Why and for whom does the pressure to help hurt others? Affective and cognitive mechanisms linking helping pressure to workplace deviance

Scholars are paying increasing attention to the “dark side” of citizenship behavior. One aspect of this dark side that has received relatively scant attention is “helping pressure”—an employee's perception that s/he is being encouraged to, or otherwise feels that s/he should, enact helping behavior at work. Drawing from theory associated with work stress, we examine affective and cognitive mechanisms that potentially explain why helping pressure, counterintuitively, may lead employees to engage in deviant behavior instead. Beyond examining these possible mechanisms, we also answer calls to identify a potential buffer to these effects. Drawing from self-determination theory, we examine how an employee's intrinsic motivation for citizenship may lessen the deleterious consequences of helping pressure at work. In two studies (a within-individual experience-sampling study and a two-wave between-individual study), we find consistent evidence that helping pressure has a positive indirect relationship with deviant behavior through increased negative affect. Further, we find evidence that intrinsic motivation for citizenship weakens the positive relationship of helping pressure with negative affect, buffering the indirect effect on subsequent deviant behavior. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings for the study of helping pressure at work are discussed.     

‘Personality in Its Natural Habitat’ Revisited: A Pooled,Multi-sample Examination of the Relationships Between the Big Five Personality Traits and Daily Behaviour and Language Use

Past research using the Electronically Activated Recorder (EAR), an observational ambulatory assessment method for the real-world measurement of daily behaviour, has identified several behavioural manifestations of the Big Five domains in a small college sample (N = 96). With the use of a larger and more diverse sample of pooled data from N = 462 participants from a total of four community samples who wore the EAR from 2 to 6 days, the primary purpose of the present study was to obtain more precise and generalizable effect estimates of the Big Five–behaviour relationships and to re-examine the degree to which these relationships are gender specific. In an extension of the original article, the secondary purpose of the present study was to examine if the Big Five–behaviour relationships differed across two facets of each Big Five domain. Overall, while several of the behavioural manifestations of the Big Five were generally consistent with the trait definitions (replicating some findings from the original article), we found little evidence of gender differences (not replicating a basic finding from the original article). Unique to the present study, the Big Five–behaviour relationships were not always comparable across the two facets of each Big Five domain. © 2020 European Association of Personality Psychology     

Wanting,having, and satisfaction: examining the role of desire discrepancies in satisfaction with income

In 3 studies, the authors tested the predictors of income satisfaction, examining whether discrepanc between the things people have and the things they desire predict satisfaction. Study 1 manipulated the desirability of items that can be purchased with participants' income, and showed that their satisfaction with that income depended on the desirability of these items. Study 2 demonstrated that whether people's income enabled them to purchase the things they desired influenced their satisfaction with income. Study 3 found that the effect of comparisons with a person's past on income satisfaction is completely mediated by one's desires; and the effect of social comparison on income satisfaction is partially mediated by desires. Thus, desires play a pivotal role in determining people's satisfaction with income.     

Learning where to look for danger: integrating affective and spatial information

Although not previously addressed by researchers of spatial cognition or affect, the combination of spatial and affective information is essential for many approach and avoidance behaviors, and thus for survival. We provide the first evidence that through incidental experience, people form representations that capture correlations between affective and spatial information. Participants were able to do so even when the correlation was weak, they were not told to look for the correlation, and the stimuli varied on multiple other dimensions besides valence. In addition, people were more sensitive to the presented correlation when stimuli were negative than when they were positive. This asymmetry in representation may stem from underlying differences in the activation functions for positive and negative hedonic information processing.     

Self-reported personality disorder in the children in the community sample: convergent and prospective validity in late adolescence and adulthood

Approximately 800 youths from the Children in the Community Study (Cohen & Cohen, 1996) have been assessed prospectively for over 20 years to study personality disorders (PDs) in adolescents and young adults. In this article we evaluate the Children in the Community Self-Report (CIC-SR) Scales, which were designed to assess DSM-IV PDs using self-reported prospective data from this longitudinal sample. To evaluate convergent validity, we assessed concordance between the CIC-SR Scales and the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-IV Personality Disorders (SCID-II; First, Gibbon, Spitzer, Williams, & Benjamin, 1995) in 644 participants at mean age 33. To assess predictive validity, we used CIC-SR Scales at mean age 22 to predict subsequent CIC-SR and SCID-II Personality Questionnaire scores at mean age 33. In these analyses the CIC-SR Scales matched or exceeded benchmarks established in previous comparisons between self-report instruments and structured clinical interviews. Unlike other self-report scales, the CIC-SR did not appear to overestimate diagnoses when compared with SCID-II clinical diagnoses.     

