No time for compromises: Age as a moderator of the relation between needs–supply fit and job satisfaction

In the light of the current demographic change, organizations need to be aware of factors influencing job satisfaction of older workers in order to maintain high motivation and commitment. The present study addresses this issue by examining the moderating effect of age on the relationship between needs–supply fit and job satisfaction. Based on the general assumption that older workers are more sensitive to circumstances that threaten their well-being (Carstensen, 2006 Carstensen, L. L. 2006. The influence of a sense of time on human development. Science, 312: 1913–1915. [Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]), we hypothesize that older as compared to younger workers should react more negatively to a misfit between their needs and available job supplies. Hence, older as compared to younger workers should report lower levels of job satisfaction when experiencing a misfit between needs and supplies. This hypothesis was tested in a sample of 471 employed workers from different occupational areas. Results confirmed our hypothesis for four out of five domains of needs–supply fit: Significant three-way interactions between needs, supply, and age were observed. The present result that older as compared to younger workers react more strongly to needs–supply misfits additionally underlines the benefits of considering age-related changes in work values and needs in age-sensitive human resource practices.     

A Psychological Means for the Control and Prevention of Industrial Stress in Computerized Working Places

Abstract

There are common traditions in investigations into industrial stress and other kinds of poor workers' states in Western and Russian/Soviet applied psychology. Based upon these traditions we attempt to overview the main domains of research and possibilities for their application in a practical sense. Proposed psychodiagnostic and psychoprophylactic approaches have to be developed according to different kinds of work situations and technological progress. But the intention of basing research on the analysis of structural mechanisms of activity regulation seems to us the most productive in all of these cases. It corresponds to the increasing demands on human internal resources and mental activities in modern technological systems.     

Remembering Numbers in Old Age: Mnemonic Training Versus Self-Generated Strategy Training

The effectiveness of two memory training programs designed to enhance four-digit number recall was examined in 90 healthy older adults. One group received instruction and training in the number-consonant mnemonic, whereas another group was instructed to adopt their own encoding and retrieval strategies to enhance number recall. Also, a control group receiving no training between testing occasions was included. The criterion task was administered according to the Buschke selective reminding procedure. Posttest performance was evaluated with and without cognitive support for remembering (i.e., verbal cues). Under unsupported conditions, the mnemonic group improved number recall following training and the self-generated strategy group showed a tendency in the same direction. When support was provided, group differences in favor of the two training groups increased. In addition, no training-related gains were observed in two verbal transfer tasks. The relatively similar patterns of gains in the two intervention groups were discussed in terms of advantages and disadvantages in the two training regimens balancing each other.     

Textures shape the attentional focus: Evidence from exogenous and endogenous cueing

The spatial cueing paradigm (Posner Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 32:3–25, 1980) has often been used to investigate the time course of the deployment of visual attention in space. In a series of eight experiments we investigated whether spatial cues would not only enhance processing of stimuli presented at cued locations, but also enhance processing of the entire texture in which the stimuli were presented. Results showed highest accuracy for responses to stimuli presented at cued locations, a replication of the traditional cueing effect (Posner 1980). Additionally, stimuli presented at uncued locations were responded to with higher accuracy when they were presented inside the same texture as the cued location, as compared with stimuli presented outside the texture with the cued location. To investigate this texture advantage for both automatic and voluntary attention deployment, exogenous and endogenous cues were used. The texture advantage was observed for short interstimulus intervals (ISIs) of 50 and 100 ms for exogenous cues and for a longer ISI of 200 ms for endogenous cues. These findings indicate that the arrangement of task-irrelevant visual stimuli also can have a large impact on the cueing effect. This suggests that visual spatial attention spreads texture-wise across the visual field. Control experiments revealed that the homogeneity within texture elements contributes most to the effect but that the texture advantage is a function of both orientation contrast at the texture border and homogeneity within texture elements.     

Correspondence

Response to Chess Denman's review of Green, André and Stern, Daniel's Clinical and Observational Psychoanalytical Research: Roots of a Controversy. ( JAP , 46, 3)     

The European Early Promotion Project: A new primary health care service to promote children's mental health

The number of children in Europe with significant psychologic and social problems is large and increasing. This article describes an innovative crosscultural method of working with families to promote the psychosocial well being of children and prevent the development of psychologic and social problems. A study designed to evaluate the effects of the service is also presented. Primary health care workers in five European countries have been trained to conduct promotional interviews with all prospective mothers in their area one month before and one month after birth. They have also been taught to work with mothers identified as in need of support as a parent by using a specific counselling model to try to prevent the onset of child mental health difficulties. Effects of the intervention on children's psychologic development and family adaptation are being evaluated at two years in comparison with matched groups not receiving the intervention. ©2002 Michigan Association for Infant Mental Health.     

