Office or kitchen? Wellbeing consequences of role participation depend on role salience

In light of the emerging trend of men and women sharing work and family roles, the goal of this study is to investigate which individuals will experience a role as depleting or enriching their energy levels. We apply self-discrepancy theory and propose that role salience explains when a role will lead to exhaustion versus engagement. Exhaustion is likely when participating in a role for which salience is low, while engagement is likely when spending time on a role for which salience is high. We test this idea using a diary study whereby participants logged time spent on work and family tasks on seven consecutive days, while reporting feelings of exhaustion and engagement in the morning. For individuals with high work salience, time spent on work increased exhaustion less, and increased engagement more, as compared to individuals with low work salience. Spending time on family tasks increased exhaustion less, and increased engagement more, when work role salience was low as compared to high. Our findings suggest that wellbeing consequences of role participation depend on work role salience. We discuss how these findings advance theoretical thinking in the work–family literature and give leads for managerial practice.     

Mechanisms underlying speech sound discrimination and categorization in humans and zebra finches

Speech sound categorization in birds seems in many ways comparable to that by humans, but it is unclear what mechanisms underlie such categorization. To examine this, we trained zebra finches and humans to discriminate two pairs of edited speech sounds that varied either along one dimension (vowel or speaker sex) or along two dimensions (vowel and speaker sex). Sounds could be memorized individually or categorized based on one dimension or by integrating or combining both dimensions. Once training was completed, we tested generalization to new speech sounds that were either more extreme, more ambiguous (i.e., close to the category boundary), or within-category intermediate between the trained sounds. Both humans and zebra finches learned the one-dimensional stimulus–response mappings faster than the two-dimensional mappings. Humans performed higher on the trained, extreme and within-category intermediate test-sounds than on the ambiguous ones. Some individual birds also did so, but most performed higher on the trained exemplars than on the extreme, within-category intermediate and ambiguous test-sounds. These results suggest that humans rely on rule learning to form categories and show poor performance when they cannot apply a rule. Birds rely mostly on exemplar-based memory with weak evidence for rule learning.     

Breaking through the loss cycle of burnout: The role of motivation

We aimed to study burnout as a process that develops over time. On the basis of the Conservation of Resources theory ( Hobfoll, 2002 ), we tested whether burnout induces a loss cycle, depleting resources, and enhancing demands. In addition, we investigated whether intrinsic job motivation and externally regulated job motivation attenuated or aggravated this loss cycle. Using a sample of 352 employees who answered online questionnaires in 2005 and 2007, we found that baseline burnout predicted future burnout that results from an increase in job demands (e.g., work overload) and a decrease in job resources (e.g., social support, information). Furthermore, external regulation aggravated the positive relationship between baseline burnout and demand accumulation. Intrinsic motivation attenuated the positive relationship between baseline burnout and resource loss. We conclude that intrinsic motivation is an important factor enabling employees to break through the negative cycle of burnout.     

Do new ways of working foster work engagement?

Although New Ways of Working (NWW) are increasingly implemented in organizational practice, few studies have addressed its pros and cons for employee outcomes. NWW enable employees to choose when and where to work, while being supported by electronic communication. We examined the effects of NWW on work engagement and exhaustion, and investigated whether communication quality mediated these relationships. The results of a five-day diary study (n= 550) showed that daily use of NWW was positively related to daily engagement and negatively to daily exhaustion due to increased effective and efficient communication. In addition, NWW enhanced connectivity among co-workers, resulting in enhanced daily engagement and reduced exhaustion. However, we also found a positive relationship between NWW and exhaustion, because NWW increased interruptions during the work process. Although some caution is needed, we conclude that NWW have the potential to foster work engagement.     

Potter's notion of bioethics

In 1970 Van Rensselaer Potter was the first to use the term "bioethics" in a publication to advocate the development of a new discipline to address the basic problems of human flourishing. This article analyzes Potter's notion of bioethics in order to understand its origins, sources, and substance. In early publications, Potter conceptualized bioethics as a bridge: between present and future, nature and culture, science and values, and finally between humankind and nature. In later publications, disappointed by a predominant focus on individual and medical issues, and with a wish to underscore the need for a broader perspective, Potter introduced the new term "global bioethics," meant to transcend ethics specialties and integrate them into a new interdisciplinary endeavor to address global problems. A growing interest in global bioethics today means that Potter's original insights are more timely than ever.     

Spontaneous Sourcing Among Students Reading Multiple Documents

This study used think-aloud methodology to explore undergraduates' spontaneous attention to and use of source information while reading six documents that presented conflicting views on a controversial social scientific issue in a Google-like environment. Results showed that students explicitly and implicitly paid attention to sources of documents as well as sources cited within documents and that their attention to source information was associated with its use in evaluating, predicting, and interpreting the content of the documents. Students' sourcing activity varied across documents. The two documents that took the strongest, opposing stances on the controversy elicited the most sourcing. We also observed that, in essays they wrote on the controversy, students' spontaneous sourcing activity was related to their citation of a particularly trustworthy source. The study's theoretical implications are discussed in terms of the Documents Model framework.     

Prime time news: The influence of primed positive and negative emotion on susceptibility to false memories

We examined the relation between emotion and susceptibility to misinformation using a novel paradigm, the ambiguous stimuli affective priming (ASAP) paradigm. Participants (N = 88) viewed ambiguous neutral images primed either at encoding or retrieval to be interpreted as either highly positive or negative (or neutral/not primed). After viewing the images, they either were asked misleading or non-leading questions. Following a delay, memory accuracy for the original images was assessed. Results indicated that any emotional priming at encoding led to a higher susceptibility to misinformation relative to priming at recall. In particular, inducing a negative interpretation of the image at encoding led to an increased susceptibility of false memories for major misinformation (an entire object not actually present in the scene). In contrast, this pattern was reversed when priming was used at recall; a negative reinterpretation of the image decreased memory distortion relative to unprimed images. These findings suggest that, with precise experimental control, the experience of emotion at event encoding, in particular, is implicated in false memory susceptibility.     

Understanding and Integrating Multiple Science Texts: Summary Tasks are Sometimes Better Than Argument Tasks

One of the major challenges of a knowledge society is that students as well as other citizens must learn to understand and integrate information from multiple textual sources. Still, task and reader characteristics that may facilitate or constrain such intertextual processes are not well understood by researchers. In this study, we compare the effects of summary and argument essay tasks when undergraduates read seven different texts on a particular scientific topic, finding that an instruction to write summaries may lead to better understanding and integration than an instruction to write argument essays. We discuss several possible explanations for this result. We also found that beliefs about the certainty of knowledge in some instances can moderate the effect of task on comprehension performance.     

The activities of UNESCO in the area of ethics

The member states of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) decided in 2002 that ethics is one of the five priority areas of the organization. This article describes three categories of past and current activities in the ethics of science and technology, in particular bioethics. The first category is the global standard setting with the Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights as the most recently adopted normative instrument. The second category focuses on capacity building in order to enable member states to apply the provisions of the declarations, through, for example, the establishment of national bioethics committees, the introduction of ethics teaching programs, and drafting of legislation and guidelines. The final category of activities is awareness raising through publications, events, and conferences. The challenges and difficulties UNESCO may face in its various activities are highlighted.