Assessment of executive function in preschool-aged children

Assessment of the overarching self-regulatory mechanisms, or executive functions, in any age group is challenging, in part due to the complexity of this domain, in part due to their dynamic essence, and in part due to the inextricable links between these central processes and the associated domain-specific processes, such as language, motor function, and attention, over which they preside. While much progress has been made in clinical assessment approaches for measuring executive functions in adults and to some extent in adolescents and school-aged children, the toolkit for the preschool evaluator remains sparse. The past decade, however, has seen a substantial increase in attention to executive functions in very young children from a developmental neuropsychological perspective. With this has come a necessity for better, more specific, and more internally valid performance measures, many of which are now described in the experimental literature. Few such tasks, however, have adequately demonstrated psychometric properties for clinical application. We present two performance tasks designed to tap selective aspects of executive function in preschoolers that are emerging from the experimental laboratory and hold promise of appropriate reliability and validity for the clinical laboratory. Performance tests alone, however, are insufficient to develop a comprehensive picture of a child's executive functioning. Thus, we present a rating scale of preschoolers' executive function in the everyday context, and advocate a model of executive function assessment that incorporates both controlled performance tasks that target specific aspects of executive function and parent/teacher ratings that target more global aspects of self-regulation in the everyday context.     

Differences in the Timing of Implausibility Detection for Recipient and Instrument Prepositional Phrases

We conducted two word-by-word reading experiments to investigate the timing of implausibility detection for recipient and instrument prepositional phrases (PPs). These PPs differ in thematic role, relative frequency, and possibly in argument status. The results showed a difference in the timing of garden path effects such that the detection of implausible dative recipients (which are clearly arguments) was delayed relative to the detection of implausible instruments (which may not be arguments). They also demonstrated that commitments to syntactic structure were made at the preposition for both dative and instrument PPs. While these results refute delay models of parsing (e.g., Britt, 1994) and syntax-first accounts of PP-attachment (e.g., Frazier, 1978; Frazier & Clifton, 1996), they support constraint-based lexicalist models that enable verb bias and plausibility information to compete (Garnsey, Pearlmutter, Myers, & Lotocky, 1997).     

The Double Life of Double Effect

The U.S. Supreme Court's majorityopinion in Vacco v. Quill assumes thatthe principle of double effect explains thepermissibility of hastening death in thecontext of ordinary palliative care and inextraordinary cases in which painkilling drugshave failed to relieve especially intractablesuffering and terminal sedation has beenadopted as a last resort. The traditionaldoctrine of double effect, understood asproviding a prohibition on instrumental harmingas opposed to incidental harming or harming asa side effect, must be distinguished from otherways in which the claim that a result is notintended might be offered as part of ajustification for it. Although double effectmight appropriately be invoked as a constrainton ordinary palliative care, it is not clearthat it can be coherently extended to justifysuch practices as terminal sedation. A betterapproach would reconsider double effect'straditional prohibition on hastening death as ameans to relieve suffering in the context ofacute palliative care.     

A meta-analytic review of prospective memory and aging

A meta-analysis of prospective memory (PM) studies revealed that in laboratory settings younger participants outperform older participants on tests of both time- and event-based PM (rs=-.39 and -.34, respectively). Event-based PM tasks that impose higher levels of controlled strategic demand are associated with significantly larger age effects than event-based PM tasks that are supported by relatively more automatic processes (rs=-.40 vs. -.14, respectively). However, contrary to the prevailing view in the literature, retrospective memory as measured by free recall is associated with significantly greater age-related decline (r=-.52) than PM, and older participants perform substantially better than their younger counterparts in naturalistic PM studies (rs=.35 and.52 for event- and time-based PM, respectively).     

Demographic characteristics,social competence,and behavior problems in children with gender identity disorder: a cross-national,cross-clinic comparative analysis

This study examined demographic characteristics, social competence, and behavior problems in clinic-referred children with gender identity problems in Toronto, Canada (N = 358), and Utrecht, The Netherlands (N = 130). The Toronto sample was, on average, about a year younger than the Utrecht sample at referral, had a higher percentage of boys, had a higher mean IQ, and was less likely to be living with both parents. On the Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL), both groups showed, on average, clinical range scores in both social competence and behavior problems. A CBCL-derived measure of poor peer relations showed that boys in both clinics had worse ratings than did the girls. A multiple regression analysis showed that poor peer relations were the strongest predictor of behavior problems in both samples. This study—the first cross-national, cross-clinic comparative analysis of children with gender identity disorder—found far more similarities than differences in both social competence and behavior problems. The most salient demographic difference was age at referral. Cross-national differences in factors that might influence referral patterns are discussed.