Do Middle-Class Students Perceive Poor Women and Poor Men Differently?

In this study, we examined attitudes toward poor women, stereotypes about them, attributions for their poverty, and whether these thoughts and feelings differ from those about poor men. In our Midwestern college students sample (n = 206), attitudes toward poor women were significantly more positive than attitudes toward poor men. In addition, stereotypes of poor women were both more positive and more consistent with gender stereotypes than were those of poor men. Participants endorsed internal attributions for the poverty of both women and men more strongly than external or cultural attributions. However, the content of these attributions was different for the two target groups. Poor women were held responsible for nontraditional familial and reproductive patterns, whereas poor men were held responsible for lack of initiative and self-improvement. For poor men, all types of attributions included references to ability or willingness to work. The three types of attributions were more conceptually distinct for poor women.     

Gender Differences in the Construct Validity of the Silencing the Self Scale

Gender differences in the construct validity of Jack's (1991) Silencing the Self Scale (STSS) were assessed using 187 female and 169 male undergraduates. Results of exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses revealed gender differences in the scale's latent structure and at best provided only limited support for the validity of the scale's four subscales for women. Among men, the studies exposed a weakness in the scale's construct validity and provided insights into possible alternative interpretations made by men when responding to the scale's items. Convergent and discriminant validity of the scale were assessed by correlating it with measures of neuroticism and attachment. Whereas the construct validity of the STSS for use with women was supported, evidence was weaker for men. For men, data suggest that the STSS, in part, taps a motive to avoid intimacy and relationship situations that limit one's sense of independence and autonomy, a construct incongruous with Jack's notion of self-silencing.     

Developmental changes in source memory

Remembering how one learned a fact can be important in itself (e.g. for considering the value of information). However, source memory is also important, along with the temporal and perceptual information on which it is based, in giving memory an episodic or autobiographical quality. The present study investigated developmental changes in children’s ability to monitor source, in a paradigm adapted from Schacter, Harbluk and McLachlan (1984). This task, unlike previous source monitoring tasks used with children, has the potential to show the existence of a serious kind of source error called source amnesia. Children of 4, 6 and 8 years participated. They also completed measures believed to assess prefrontal function. Children showed a steady improvement with age in their ability to remember facts, but showed abrupt improvement between 4 and 6 years in their ability to monitor the source of those facts. Most notably, 4–year–old children displayed a great deal of source amnesia (i.e. errors of the kind committed by populations with frontal dysfunction), but 6– and 8–year–old children showed very few such errors. In addition, source memory was related, in some analyses although not in others, to behavioral measures often used to assess prefrontal functioning. The timing of the transition in source monitoring ability is discussed, including implications for childhood amnesia.     

Theorising the Rainbow? The Puzzle of the Public-private Divide

Two influential approaches to conceptualising the relationship between public and private law have suggested that the distinction between them should be abandoned. The first, as exemplified by Oliver, suggests that the distinction should be abandoned in favour of fusion based on the notion of commonality. The second, as exemplified by Teubner, rejects fusion, arguing for the replacement of the distinction with a concept capturing the multi-dimensional complexity of law in multiple social contexts: `polycontexturality'. This article focuses primarily on exploring conceptual puzzles presented by Oliver's `commonality thesis', and argues for a reconceptualisation of the relationship between public and private law as multi-layered. Monolithic and rigidly binary concepts alike should be replaced by a complex set of relationships – a position broadly supportive of Teubner's. However, it is argued that the relationships between public and private law are to be seen as existing on a spectrum, or even on an overarching meta-spectrum, in which the existence of distinctive `archetypal conceptual paradigms' influence as `meta-spectrum extremities'. This presents a limited caveat to Teubner's thesis. I suggest that explicit theoretical attention to both the implications of polycontexturality and the existence of the archetypal conceptual paradigms as meta-spectrum extremities might avoid occluding important distinctions and nuances within a fusion that tends illegitimately to subsume private law within a public law paradigm. Such an analysis, I argue, could enhance the coherence of the law in complex, multi-dimensional cases at the troubled borderline between public and private law. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.