Fear imagery and the startle-probe reflex

Blink reflexes to acoustic probes, heart rate, and subjective reports were studied during affective memory imagery. Thirty-six undergraduates memorized 6 pairs of neutral and fearful sentences. After learning each pair, they relaxed and listened to a series of uniform tones, one every 6 s. A change in tone pitch (higher or lower) cued recall of one of the two sentences. At the first cue tone, groups (n = 12) were under different instructions: (a) ignore the sentence and relax, (b) silently articulate the sentence, and (c) imagine the sentence content as a personal experience. At the second cue tone, all subjects performed the imagery task. Startle probes (50-ms, 95-dB white noise) were presented unpredictably during relaxation and recall trials. Probe blink reflexes were larger and cardiac rate faster at fear sentence recall than at neutral sentence recall or relaxation. For probe reflexes, this effect was greater for imagery than for nonsemantic recall tasks.     

Employees' Political Skill and Job Performance: An Inverted U‐Shaped Relation?

During the past decade, the construct of political skill has attracted a lot of attention. In particular, its relation to job performance has been examined. With regard to this link, it is typically proposed that political skill affects job performance in a positive linear manner. However, in this article it is suggested that intermediate levels of employees' political skill yield the highest job performance, implying that this association is in fact represented by an inverted U‐shape. Findings from two field studies (N₁ = 178, N₂ = 115 employee‐supervisor‐colleague triads) that incorporated different sample characteristics (early career employees, established employees), job performance dimensions (overall, task, contextual, and adaptive performance), and rating sources (supervisors and colleagues) supported this idea. Across different analyses, employees with intermediate levels of political skill received higher job performance ratings compared to those with lower and higher levels, respectively. In addition, the nature of the relationships between employees and their raters was found to moderate this curvilinear effect. Specifically, besides the fact that employees who had close working relationships with their raters generally received higher job performance ratings, the decreases in the job performance ratings of employees high in political skill were less pronounced when they had close relationships.     

"They" are old but "I" feel younger: age-group dissociation as a self-protective strategy in old age

Age becomes an important self-defining aspect particularly during advanced age. With increasing age, negative attributes related to age and aging become salient. Aging-related declines, losses, as well as the finitude of life seem to threaten older adults' sense of self. We hypothesize that older adults will try to avoid the negative consequences of their age group membership by distancing themselves from their age group. Study 1 (N = 544, 65% women; 18-85 years of age) examined the role of age-group identification for self-conception and self-image (subjective age and future time perspective) across the life span. Results show that weakly identified older adults feel younger than their chronological age and report a more expanded future time perspective relative to their same-age counterparts. A second experiment (N = 68, 69% women; 65-85 years of age) tested the impact of age stereotypes on older adults' level of age-group identification. Results suggest that older adults are more likely to psychologically dissociate themselves from their age group when negative age stereotypes are salient. Discussion focuses on (mal)adaptive consequences of age-group dissociation in later adulthood.     

信息模糊：消费决策领域中的有限理性

信息模糊（obfuscation）是行为经济学研究的重要领域,主要解释了在商品买卖过程中,销售商通过把商品信息复杂化等手段,让人们的消费过程变得更加复杂和困难,从而使消费者在购买商品时面对信息模糊做出种种不明智的选择的现象问题。本文从以往的研究成果出发,就信息模糊、有限理性和销售者的决策行为的关系进行了探讨,以期为信息模糊的跨学科研究提供可借鉴的思路和方法。     

The Italian Five Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire: A Contribution to its Validity and Reliability

Mindfulness refers to the ability to be aware of and attentive to internal and external events, without becoming overwhelmed or feeling the need to react automatically. Recent studies indicate that this ability is associated with the following factors: mental health, psychological functioning, and stress reduction. Although questionnaires have been developed to measure mindfulness, so far these have not been adapted for use within the Italian population. Thus, the aim of our studies was to investigate the reliability and validity of an Italian version of the Five Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire (FFMQ; Baer et al. Assessment, 13, 27–45, 2006). The FFMQ is a self-report measure that is based on a five-facet model (i.e., Observe, Describe, Act with Awareness, Nonjudge, and Nonreact). In the first study, internal consistency, factor structure, and concurrent validity analyses were carried out on a sample of 559 volunteers. The second study entailed test–retest analyses on a different sample of 43 students. The results showed that the Italian FFMQ: (a) has a similar factor structure to the original English version; (b) has good to excellent internal consistency as a whole (alpha?=?0.86) with sub-scale consistency ranging from 0.65 to 0.81, and test–retest stability for the total score being 0.71; (c) has good concurrent validity as demonstrated by significant correlations between the FFMQ scores and a number of self-report measures related to mindfulness. Our findings support both the adaptation of the FFMQ to the Italian context as well as the conceptualization of mindfulness in multi-faceted terms.