(Re)Applying social psychology to organizational work,well‐being,and leadership

Research on organizational behavior is fundamentally an application of social psychology theory and phenomena. While much of organizational psychology is inherently grounded in social psychological research, these two disciplines are largely disconnected from one another. More visibility of the commonalities may encourage discussion, collaboration, and integration between these two fields—an integration that will only benefit each discipline. The present article briefly reviews the historic overlap between these disciplines, the resulting divide between them, and then discusses recent developments demonstrating the potential power of reconnecting social psychology with organizational‐relevant research. We then examine how the six empirical articles in this Special Issue benefit from applying social psychological theory to organizational research. We will conclude by identifying potential areas ripe for future research.     

Commentary: Reintegrating psychology into an expanded biopsychosocial model of severe acute respiratory syndrome

The Special Issue highlights the importance of psychology in the research agenda on severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS). The five articles examined relevant theories on social cognition and coping in the ecological context of the SARS outbreak. They provide preliminary tests to current psychological principles of coping and health psychology in a real crisis. The limitations of the studies are recognized. Other areas of psychological research on SARS are suggested. It is proposed that the biopsychosocial model of behavioral medicine could be expanded as a paradigm in public health to study and prepare for future emerging epidemics.     

What have we learned about burnout and health?

Abstract It has been a decade since an international group of scholars came together to discuss and debate the construct of job burnout. That conference, which took place in Krakow, Poland in 1990, was a major turning point in the development of this field. Not only did it bring together a wide range of theoretical perspectives and empirical data, it generated new directions for the work that needed to be done in the future (Schaufeli et al., 1993). Now that we are 10 years into that future, it would be worthwhile to assemble a new group of international scholars and discover what progress has been made. In essence, that is what the editors of this Special Issue have done. They have invited several of the leading burnout researchers from several continents to contribute their newest studies on this important social phenomenon. Thus this Special Issue affords us the opportunity to assess the strides that have been made since that first meeting in Krakow. So what have we now learned about burnout and its relation to health?     

How can Asian social psychology succeed globally?†

The present article is inspired by the provocative ideas of Atsumi, Hofstede, Leung, and Ward expressed in this Special Issue on the past achievements, current status, and future opportunities and challenges of Asian social psychology as an international (vs a regional) endeavour. I believe that the success of Asian social psychology as a new voice and emerging perspective in social psychology hinges upon several factors: (i) adoption of an international (vs regional) outlook; (ii) not letting arbitrary geographical or intellectual boundaries restrict creative expansion of research ideas; and (iii) striving to craft a global identity with an Asian character by developing communicable theories that describe and explain important Asian social psychological phenomena for the benefits of Asia and beyond.     

Connectionist Natural Language Processing: The State of the Art

This Special Issue on Connectionist Models of Human Language Processing provides an opportunity for an appraisal both of specific connectionist models and of the status and utility of connectionist models of language in general. This introduction provides the background for the papers in the Special Issue. The development of connectionist models of language is traced, from their intellectual origins, to the state of current research. Key themes that arise throughout different areas of connectionist psycholinguistics are highlighted, and recent developments in speech processing, morphology, sentence processing, language production, and reading are described. We argue that connectionist psycholinguistics has already had a significant impact on the psychology of language, and that connectionist models are likely to have an important influence on future research.     

Box Scores and Bottom Lines: Sports Data Can Inform Research and Practice in Organizations

In this introduction to the Special Issue on the use of sports data to inform research and practice in organizations, we first outline the state of research in this flourishing area to provide the need for this Special Issue. We note a similarity in the study of organizations and the study of sports and, in turn, how studies of sports can readily be compared to and applied to the study and practice of work in organizations. Next, we describe each of the six articles in this Special Issue, particularly noting that the articles sampled data from a variety of sporting domains, ranging from the National Football League to Olympic ice hockey. Topics of the studies included travel stress on team performance; pay standing and task performance; job hopping, organizational change, and performance of new employees; team work experience and performance; the effect of leadership transitions and changes to performance and human capital quality; and the effects of star performers and core team members. We then outline how these studies fit with the call for this Special Issue and provide common themes, such as methodological sophistication and novel analyses and the opportunity for sports data to provide both academic and practitioner audiences an awareness of evidence-based approaches to studies of work. We end this introductory article by providing some challenges in using sports data to enhance the study of organizations and possible areas for future research.     

Social signals: from theory to applications

The Special Issue Editorial introduces the research milieu in which Social Signal Processing originates, by merging computer scientists and social scientists and giving rise to this field in parallel with Human–Computer Interaction, Affective Computing, and Embodied Conversational Agents, all similarly characterized by high interdisciplinarity, stress on multimodality of communication, and the continuous loop from theory to simulation and application. Some frameworks of the cognitive and social processes underlying social signals are identified as reference points (Theory of Mind and Intersubjectivity, mirror neurons, and the ontogenesis and phylogenesis of communication), while three dichotomies (automatic vs. controlled, individualistic vs. intersubjective, and meaning vs. influence) are singled out as leads to navigate within the theoretical and applicative studies presented in the Special Issue.     

