance was due to their responding metaphorically.     

Are women always more interpersonally sensitive than men? Impact of goals and content domain

Two studies examined motivation and content domain as possible influences on sex differences in interpersonal sensitivity. Although much research has found women to excel on tasks measuring interpersonal sensitivity, most of the tasks have measured accuracy in female-relevant domains such as emotion. The present studies measured interpersonal sensitivity, defined as accurate recall of another person, for both female-relevant and male-relevant content domains and also included motivational manipulations intended to influence men and women differently. Study 1 measured accuracy of recalling information in a written vignette about a person, and Study 2 measured accuracy of recalling details about an interaction partner. Both studies supported hypotheses about domain specificity and gender-relevant motivation. However, even for male-stereotypic content and for tasks framed to favor men's motivation to perform well, men's accuracy never exceeded women's.     

Are conditioned stimuli determinants of oriented exploratory behavior in the rat?

To test Bindra and Palfai's hypothesis about enhancing and inhibitory motivational effects of a conditioned stimulus on exploratory behavior, rats in a first experiment were submitted to pairings of a tone with (a) water, (b) intermittent deliveries of water after a period of constant pairing. In a control condition, the tone was presented alone. The tone was subsequently presented during oriented exploration of a novel stimulus, in the conditioning context. There was no difference in exploratory performance between conditions. In a second experiment with another kind of stimulus change and a larger number of training trials, exploration did not increase when occurring during CS presentation. The lack of facilitation which is possibly the product of competition between exploration and magazine-directed responses, can also be interpreted as indicating that the effects of a conditioned stimulus are reinforcer specific and that the diffuse activity it generates in a situation different from the training one is not equivalent, as concerns the processes involved, to oriented exploratory behavior.     

Is the gap more than gender? A longitudinal analysis of gender, gender role orientation, and earnings

This study investigated the relationships among gender, gender role orientation (i.e., attitudes toward the gendered separation of roles at work and at home), and earnings. A multilevel model was conceptualized in which gender role orientation and earnings were within-individual variables that fluctuate over time (although predictors of between-individual differences in gender role orientation were also considered). Results indicated that whereas traditional gender role orientation was positively related to earnings, gender significantly predicted the slope of this relationship: Traditional gender role orientation was strongly positively associated with earnings for men; it was slightly negatively associated with earnings for women. Occupational segregation partly explained these gender differences. Overall, the results suggest that although gender role attitudes are becoming less traditional for men and for women, traditional gender role orientation continues to exacerbate the gender wage gap.     

Who is more proactive,the optimist or the pessimist? Exploring the role of hope as a moderator

This research tested the existence of a moderation role of hope on the effects of optimism and pessimism over proactive coping in a sample survey of 343 subjects. The results showed that optimism explained proactive coping, independent of hope. However, hope appeared to moderate the relationship between pessimism and passive coping, a criterion variable that emerged from the psychometric analysis of the proactive coping measure. Specifically, for individuals low in pessimism, being high or low in hope did not impact coping, but for individuals high in pessimism, having higher levels of hope reduced passive coping. A deeper analysis also indicated that this was particularly due to the moderating role of the pathways dimension of hope. We discuss these results in light of different adaptive strategies of optimists and pessimists and draw implications for psychological research and practice.     

Is the whole more than the sum of the parts? Re-evaluating social status in marketing

Data from 2 national surveys were examined to determine whether the components of social status (education, income, occupation) as separate individual factors could explain more variance than social status composites (Coleman, Hollingshead, Census). In general the evidence implies that the components are better predictors than the composite score, and that in the majority of cases only the raw education and income information is required for prediction.     

Are lies more wrong than errors? Accuracy judgments of inaccurate statements

People are often mistaken when estimating and predicting quantities, and sometimes they report values that they know are false: they lie. There exists, however, little research devoted to how such deviations are being perceived. In four vignette studies, participants were asked to rate the accuracy of inaccurate statements about quantities (prices, numbers and amounts). The results indicate that overstatements are generally judged to be more inaccurate than understatements of the same magnitude; self-favorable (optimistic) statements are considered more inaccurate than unfavorable (pessimistic) statements, and false reports (lies) are perceived to be more inaccurate than equally mistaken estimates. Lies about the future did not differ from lies about the past, but own lies were perceived as larger than the same lies attributed to another person. It is suggested that estimates are judged according to how close they come to the true values (close estimates are more correct than estimates that are less close), whereas lies are judged as deviant from truth, with less importance attached to the magnitude of the deviation.     

Are more items identified than can be reported?

Subjects are typically able to report only about four items from a many-item array presented tachistoscopically (full-report span). Current models of visual information processing disagree as to whether the limiting process is best represented as identification or as short-term memory. Estes and Taylor have argued that the number of items identified is up to twice the full-report span and, hence, that memory limits report. Experiment 1 here used a memory-probe method which showed that when no position report is required the large number of items that were identified in the Estes and Taylor paradigm is not greater than the number in a posticonic memory. Experiment 2 indicated that when position report is required the number of items identified (with correct position) does not exceed the number which can be reproduced in full report. These results support models in which memory is entailed by identification either as an aspect of the identification process or as a separate stage.     

Are the pathogens of out-groups really more dangerous?

We question the plausibility of Fincher & Thornhill's (F&T's) argument that localised pathogen-host coevolution leads to out-groups having pathogens more damaging than those infecting one's own family or religious group.     

Are students in some college majors more self-determined in their studies than others?

Self-determination theory proposes that the extent to which students’ motivation is self-determined is critical to learning outcomes. Based on occasional research evidence and our perceptions, we hypothesize that college students in certain majors have profiles that are higher in self-determined motivation than students in other majors. Specifically, our primary hypothesis is that students in the social sciences and humanities tend to be more self-determined, whereas students in business-related majors tend to be less self-determined. The results from two studies using large samples and advanced analytical methods support the primary hypotheses. Comparison results were also obtained for other majors (e.g., engineering and natural sciences), and supplemental analyses supported the critical role of self-determined motivation in learning outcomes among students in all majors. Study 2 also found support for two mechanisms for such differences, i.e., the majors’ learning climates and students’ individual differences in autonomous functioning. The current evidence suggests the importance of promoting more humanistic learning environments in certain academic disciplines.