Psychological contracts and their implications for commitment: A feature-based approach

Two studies were conducted to examine the link between employee perceptions of the psychological contract and their affective and normative commitments to the organization. The authors adapt a new approach to the study of psychological contracts by developing a generalizable measure of contract features (e.g., scope; time frame). In Study 1 (N = 301), the authors predicted and found that employees’ perceptions of the contract’s features contributed beyond perceptions of contract type (i.e., transactional; relational) and fulfillment to the prediction of affective and normative commitment. In Study 2 (N = 147), the features measure was refined and results from the first study were largely replicated. In both studies, affective and normative commitment were greater when employees viewed the contract as broad, trust-based, equal, negotiated, tangible, and long-term, and weaker when they saw it as unequal, imposed, and short-term. We also found evidence for patterns of features that correspond to transactional and relational contracts, as well as to recently proposed balanced contracts and I-Deals. Implications for theory and the management of psychological contracts are discussed.     

Women's Caregiving Careers and Retirement Financial Insecurity

Providing the essential care for children and aged relatives has immediate and long‐term financial consequences for women, particularly financial insecurity in retirement. Women's caregiving careers are examined in relationship to the impact on retirement. The need for career and retirement education and counseling aimed at women who assume caregiving roles is addressed.     

Basic Infobase Change

Generalisations of theory change involving arbitrary sets of wffs instead of belief sets have become known as base change. In one view, a base should be thought of as providing more structure to its generated belief set, and can be used to determine the theory change operation associated with a base change operation. In this paper we extend a proposal along these lines by Meyer et al. We take an infobase as a finite sequence of wffs, with each element in the sequence being seen as an independently obtained bit of information, and define appropriate infobase change operations. The associated theory change operations satisfy the AGM postulates for theory change. Since an infobase change operation produces a new infobase, it allows for iterated infobase change. We measure iterated infobase change against the postulates proposed by Darwiche et al. and Lehmann.     

Eye movements during the production of nouns and pronouns

Earlier research has established that speakers usually fixate the objects they name and that the viewing time for an object depends on the time necessary for object recognition and for the retrieval of its name. In three experiments, speakers produced pronouns and noun phrases to refer to new objects and to objects already known. Speakers looked less frequently and for shorter periods at the objects to be named when they had very recently seen or heard of these objects than when the objects were new. Looking rates were higher and viewing times longer in preparation of noun phrases than in preparation of pronouns. If it is assumed that there is a close relationship between eye gaze and visual attention, these results reveal (1) that speakers allocate less visual attention to given objects than to new ones and (2) that they allocate visual attention both less often and for shorter periods to objects they will refer to by a pronoun than to objects they will name in a full noun phrase. The experiments suggest that linguistic processing benefits, directly or indirectly, from allocation of visual attention to the referent object.     

The Political Ecology of Dignity: Human Dignity and the Inevitable Returns of Animality

Human dignity names a two‐tier political ecology: one moral‐political community whose members bear a special status of inviolability, and another larger community where violence and degradation are routine. Because ecological relations are never uni‐directional, the routinized violence that “belongs” in interactions with nonhuman animals returns, normalizing violence across gendered, racialized, and politicized lines of human difference. An account of dignity that begins from creaturely vulnerability rather than anthropological exceptionalism not only better expresses key theological insights of the Christian tradition, it also resists the repressed and disavowed violence generated by prevalent accounts of dignity.     

Adverse effects of predictive testing for Huntington disease underestimated: long-term effects 7-10 years after the test.

The 7-10-year psychological effects of presymptomatic testing for Huntington disease are described in 142 individuals and 104 partners. Questionnaires included the Beck Hopelessness Scale (A. T. Beck, A. Weissman, D. Lester, & L. Trexler, 1974), the Impact of Event Scale (M. J. Horowitz, N. Wilner. & W. Alvarez. 1979). and the General Health Questionnaire (D. P. Goldberg. 1972). Carriers and their partners were more distressed immediately after the test result, although their outlooks improved somewhat in the 2-3-year posttest period. However, they became more pessimistic thereafter, when approaching the age of onset. Carriers, who were lost to follow-up after disclosure of test results, reported more distress pretest than did retained carriers. This demonstrates that studies that report few harmful effects may have underestimated the real impact. Moreover, follow-up studies need to investigate time effects for longer than a few years.     

An investigation of persuasion and sentencing severity with mock juries

The extent to which the personal characteristics of individual mock jurors affect participation and influence with other jurors within the deliberation process was the focus of this investigation. A predeliberation locus of control measure, along with two conditions of jury composition (heterogenous vs homogenous with respect to the locus of control measure) were used to investigate interactions among sentencing severity, persuasiveness in deliberation, and demographic characteristics among 96 jurors. Results indicated that group sentences were significantly more severe than predeliberation sentences and that postdeliberation shifts were significantly more pronounced for the heterogenous juries than for the homogeneous juries.