Social signals: from theory to applications

The Special Issue Editorial introduces the research milieu in which Social Signal Processing originates, by merging computer scientists and social scientists and giving rise to this field in parallel with Human-Computer Interaction, Affective Computing, and Embodied Conversational Agents, all similarly characterized by high interdisciplinarity, stress on multimodality of communication, and the continuous loop from theory to simulation and application. Some frameworks of the cognitive and social processes underlying social signals are identified as reference points (Theory of Mind and Intersubjectivity, mirror neurons, and the ontogenesis and phylogenesis of communication), while three dichotomies (automatic vs. controlled, individualistic vs. intersubjective, and meaning vs. influence) are singled out as leads to navigate within the theoretical and applicative studies presented in the Special Issue.     

The Stories We Tell: Introduction to the Special Issue on Ethical Challenges in Community Psychology Research and Practice

This Special Issue examines ethical challenges in community psychology research and practice. The literature on ethics in community psychology has remained largely abstract and aspirational, with few concrete examples and case studies, so the goal of this Special Issue was to expand our written discourse about ethical dilemmas in our field. In these articles, researchers and practitioners share stories of specific ethical challenges they faced and how they sought to resolve them. These first‐person narratives examine how ethical challenges come about, how community psychology values inform ethical decision making, and how lessons learned from these experiences can inform an ethical framework for community psychology.     

Moving toward interdisciplinary dialogue in mentoring scholarship: An introduction to the Special Issue

The study of mentoring spans a wide range of disciplines including psychology, organizational behavior, education, and social work, among others. However, until recently there has been little interdisciplinary dialogue among mentoring scholars. In this Special Issue we attempt to lay the groundwork for interdisciplinary research on mentoring by examining this phenomenon through the lens of youth mentoring, academic mentoring, and workplace mentoring. In this introduction we outline the aims of this Special Issue, provide a common definition of mentoring to guide the reader through the articles that follow, summarize the knowledge gained from the included articles, and offer insight into what we believe are important next steps for developing a multidisciplinary perspective on mentoring.     

Feminism and the Evolution of Sex Differences and Similarities

Distrust between most evolutionary psychologists and most feminist psychologists is evident in the majority of the articles contained in this Special Issue. The debates between proponents of these perspectives reflect different views of the potential for transforming gender relations from patriarchal to gender-equal. Yet, with respect to the overall prevalence of sex differences or similarities, the articles in the Special Issue show that neither feminist psychologists nor evolutionary psychologists have uniform positions. Questions about how and if women and men differ are still under negotiation in the articles in this Special Issue as well as in other research related to evolutionary and feminist psychology. Clearer conclusions would be fostered by standardized metrics for representing male?Cfemale comparisons, more varied research methods for assessing both psychological and biological processes, greater diversity in populations sampled, and more researcher openness to taking into account findings that challenge their theories. Theoretical growth also is needed, especially to develop and integrate the many individual feminism-influenced theories represented in this Special Issue. To this end, we propose an integrative evolutionary framework that recognizes human culture in both ultimate and proximal causes of female and male behavior.     

Introduction: Special Issue on Spirituality and Adult Development, Part III

This paper reviews the purpose of the three-part Special Issue on Spirituality and Adult Development, described in the Introduction to Special Issue Parts I and II (J. D. Sinnott, 2001, in press). It also outlines the contents of Part III. Developing adults express their belief that spirituality plays a key role in their development, and humanistic psychology supports this view, yet developmental psychologists have given comparatively little attention to this factor. Also the concept of spirituality seldom has been considered separately from that of religion. The purpose of this Special Issue is to begin to remedy this neglect and to begin to examine the meanings spirituality has for the developing adult. How might spirituality be adaptive? How might it relate to our connections with others and our society? This introduction is a summary of the five empirical and theoretical papers that form Part III of the Special Issue on Spirituality and Adult Development.     

Justice and Social Conflict

This article analyzes possible effects of ideas of justice, perceptions of injustice, and the use of justice arguments on the emergence, course, and resolution of social conflicts. Four functions of justice are identified: (1) ideas of justice and perceptions of injustice can elicit or evoke social conflicts; (2) justice arguments and rhetorics can be used to support one's own position in a dispute; (3) the basic value and the principles and rules of justice can restrict social conflicts and help to generate ways of conflict resolution; (4) the labelling of conflict resolutions as just can increase the acceptance of the resolution. The analysis is illustrated by making reference to a recent case of international conflict and diplomatic controversy.     

