Cognitive-Perceptual Theory and the Projective Use of Autobiographical Memory

Most clinicians know little about the operation of autobiographical memory. Yet as assessment people, clinicians are frequently called upon to make important decisions about the individuals they evaluate. It is not surprising that clinicians are ignorant regarding many aspects of autobiographical memory because most have not been trained to understand how autobiographical memory functions. This article focuses on a vital domain of autobiographical memories—early memories—and discusses from a clinical perspective the purpose, function, and organization of autobiographical memory as seen by cognitive-perceptual theory.     

Work happiness among teachers: A day reconstruction study on the role of self-concordance

Self-concordant work motivation arises from one's authentic choices, personal values, and interests. In the present study, we investigated whether self-concordant motivation may fluctuate from one work-related task to the next. On the basis of self-determination theory, we hypothesized that momentary self-concordance buffers the negative impact of momentary work demands on momentary happiness. We developed a modified version of the day reconstruction method to investigate self-concordance, work demands, and happiness during specific work-related tasks on a within-person and within-day level. In total, 132 teachers completed a daily diary on three consecutive work days as well as a background questionnaire. The daily diary resulted in 792 reported work activities and activity-related work demands, self-concordance, and happiness scores. Multilevel analysis showed that—for most work activities—state self-concordant motivation buffered the negative association of work demands with happiness. These findings add to the literature on motivation and well-being by showing that the levels of self-concordance and happiness experienced by employees vary significantly on a within-day level and show a predictable pattern. We discuss theoretical and practical implications of the findings to increase employees' well-being.     

Group Psychotherapy and the Nature of Drug Addiction

There is little evidence that the development and resolution of a regressive transference neurosis is an important or useful experience for patients in once-a-week outpatient group psychotherapy. Rather, research evidence and clinical experience suggest that a broad range of therapeutic factors are important. Before group treatment, patients expect to gain from insight, catharsis, interpersonal output, and interpersonal input. Patients who have had short therapeutic experiences indicate that catharsis, learning to trust others, and learning how one relates to others are most important. In longer-term therapies, a broad range of factors comes into play, including universalization, altruism, guidance, and existential factors, in addition to catharsis, insight, and interpersonal learning.     

The Effect of a Final Exam on Long-Term Retention

Testing on a final exam in a college course improved long-term retention over material that had not been tested on the final. Students from an upper level psychology course took a long-term retention test, four to five months after the end of the course. For half of the items, a related question had been on the final. For the remaining half, a related question had appeared on an earlier exam, but not the final. On the long-term retention test, percent correct was 79% when a related question had appeared on the final and 67% when a related question had not appeared on the final. These results have both theoretical and practical implications.     

The irresponsibility of American social scientists

The arguments contained in books criticizing American social scientists by C. Wright Mills (The Sociological Imagination) and Bernard Crick (The Science of American Politics) are discussed, compared and criticized. It is argued that Mills’ criteria of evaluation and constructive alternatives to the tendencies he criticizes are immeasurably sounder than those found in Crick's book. An effort to supplement Mills’ argument by providing a more explicit statement of its moral underpinnings is made. Finally, it is argued that though both critiques have serious empirical flaws, the authors have undeniably demonstrated that important tendencies for irresponsible thought and action do exist within the American social sciences.     

Does Strengths Use Mean Better Focus? Well-being and Attentional Performance at the Episodic Level

Journal of Happiness Studies - Positive psychology postulates that using one’s strengths can facilitate employee well-being and performance at work. However, whether strengths use is...     

