A Mediated Moderation Model of Recruiting Socially and Environmentally Responsible Job Applicants

Socially and environmentally responsible organizations must attend to the fit of employees with the values of the organization. Recruiting practices are a key tool for ensuring fit with an organization's culture and values. We develop and test a model of the process through which recruitment information about an organization's social and environmental responsibility values differentially affect job seeker perceived fit, attraction, and job pursuit intentions depending on job seekers’ desire to have a significant impact through work. Our model of mediated moderation is tested with a sample of 339 actual job seekers using conditional process modeling and nonlinear bootstrapping techniques. Results support expectations that advertisement messages about an organization's social and environmental responsibility values interact with applicants’ desire to have a significant impact through work to influence job pursuit intentions through the hypothesized mediational process. Implications of the model for research on recruitment and organizational social and environmental responsibility are discussed.     

Shy children’s coping with a social conflict: The role of personality self-theories

Shy children’s risk for psychosocial difficulties may result partly from ineffective coping with social stressors. Little is known about which shy children are most susceptible to maladaptive coping styles. Personality self-theories may be one source of individual differences in shy children’s coping with social stressors. The purpose of this study was to examine whether the links between shyness and coping were moderated by personality self-theories. Participants were 175 children (M_age = 10.11 years), who completed self-report assessments of shyness, personality self-theories, and coping strategies. Self-theories moderated links between shyness and coping, sometimes differentially for boys and girls. For example, shyness was most strongly related to internalizing coping among entity-oriented children. However, shyness was most strongly negatively related to approach coping (social support, problem-solving) among incrementally-oriented boys and entity-oriented girls.     

Are individual differences in appetitive and defensive motivation related? A psychophysiological examination in two samples

Appetitive and defensive motivation account for a good deal of variance in personality and mental health, but whether individual differences in these systems are correlated or orthogonal has not been conclusively established. Previous investigations have generally relied on self-report and have yielded conflicting results. We therefore assessed the relation between psychophysiological indices of appetitive and defensive motivation during elicitation of these motivational states: specifically, frontal electroencephalogram asymmetry during reward anticipation and startle response during anticipation of predictable or unpredictable threat of shock. Results in a sample of psychopathology-free community members (n=63), an independent sample of undergraduates with a range of internalising symptoms (n=64), and the combination of these samples (n=127) revealed that differences in responding to the two tasks were not significantly correlated. Average coefficients approached zero in all three samples (community: .04, undergraduate: ?.01, combined: .06). Implications of these findings for research on normal and abnormal personality are discussed.     

Psychological Adjustment and Life Style of Single Lesbians and Single Heterosexual Women

The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) and a 60-item structured interview questionnaire were administered to 25 white single homo-sexually-oriented women and 25 white single heterosexually-oriented women between the ages of 20 and 45 years in order to investigate their psychological adjustment and current life styles. Groups were equivalent on age, marital status, educational and occupational levels, and other demographic variables. Groups did not differ in total psychological adjustment as measured by scale scores on the MMPI nor as evaluated by blind expert raters using the MMPI profiles. Groups differed significantly on the Masculinity-Femininity (Mf) scale (p <.001) and the Hypomania (Ma) scale (p <.05). On the interview questionnaire, which included current living situations, roles and relationships, behavior and friendship patterns, and drinking, drug, and suicidal behavior, no major differ ences between groups were found. Differences between groups were found only on items directly related to sexual orientation. The findings clarify some of the myths and misconceptions about lesbianism.     

The facilitatory effect of negative feedback on the emergence of analogical reasoning abilities

This paper focuses on the development of analogical reasoning abilities in 5‐ and 6‐year‐old children. Our particular interest relates to the way in which analogizing is influenced by the provision of task‐based feedback coupled with a self‐explanation requirement. Both feedback and self‐explanation provide children with opportunities to engage in self‐reflective thinking about the process of analogical reasoning. To examine the role of such metacognitive factors in analogical strategy development the reported study combined a proportional analogy paradigm with a small‐scale microgenetic approach involving multiple testing sessions over a restricted time period. The key manipulation involved exposing participants either to the correct or incorrect analogy completions of another reasoner that they were then asked to explain. The data revealed that the development of an effective analogizing strategy embodying a ‘relational shift’ from superficial to relational responding was modulated by the feedback condition that the child was placed in, with a negative feedback intervention providing the greatest developmental benefit. We suggest that the value of negative feedback for the acquisition of analogical reasoning abilities derives from the way in which a self‐reflective analysis of the reasons for erroneous responses sensitizes the child to a deeper understanding of how to make effective relational mappings.     

On the Meaning of Being Real: Fantasy and ‘the Real’ in Personal Identity-Formation

Abstract

With the help of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, this article addresses certain perplexities concerning personal identity that emerge from different kinds of interpersonal encounters. Lacan’s notion of the ‘fundamental fantasy’ incorporates the insight that phantasmic projections (of both self and other) form the basis of personal identity and interpersonal relations are a complex interplay between such projections. Nevertheless, in face of disconcerting pretence phenomena, the notion of a real self plays a profoundly important part in interpersonal relations. To call some phantasmic projections ‘pretensions’ or ‘delusions’ is simultaneously to admit that some must, by contrast, embody or express a real self. Lacan’s paradoxical answer to the question of whether the fundamental fantasy embodies the real self is ‘yes and no’. To explain this, I unpack the notion of the fundamental fantasy insofar as it is construed as the basis upon which we construct a complex identity (a semblance) imperfectly shielded from the traumatic Real. I offer an indirect account of the Real, via a critique of Rowlands on absurdity. I then sketch the developmental formation of a complex semblance, guided at its core by the fundamental fantasy, which structures the comportment of the self with a three-fold other. While the fundamental fantasy forms the core of a person’s identity and might be named the basis of the real self, Lacan warns that one must traverse it to acknowledge the Real in oneself. I elaborate on this via Derrida’s conception of the parergon. My aim is to demonstrate the irreducible complexity of identity formation and to show that to be real is to accept the uncertainty associated with acknowledging the Real in me that exceeds both my pretensions and the phantasmic reality that structures my identity.