Leadership, collective personality, and performance

By viewing behavior regularities at the individual and collective level as functionally isomorphic, a referent-shift compositional model for the Big 5 personality dimensions is developed. On the basis of this compositional model, a common measure of Big 5 personality at the individual level is applied to the collective as a whole. Within this framework, it is also hypothesized that leadership (i.e., transformational, transactional, and passive) would predict collective personality and that collective personality would be significantly related to collective performance. The results supported these hypotheses using a sample of franchised units. On the basis of recent research at the individual level, several interactions among the various personality dimensions were hypothesized and supported. Implications are discussed.     

Immigrant adolescents behaving as culture brokers: a study of families from the former Soviet Union

In immigrant families, culture brokering (CB) occurs when children mediate the new culture for their family. The authors examined CB in Russian immigrant adolescent-mother dyads (N=226) to determine the types and amounts of CB that Russian adolescents performed, why adolescents assumed the CB role, and how the role affected adolescent and familial functioning. The present results indicated that most adolescents reported CB for their families (89%). Children of families that more recently arrived in the U.S., with mothers who were less American-language acculturated, culture brokered more. Higher levels of CB related to (a) higher adolescent stress and reports of problems at home and with friends and (b) lower feelings of school membership. Parent-reported problems at home did not relate to CB. The authors discussed implications for future research on the role of the child as culture broker.     

Attentional and perceptual sources of the auditory attentional blink

When a rapid succession of auditory stimuli is listened to, processing of the second of two successive targets among fillers is often impaired, a phenomenon known as the attentional blink (AB). Three experiments were conducted to examine the role of filler items in modulating the size of the auditory AB, using a two-alternative forced choice discrimination paradigm. In the first experiment, dual-stream presentations in which low- and high-pitch items were separated by six semitones were tested. A transient deficit in reporting the probe was observed in the presence of fillers that was greater when fillers were in the same stream as the probe. In the absence of a filler, there was a residual deficit, but this was not related to the time lag between the target and the probe. In the second and third experiments, in which single-stream presentations were used, a typical AB was found in the presence of homogeneous fillers, but heterogeneous fillers tended to produce a greater deficit. In the absence of a filler, there was little or no evidence of a blink. The pattern of results suggests that other attentional and perceptual factors contribute to the blink.     

Sensation seeking and the use and selection of media materials

175 individuals recruited from urban universities (n=82) and the surrounding community (120 women, 55 men; 82 18- to 25-yr.-olds, 26 26- to 34-yr.-olds, 44 35- to 50-yr.-olds, 23 50 yr. old or over) completed a sensation seeking scale and measures of the frequency with which they used specific media and selected specific television programming, film, and music genres. Regression analyses showed Sensation Seeking to be associated positively with Movie Theatre Attendance and with the Selection of Urban Music Genres. Sensation Seeking was also associated negatively with Selection of Light Film Genres.     

Skill training,retention, and transfer: The effects of a concurrent secondary task

In two experiments, we examined training, retention, and transfer of a duration production skill in a prospective paradigm. Participants were trained with feedback and then were either tested immediately for transfer without feedback or retrained with feedback 1 week later. There were three training and retraining conditions, two involving secondary tasks. Retention of the duration production skill was perfect across the 1-week delay when the secondary task condition was unchanged, but there was no skill transfer when that condition was changed. These findings demonstrate specificity of training, with the assumption that the cognitive operations learned during duration production training incorporate requirements of the secondary task. More generally, this study challenges the current practice in which training conditions often do not match eventual testing conditions.     

Family Support and Mental Health in Pregnant Women Experiencing Interpersonal Partner Violence: An Analysis of Ethnic Differences

This study investigated the relationship between family support and mental health in a community sample of pregnant women experiencing interpersonal partner violence (IPV). This study also examined how family support may differentially affect mental health in Black and White women experiencing IPV. A total of 110 participants (32 Black and 78 White) were obtained from the first time period of a longitudinal study examining the effects of domestic violence on women. The model was supported (χ² = 142.55; df = 72, p > .001, RMSEA = .07). Black women had better mental health than White women. However, ethnicity was not a significant predictor of family support. Implications from this study highlight the need for further research on the role of family support in the lives of physically abused women as well as the need to incorporate cross cultural perspectives when examining this issue.     

Auditory attentional capture during serial recall: violations at encoding of an algorithm-based neural model?

A novel attentional capture effect is reported in which visual-verbal serial recall was disrupted if a single deviation in the interstimulus interval occurred within otherwise regularly presented task-irrelevant spoken items. The degree of disruption was the same whether the temporal deviant was embedded in a sequence made up of a repeating item or a sequence of changing items. Moreover, the effect was evident during the presentation of the to-be-remembered sequence but not during rehearsal just prior to recall, suggesting that the encoding of sequences is particularly susceptible. The results suggest that attentional capture is due to a violation of an algorithm rather than an aggregate-based neural model and further undermine an attentional capture-based account of the classical changing-state irrelevant sound effect.     

Validation of the Beck Depression Inventory-II in a low-income African American sample of medical outpatients

The psychometric properties of the Beck Depression Inventory-II (BDI-II) are well established with primarily Caucasian samples. However, little is known about its reliability and validity with minority groups. This study evaluated the psychometric properties of the BDI-II in a sample of low-income African American medical outpatients (N=220). Reliability was demonstrated with high internal consistency (.90) and good item-total intercorrelations. Criterion-related validity was demonstrated. A confirmatory factor analysis supported a hierarchical factor structure in which the BDI-II reflected 2 first-order factors (Cognitive and Somatic) that in turn reflected a second-order factor (Depression). These results are consistent with previous findings and thus support the use of the BDI-II in assessing depressive symptoms for African American patients in a medical setting.     

Disruption by speech of serial short-term memory: The role of changing-state vowels

Serial short-term memory is markedly impaired by the presence of irrelevant speech so long as the successive tokens within the irrelevant speech are phonologically (or acoustically) dissimilar (Jones & Macken, 1995b). In two experiments in which consonant—vowel—consonant syllables were used as irrelevant speech tokens, we sought to evaluate the relative disruptive potency of changes in the final consonant only (Experiment 1), in the initial consonant, or in the vowel portion (Experiment 2) of each token. The results suggest that the vowel changes are the dominant source of disruption. This dominance may be explained, at least in part, by the role played by vowel sounds in the perceptual organization of speech and, in turn, the particular propensity for vowel changes to yield information about serial order. The results are consistent also with the view that the factors that promote order encoding in sound are also the ones that promote disruption.     

Transgenic mice expressing a truncated form of CREB-binding protein (CBP) exhibit deficits in hippocampal synaptic plasticity and memory storage

Deletions, translocations, or point mutations in the CREB-binding protein (CBP) gene have been associated with Rubinstein-Taybi Syndrome; a human developmental disorder characterized by retarded growth and reduced mental function. To examine the role of CBP in memory, transgenic mice were generated in which the CaMKII alpha promoter drives expression of an inhibitory truncated CBP protein in forebrain neurons. Examination of hippocampal long-term potentiation (LTP), a form of synaptic plasticity thought to underlie memory storage, revealed significantly reduced late-phase LTP induced by dopamine-regulated potentiation in hippocampal slices from CBP transgenic mice. However, four-train induced late-phase LTP is normal. Behaviorally, CBP transgenic mice exhibited memory deficits in spatial learning in the Morris water maze and deficits in long-term memory for contextual fear conditioning, two hippocampus-dependent tasks. Together, these results demonstrate that CBP is involved in specific forms of hippocampal synaptic plasticity and hippocampus-dependent long-term memory formation.