Executive Attention: An Alternative Perspective on General Mental Ability,Performance, and Subgroup Differences

The validity‐adverse impact tradeoff associated with the relationships among general mental ability (GMA), ethnicity, and employee performance represents one of the most pressing concerns in organizational staffing. We conducted 4 studies with 273 bank employees and 197 university students designed to assess the extent to which executive attention (EA) and GMA predict simulation performance and supervisory ratings of performance. We also assess the extent to which measures of EA and GMA are associated with subgroup differences. Results indicate that, like GMA, EA positively predicts managerial simulation and supervisory ratings of performance. In addition, although reaching statistical significance in only 1 of our 4 studies, EA was generally associated with smaller subgroup differences than GMA, and meta‐analysis across our samples supports this reduced subgroup difference. Moreover, advantages of EA tend to increase as studies move from the laboratory with undergraduate students to a concurrent validation organizational setting with employees. We discuss implications for a theory‐based view of cognitive ability in employee selection and implications for managerial practice.     

Distraction During Deployment: Marital Relationship Associations With Spillover for Deployed Army Soldiers

Military spouses often have concerns regarding the impact of their communication on soldiers during deployment. However, literature is mixed regarding how communication between soldiers and spouses may impact soldiers’ self-reported work functioning during deployment, suggesting the need to evaluate moderating factors. In the current study, 3 relationship factors (marital satisfaction, conflictual communication, and proportion of conversation focused on problems) were tested as moderators of communication frequency and negative marriage-to-work spillover for soldiers. Whereas the 3 relationship factors were independently related to negative spillover, none significantly moderated the relationship between communication frequency and spillover. The overall pattern of results suggests that (a) lower marital satisfaction, a focus on problems during communication, and conflictual communication are each strongly linked to spillover for deployed soldiers; and (b) military couples may be self-restricting deployment communication frequency when experiencing less marital satisfaction and higher rates of negative communication. Implications for communication during deployment are discussed.     

Hallucination And Imagination

What are hallucinations? A common view in the philosophical literature is that hallucinations are degenerate kinds of perceptual experience. I argue instead that hallucinations are degenerate kinds of sensory imagination. As well as providing a good account of many actual cases of hallucination, the view that hallucination is a kind of imagination represents a promising account of hallucination from the perspective of a disjunctivist theory of perception like naïve realism. This is because it provides a way of giving a positive characterisation of hallucination—rather than characterising hallucinations in negative, relational, terms as mental events that are subjectively indistinguishable from veridical perceptual experiences.     

Cognitive Offloading: Structuring the Environment to Improve Children's Working Memory Task Performance

Research has shown that adults can engage in cognitive offloading, whereby internal processes are offloaded onto the environment to help task performance. Here, we investigate an application of this approach with children, in particular children with poor working memory. Participants were required to remember and recall sequences of colors by placing colored blocks in the correct serial order. In one condition the blocks were arranged to facilitate cognitive offloading (i.e., grouped by color), whereas in the other condition they were arranged randomly. Across two experiments (total N = 166) the ordered condition improved task performance for children with low working memory ability. In addition, participants in Experiment 2 rated the difficulty of the two arrangements and performed a further condition in which they were given an opportunity to freely arrange the blocks before completing the task. Despite performing better in the ordered condition, children with low working memory ability did not rate the ordered arrangement as easier, nor did they choose an ordered arrangement when given the opportunity to do so. This research shows that cognitive offloading can also be a useful process in populations other than typical adults, and the implications of this work for supporting children with poor working memory are discussed.     

Examining legalism,scrupulosity, family perfectionism,and psychological adjustment among LDS individuals

This study examined the relationships and interactions between legalism, scrupulosity, family perfectionism, guilt, and shame among 421 Latter-Day Saints (LDS or Mormons). The results showed that scrupulosity fully mediated the links between legalism and guilt, as well as legalism and shame. A moderated-mediation effect was found, in which family discrepancy (maladaptive perfectionism) intensified the scrupulosity–shame association in the mediation model of legalism and shame by scrupulosity. Family discrepancy was not a significant moderator for the mediation model of legalism and guilt by scrupulosity. Additional results are provided and implications of these findings are outlined.     

"Express yourself": culture and the effect of self-expression on choice

Whereas self-expression is valued in the United States, it is not privileged with such a cultural emphasis in East Asia. Four studies demonstrate the psychological implications of this cultural difference. Studies 1 and 2 found that European Americans value self-expression more than East Asians/East Asian Americans. Studies 3 and 4 examined the roles of expression in preference judgments. In Study 3, the expression of choice led European Americans but not East Asian Americans to be more invested in what they chose. Study 4 examined the connection between the value of expression and the effect of choice expression and showed that European Americans place greater emphasis on self-expression than East Asian Americans, and this difference explained the cultural difference in Study 3. This research highlights the importance of the cultural meanings of self-expression and the moderating role of cultural beliefs on the psychological effect of self-expression.