Discrepant integration times for upright and inverted faces

Judgments of upright faces tend to be more rapid than judgments of inverted faces. This is consistent with encoding at different rates via discrepant mechanisms, or via a common mechanism that is more sensitive to upright input. However, to the best of our knowledge no previous study of facial coding speed has tried to equate sensitivity across the characteristics under investigation (eg emotional expression, facial gender, or facial orientation). Consequently we cannot tell whether different decision speeds result from mechanisms that accrue information at different rates, or because facial images can differ in the amount of information they make available. To address this, we examined temporal integration times, the times across which information is accrued toward a perceptual decision. We examined facial gender and emotional expressions. We first identified image pairs that could be differentiated on 80% of trials with protracted presentations (1 s). We then presented these images at a range of brief durations to determine how rapidly performance plateaued, which is indicative of integration time. For upright faces gender was associated with a protracted integration relative to expression judgments. This difference was eliminated by inversion, with both gender and expression judgments associated with a common, rapid, integration time. Overall, our data suggest that upright facial gender and expression are encoded via distinct processes and that inversion does not just result in impaired sensitivity. Rather, inversion caused gender judgments, which had been associated with a protracted integration, to become associated with a more rapid process.     

Imagining the near and far future: The role of location familiarity

Plausible personal events envisioned as occurring in the near future tend to be reported as more vivid than those set in the far future. Why is this? The present set of three experiments identified one’s familiarity with the location in which the event is placed as critical in this regard. Specifically, Experiment 1 demonstrated that amongst a wide range of phenomenological characteristics, clarity of location appears to drive the overall difference in vividness between events imagined to take place in the near and the far future. Experiments 2 and 3 were designed to further elucidate this finding. Experiment 2 demonstrated that near future events are more likely than far future events to be imagined in familiar locations. Experiment 3 showed that future events set in familiar locations tend to be imagined with greater clarity than those set in unfamiliar locations. The results of all three experiments converge on the conclusion that the difference in vividness of events imagined as occurring in the near and far future is mediated by one’s familiarity with the location in which the event is imagined to occur.     

Development and validation of the job crafting scale

We developed and validated a scale to measure job crafting behavior in three separate studies conducted in The Netherlands (total N = 1181). Job crafting is defined as the self-initiated changes that employees make in their own job demands and job resources to attain and/or optimize their personal (work) goals. In Study 1 and 2 the Dutch job crafting scale (JCS) was developed and tested for its factor structure, reliability, and convergent validity. The criterion validity of the JCS was examined in Study 3. The results indicated that there are four independent job crafting dimensions, namely increasing social job resources, increasing structural job resources, increasing challenging job demands, and decreasing hindering job demands. These dimensions could be reliably measured with 21 items. The JCS shows convergent validity when correlated with the active constructs proactive personality (+), personal initiative (+), and the inactive construct cynicism (?). In addition, results indicated that self-reports of job crafting correlated positively with colleague-ratings of work engagement, employability, and performance — thus supporting the criterion validity of the JCS. Finally, self-rated job crafting behaviors correlated positively with peer-rated job crafting behaviors.     

Test publishers' perspective on "an updated meta-analysis": comment on Van Iddekinge, Roth, Raymark, and Odle-Dusseau (2012)

Van Iddekinge, Roth, Raymark, and Odle-Dusseau's (2012) meta-analysis of pre-employment integrity test results confirmed that such tests are meaningfully related to counterproductive work behavior. The article also offered some cautionary conclusions, which appear to stem from the limited scope of the authors' focus and the specific research procedures used. Issues discussed in this commentary include the following: (a) test publishers' provision of studies for meta-analytic consideration; (b) errors and questions in the coding of statistics from past studies; (c) debatable corrections for unreliable criterion measures; (d) exclusion of laboratory, contrasted-groups, unit-level, and time-series studies of counterproductive behavior; (e) under-emphasis on the prediction of counterproductive workplace behaviors compared with job performance, training outcomes, and turnover; (f) overlooking the industry practice of deploying integrity scales with other valid predictors of employee outcomes; (g) implication that integrity test publishers produce biased research results; (h) incomplete presentation of integrity tests' resistance to faking; and (i) omission of data indicating applicants' favorable response to integrity tests, the tests' lack of adverse impact, and the positive business impact of integrity testing. This commentary, therefore, offers an alternate perspective, addresses omissions and apparent inaccuracies, and urges a return to the use of diverse methodologies to evaluate the validity of integrity tests and other psychometric instruments.