Introduction: Special Issue on Spirituality and Adult Development, Part II

This article reviews the purpose of the 3-part Special Issue on Spirituality and Adult Development, described in the Introduction to Special Issue Part I (J. D. Sinnott, 2000). It also outlines the contents of Part II. Developing adults express their belief that spirituality plays a key role in their development, yet developmental psychologists have given comparatively little attention to this factor. Also the concept of spirituality has seldom been considered separately from that of religion. The purpose of this special issue is to begin to remedy this neglect. This introduction is a summary of the 7 empirical and theoretical articles that form Part II of the Special Issue on Spirituality and Adult Development.     

Understanding the mechanisms underlying the other-‘race’ effect: An attempt at integrating different perspectives

Although different human races do not exist from the perspective of biology and genetics, ascribed ‘race’ influences psychological processing, such as memory and perception of faces. Research from this Special Issue, as well as a wealth of previous research, shows that other-‘race’ faces are more difficult to recognize compared to own-‘race’ faces, a phenomenon known as the other-‘race’ effect. Theories of expertise attribute the cause of the other-‘race’ effect to less efficient visual representations of other-‘race’ faces, which results from reduced visual expertise with other-‘race’ faces compared to own-‘race’ faces due to limited contact with individuals from other ‘racial’ groups. By contrast, social-cognitive accounts attribute the cause of the other-‘race’ effect to reduced motivation to individuate other-‘race’ faces compared to own-‘race’ faces. Evidence for both types of theories is still mixed, but progress in understanding the phenomenon has also been hampered by the fact that there has been little crosstalk between these accounts, which tend to be rooted in separate domains of experimental perception science and social psychology, respectively. To promote an integrative perspective on current knowledge on own- versus other-‘race’ face processing, the present Special Issue bridges different psychological subdisciplines, showcasing research using a large variety of methodological approaches and measures. In this guest editorial, we briefly highlight individual contributions to this Special Issue and offer what we see as important avenues for future research on the other-‘race’ effect.     

A clinician''s perspective: Comments on identification of stuttering, prevention, and early intervention

I am responding to the Hamre article on the identification and prevention o stuttering and to what was said by those who commented in the recent Special Forum Issue. My discussion will be in terms of my understanding and one of my major career objectives, that of translating reported research and clinical experience in a meaningful and useful way for students and professional clinicians.     

Anxiety and depression: toward overlapping and distinctive features

ABSTRACT

This Special Issue of Cognition and Emotion addresses one of the cardinal concerns of affective science, which is overlapping and distinctive features of anxiety and depression. A central finding in the study of anxiety and depression is that they are moderately highly correlated with each other. This leads us to the question: What is behind this co-occurrence? Possible explanations relate to poor discriminant validity of measures; both emotional states are associated with negative affect; stressful life events; impaired cognitive processes; they share a common biological/genetic diathesis. However, despite a set of common (nonspecific) features, anxiety and depression are clearly not identical emotional states. Differences between them might be best viewed, for example, through their heterogeneous and multi-layered nature, adaptive functions and relations with regulatory processes, positive affect, and motivation or complex cognitive processes. In this introduction we consider several approaches (e.g. functional approach; tripartite model and content-specificity hypothesis) to which most research in this Special Issue is relevant. In addition, we have asked contributors to this Special Issue to indicate how their own studies on comparisons between anxiety and depression and models on anxiety and depression move this area of research to more mature science with applicability.     

Introduction to the Special Section ‘Innovative counselling and psychotherapy research methods’: Defining the future of counselling and psychotherapy research

In the call for papers for this Special Issue, we sought submissions that would introduce innovative methods with the potential to shape counselling and psychotherapy research into the future. We believe that we accomplished this goal and that this issue introduces a range of valuable examples of current innovations in counselling and psychotherapy research methods. Through the review process, we encouraged authors to offer practical guidelines on how to innovatively assess and analyse change and other relevant aspects of therapy. We also guided authors to not only provide the field with an update on cutting‐edge methodology, but also describe these methods in a practice‐friendly way. As such, the Special Issue aims at becoming a building block for future practice‐friendly research in counselling and psychotherapy.     

Epilogue: Overarching themes and enduring contributions of the Lanzetta research program

In this Epilogue we step back from the four research lines that have been the focus of this two-part Special Issue and discuss four important themes that run through the Lanzetta research program: (1) the importance of the face as a fundamental channel of social communication, (2) the physiological nature of the information conveyed by facial expression, (3) the realization that response to facial expressions involve multiple levels of cognitive processing, and (4) the value in using multiple convergent measures and creative experimental paradigms to study complicated phenomena like emotional facial expressions. The ways in which these themes carry through the individual research lines are described, and important implications of the themes are highlighted.     

Introduction: Special Issue on Spirituality and Adult Development, Part I

This article describes the purpose of the 3-part Special Issue on Spirituality and Adult Development, and the contents of Part I. Developing individuals express their belief that spirituality plays a key role in their development, yet developmental psychologists have given comparatively little attention to this factor. The concept of spirituality is seldom considered separately from that of religion. The purpose of this Special Issue is to begin to remedy this neglect. This introduction is a summary of the 6 empirical and theoretical articles that form Part I.