Leader Inquisitiveness,Political Skill,and Follower Attributions of Leader Charisma and Effectiveness: Test of a moderated mediation model

Given the variability in personality's relationship with leadership and the use of personality measures in leader selection and assessment, we examine the joint influence of leader trait inquisitiveness and leader political skill on subordinate perceptions of leader charisma and effectiveness. Findings indicate a positive main effect of political skill on charisma, the positive relationship between inquisitiveness and charisma is moderated by heightened political skill, and charisma mediates the relationship between the inquisitiveness by political skill interaction and perceived effectiveness. The moderated mediation results of our study suggest that organizations should not only select creative and imaginative leaders, but also select those who are politically skilled or provide political skill training.     

Single-process versus multiple-strategy models of decision making: Evidence from an information intrusion paradigm

When decision makers are confronted with different problems and situations, do they use a uniform mechanism as assumed by single-process models (SPMs) or do they choose adaptively from a set of available decision strategies as multiple-strategy models (MSMs) imply? Both frameworks of decision making have gathered a lot of support, but only rarely have they been contrasted with each other. Employing an information intrusion paradigm for multi-attribute decisions from givens, SPM and MSM predictions on information search, decision outcomes, attention, and confidence judgments were derived and tested against each other in two experiments. The results consistently support the SPM view: Participants seemingly using a “take-the-best” (TTB) strategy do not ignore TTB-irrelevant information as MSMs would predict, but adapt the amount of information searched, choose alternative choice options, and show varying confidence judgments contingent on the quality of the “irrelevant” information. The uniformity of these findings underlines the adequacy of the novel information intrusion paradigm and comprehensively promotes the notion of a uniform decision making mechanism as assumed by single-process models.     

Anxiety,depression, and health-related quality of life in aging people living with HIV compared to diabetes patients and patients with minor health conditions: a longitudinal study

HIV infection has evolved from a fatal to a treatable condition, leading to an increase in the rate of elderly People Living with HIV (PLWH). However, little is known about the psychosocial burden of elderly PLWH. Thus, the aim of this longitudinal multi-center cohort study was to investigate whether elderly PLWH experience more anxiety and depression and reduced health related quality of life (HRQOL) compared to elderly patients with other chronic conditions. PLWH were compared to diabetes patients (DM) and patients with minor health conditions (MHC), e.g. patients with hypertension or allergic conditions. All patients were over 50 years old. Anxiety and depression (HADS) as well as HRQOL (SF-36) were assessed at baseline and after 12 months. 218 PLWH, 249 DM and 254 MHC were included. At baseline, the study groups did not differ in anxiety, depression, and physical HRQOL. However, PLWH indicated lower mental HRQOL than DM and MHC patients (p = 0.001). We did not obtain any moderating effects showing a differential effect of patient characteristics on anxiety, depression, and HRQOL in the three patient groups. At follow-up, the level of anxiety, depression, and HRQOL did not change significantly. The prevalence of anxiety ranged between 27 and 35%, and that of depression between 17 and 28%. Thus, the results of our investigation tentatively suggest that the psychosocial adaptation to HIV among elderly PLWH resembles those of other chronic diseases. There may be some subtle impairments, though, as PLWH experienced lower mental HRQOL.     

Anne‐Thérèse de Lambert on Aging and Self‐Esteem

This article studies Madame de Lambert's early eighteenth‐century views on aging, and especially the aging of women, by contextualizing them in a twofold way: (1) It understands them as a response to La Rochefoucauld's skepticism concerning aging, women, and the aging of women; (2) It understands them as being closely connected to a long series of scattered remarks concerning esteem, self‐esteem, and honnêteté in Lambert's moral essays. Whereas La Rochefoucauld describes aging as a decline of intellectual, emotional, and physical powers and is suspicious of the mechanisms of esteem and self‐esteem, Lambert develops a view of aging as offering the chance to become more independent of the judgment of others, especially the chance for women to become more independent of the judgment of men. As she argues, aging offers women the possibility of cultivating genuinely estimable intellectual and emotional qualities that attract the justified esteem essential for a stable friendship, as well as the opportunity to develop a form of self‐esteem that is based on respect for one's own capacities of judgment.     

