The Role of Self-Regulation Training in Developing the Motivation Management Capabilities of Salespeople

Time management, goal setting, goal attainment strategies, prioritization techniques! These are some of the self-regulation skills that today’s sales organizations are attempting to develop in a sales force through self-regulation training. This study empirically investigates self-regulation training and how it can facilitate salesperson performance. Findings suggest that self-regulatory training can enhance salesperson self-regulation capabilities, decrease role ambiguity, and thereby aid sales performance. Furthermore, our findings suggest that the value of self-regulation training may not be uniform across all sales trainees. Specifically, self-regulation training may be more beneficial to salespeople after they have developed a level of mastery over fundamental core selling capabilities.     

Eye movements when reading: The importance of the word to the left of fixation

In reading, it is well established that word processing can begin in the parafovea while the eyes are fixating the previous word. However, much less is known about the processing of information to the left of fixation. In two experiments, this issue was explored by combining a gaze-contingent display procedure preventing parafoveal preview and a letter detection task. All words were displayed as a series of xs until the reader fixated them, thereby preventing forward parafoveal processing, yet enabling backward parafoveal or postview processing. Results from both experiments revealed that readers were able to detect a target letter embedded in a word that was skipped. In those cases, the letter could only have been identified in postview (to the left of fixation), and detection rate decreased as the distance between the target letter and the eyes' landing position increased. Most importantly, for those skipped words, the typical missing-letter effect was observed with more omissions for target letters embedded in function than in content words. This can be taken as evidence that readers can extract basic prelexical information, such as the presence of a letter, in the parafoveal area to the left of fixation. Implications of these results are discussed in relation to models of eye movement control in reading and also in relation to models of the missing-letter effect.     

Perception of genuine and masking smiles in children and adults: sensitivity to traces of anger

The authors examined children's and adults' sensitivity to traces of anger in masking smiles by presenting participants with short video excerpts of smiles that differed by the intensity of an anger component. Fifty-two children, aged 6 to 12 years, and 26 adults were asked to judge whether a stimulus person was really happy or pretending to be happy. Six- and 7-year-old children were found to be sensitive to traces of anger, but less so than older children and adults. Researchers found evidence of explicit knowledge of the emotion hidden in masking smiles only in adult participants.     

Food sharing and perceptions of the status of a relationship

This study examined how individuals may form an impression of the closeness of the relationship between two individuals based on an observation of them sharing food. An opportunity sample of 72 participants watched a video clip of young adults in same-sex or mixed-sex dyads eating a meal together. In the experimental conditions, each member of the dyad also offered or fed a morsel of food to the other person. Analysis showed that food sharing was seen as indicative of familiarity between the members of a dyad. Actually feeding the other person a morsel of food was seen as an indicator of intimacy in male dyads but not in mixed-sex or female dyads. Results are discussed in terms of expectations of intimacy in male and female relationships.     

Another look inside the gap: ecological contributions to the transmission of attachment in a sample of adolescent mother-infant dyads

Ecological contributions to attachment transmission were studied in a sample of 64 adolescent mother-infant dyads. Maternal sensitivity was assessed when infants were 6 and 10 months old, and infant security was assessed at 15 and 18 months. Maternal attachment state of mind was measured with the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI) after the 1st assessment. Ecological variables considered were maternal education and depression, paternal support, and infant maternal grandmother support. Results indicated that when the contribution of ecological variables was statistically controlled for, sensitivity was a significant mediator and state of mind no longer contributed to infant security. Sensitivity also mediated an association between maternal education and infant attachment, suggesting that attachment transmission is embedded in a more global process of infant attachment development.     

Is sense of coherence a mediator or moderator of relationships between violence at work and stress reactions?

The relationships between exposure to violence at work, sense of coherence, and stress reactions were analysed in a large sample of the Danish workforce. The results showed that employees subjected to violence have a weaker sense of coherence than the rest of the respondents. Sense of coherence acted as a mediator and not as a moderator of relationships between exposure to violence and psychological, psychosomatic and cognitive stress reactions. The stability of the sense of coherence construct is discussed. With respect to the relation between sense of coherence and violence, preventative measures at the individual and organizational level are suggested.     

Temporal patterns of responding in small fixed-ratio schedules

Pigeons were exposed to an ascending series of small fixed-ratio schedules from fixed-ratio 1 to 7. Two of those pigeons were later placed on a fixed-ratio 30 schedule. The two primary dependent variables were the postreinforcement pause and the interresponse time. Changes in these variables under small fixed ratios were sometimes opposite to changes reported with large fixed ratios. For example, postreinforcement pauses decreased in length as the fixed-ratio requirement increased from fixed-ratio 1 to fixed-ratio 3. Also, the interresponse times early in the small fixed-ratio schedule were shorter than those immediately preceding reinforcement. These findings question the role of interresponse-time reinforcement in determining temporal patterns of responding under small fixed-ratio schedules. They also suggest that there may be a limited region in which the independent variable, fixed-ratio size, does not operate as previously described.     

Insertion of connectives by 9- to 11-year-old children in an argumentative text

The objective of the present study was to show that the use of adversative and conclusive connectives to mark off the prototypical schema of argumentative text begins to set in at approximately the age of 10 or 11. Based on Adam's (1992) proposals, we constituted an argumentative text with two blocks of arguments separated by an adversative instruction (the connective but or an equivalent) and followed by a conclusion introduced by a conclusive instruction (the connective thus or an equivalent). Four revising tasks (insertion or substitution with or without five connectives) have been used to asses children's knowledge of the argumentative schema and the use of connectives that punctuate them. The study of good and erroneous locations (concerning the placement of but and thus) showed that there was some regularity in the choices made by the children. The main result of this study shows that argumentative connectives are used differently by children aged 9 and children aged 10 or 11. The argumentative schema is used more consciously by 11-year-olds to guide revising tasks than by 10-year-olds.     

Prior probability modulates anticipatory activity in category-specific areas

Bayesian models are currently a dominant framework for describing human information processing. However, it is not clear yet how major tenets of this framework can be translated to brain processes. In this study, we addressed the neural underpinning of prior probability and its effect on anticipatory activity in category-specific areas. Before fMRI scanning, participants were trained in two behavioral sessions to learn the prior probability and correct order of visual events within a sequence. The events of each sequence included two different presentations of a geometric shape and one picture of either a house or a face, which appeared with either a high or a low likelihood. Each sequence was preceded by a cue that gave participants probabilistic information about which items to expect next. This allowed examining cue-related anticipatory modulation of activity as a function of prior probability in category-specific areas (fusiform face area and parahippocampal place area). Our findings show that activity in the fusiform face area was higher when faces had a higher prior probability. The finding of a difference between levels of expectations is consistent with graded, probabilistically modulated activity, but the data do not rule out the alternative explanation of a categorical neural response. Importantly, these differences were only visible during anticipation, and vanished at the time of stimulus presentation, calling for a functional distinction when considering the effects of prior probability. Finally, there were no anticipatory effects for houses in the parahippocampal place area, suggesting sensitivity to stimulus material when looking at effects of prediction.