Researching mind wandering from a first‐person perspective

Mind wandering is an inherently inner (or first‐person) phenomenon that leaves few direct traces for third‐person enquiry. Nonetheless, psychologists often study mind wandering using third‐person (e.g., behavioral or neuronal) research methods. And although research–participants may well be asked to introspect on their mind wandering experiences (e.g., via experience‐sampling or think‐aloud techniques), such introspective self‐observations typically lack methodological rigor and are hence of only preliminary value. Here, we argue that it is a missed opportunity to not train researchers to introspect on their own mind‐wandering experiences to better understand the associated mental processes. We propose a novel approach to cultivating an educated form of introspection in the study of attentional focusing and mind wandering. Our research adds to the current theoretical understanding by explicating conditions that facilitate mind wandering (e.g., the shifting and broadening of concepts) and help find the way back to the primary task (e.g., commitment; deliberate shifts between focusing and defocusing).     

Sense of Coherence and Posttraumatic Growth: The Moderating Role of Value Orientation in Chinese and Swiss Bereaved Parents

Sense of Coherence–Revised (SOC-R) and posttraumatic growth (PTG) can be understood as two metaheuristics that are closely linked to resilience and adaption to adversity. This study investigated the association between SOC-R and PTG, as well as the moderating role of value orientations, in a sample of 67 Chinese and Swiss parents who lost their child. Results showed that, cross-culturally, the value of conservation was negatively associated with PTG, and self-transcendence showed a significant moderation effect to enhance the positive relationship between SOC-R and PTG. Implications for clinical practice to facilitate growth by focusing on SOC-R and value orientations were discussed.     

Quality of life in breast cancer patients: Associations with optimism and social supportCalidad de vida en pacientes con cáncer de mama: asociación con optimismo y apoyo social

Background/Objective: The purpose of this study was to examine quality of life (QoL) in breast cancer patients from Colombia and to explore the relationship between QoL, habitual optimism, and social support. Method: A sample of 95 breast cancer patients treated in a hospital in Bogotá were administered the QoL instrument EORTC QLQ-C30 and the Life Orientation Test LOT-R. Additionally, they were asked to indicate from whom (physicians, friends, nurses, etc.) they wished and received social support. Reference data for the EORTC QLQ-C30 and the LOT-R were taken from a representative sample of the general Colombian population. Results: The breast cancer patients showed detriments to their QoL on most functioning scales and symptom scales of the EORTC QLQ-C30, while their general assessments of health and QoL were not worse than those of the controls. Optimism was positively correlated with QoL. Most patients wanted and received social support from their physicians and friends/family. Conclusions: The results suggest that optimism helps patients better cope with disease. A general assessment of global QoL cannot replace the more specific assessments of the functioning domains and symptoms.     

Hare Psychopathy Checklist-Revised

The Hare Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R) is among the most frequently used instruments for the assessment of psychopathic traits. In the scope of the German adaptation of the PCL-R, normative data were collected from a sample of adult male offenders. Based on these data the factor structure and reliability of the German language version of the PCL-R are discussed in the first section of the article. The assessment of a model with four facets and two superordinate factors showed a very good agreement with the empirical data. In addition, examination of interrater agreement and internal consistency indicated that the PCL-R is a reliable measure. In the second part of the paper recommendations are provided for the correct application of the PCL-R. The focus lies on the correct performance, evaluation and interpretation of PCL-R test results with respect to key indices and the dimensional structure of the psychopathy construct.     

Visually induced gains in pitch discrimination: Linking audio-visual processing with auditory abilities

Perception is fundamentally a multisensory experience. The principle of inverse effectiveness (PoIE) states how the multisensory gain is maximal when responses to the unisensory constituents of the stimuli are weak. It is one of the basic principles underlying multisensory processing of spatiotemporally corresponding crossmodal stimuli that are well established at behavioral as well as neural levels. It is not yet clear, however, how modality-specific stimulus features influence discrimination of subtle changes in a crossmodally corresponding feature belonging to another modality. Here, we tested the hypothesis that reliance on visual cues to pitch discrimination follow the PoIE at the interindividual level (i.e., varies with varying levels of auditory-only pitch discrimination abilities). Using an oddball pitch discrimination task, we measured the effect of varying visually perceived vertical position in participants exhibiting a wide range of pitch discrimination abilities (i.e., musicians and nonmusicians). Visual cues significantly enhanced pitch discrimination as measured by the sensitivity index d’, and more so in the crossmodally congruent than incongruent condition. The magnitude of gain caused by compatible visual cues was associated with individual pitch discrimination thresholds, as predicted by the PoIE. This was not the case for the magnitude of the congruence effect, which was unrelated to individual pitch discrimination thresholds, indicating that the pitch-height association is robust to variations in auditory skills. Our findings shed light on individual differences in multisensory processing by suggesting that relevant multisensory information that crucially aids some perceivers’ performance may be of less importance to others, depending on their unisensory abilities.