The interaction between values and organizational identification in predicting suggestion‐making at work

The present study proposed and found that personal values and organizational identification interact in predicting making suggestions for organizational improvements at work. One hundred and forty‐eight employees of children's day‐care centres rated their values, their identification with the organization and their suggestion‐making behaviour. Their behaviour was also rated by their supervisors. As expected, the value dimension of openness to change vs. conservation predicted suggestion‐making more strongly amongst individuals highly identified with the organization than amongst individuals weakly identified with the organization. This was found using self‐ratings of behaviour as well as supervisor's rating of behaviour. The study points to the importance of values and identification in understanding suggestion‐making and innovative behaviour at work, and it opens new avenues for examining this interaction in predicting other kinds of organizational behaviours.     

Personality as a moderator in the relations between perceptions of organizational justice and sickness absence

This longitudinal study examined whether hostility and neuroticism moderated the effect of organizational justice perceptions on short-term sickness absence among 506 male and 3570 female hospital employees. Organizational justice perceptions were assessed using a questionnaire on procedural and relational justice. Self-certified sickness absence records at baseline and during the two-year follow-up were derived from employers’ registers. Hierarchical moderated Poisson regression models suggest that low procedural justice perceptions related to increased sickness absence more in hostile men than in other male employees. Low relational justice perceptions were a greater risk for sickness absence for male employees with higher neuroticism than for their colleagues with lower neuroticism.     

Impulsivity as a predictor of smoking and alcohol consumption

This prospective study examined the relationships between impulsivity, smoking and alcohol use in a large non-clinical sample of 601 men and 4832 women working in 12 Finnish hospitals. Data on impulsivity, smoking and alcohol consumption were collected by two questionnaires with a two-year interval. At baseline, impulsivity was associated with smoking and alcohol use. After controlling for baseline smoking, impulsivity predicted increased number of cigarettes smoked per day in women (p=0.08), but not in men. After controlling for alcohol use at baseline, impulsivity predicted increased alcohol consumption similarly in both genders (p<0.01). Higher impulsivity was also associated with increased likelihood of taking up smoking or becoming a heavy drinker (p<0.05). This evidence suggests that impulsivity contributes to increasing health risk behaviours.     

Authority-based Argumentative Strategies: A Model for their Evaluation

In this paper, I try to develop an informal model for the analysis and evaluation of argumentative strategies based on active authorities. The explanations necessary to understand the idea of the model and what is modelled are given through the development of the paper. I first give an example of argumentative activities. After that, the main assumption of the model is given. In the third part, the relevant aspects of the argumentative activity are analysed, while the principles of the evaluation are explained in the fourth part. The informal model is presented in the fifth part. In the final remarks, the suggestions for further work are given, as well as a comparison with some related recent works in argumentation theory.     

Die Perestrojka in der heutigen sowjetischen Philosophie

The situation in Soviet philosophy has changed radically in the course of the last 4 years. Gone is the attitude according to which philosophers fall into two camps; genuine developments are discernible in the direction of alternative thinking. Signs of the latter include the growing number of round-table discussions published in the main philosophical journals, the conversations among philosophers broadcast on television, the new textbook, with its stress on the history of philosophy, including a new look at the classics, especially Marx. In general, Marxist-Leninist doctrine is now relativized to the status of a moment in the history of philosophy, and is no longer regarded as the culmination of philosophical truth.The main questions occupying philosophers today cluster around the nature of the person: individual freedom, democracy, universal values, as well as the central importance of law in civil society and a legally sanctioned State. The revival of interest in Russian religious philosophy has to be approached with care as it involves several dimensions: the question of Russia's spiritual character as compared with the West, the confrontation with the heretofore reigning materialist view of the world in relation to the vexed question of human creativity, as well as the religious affirmation of the unity of humanity in opposition to the Marxist conception of difference and struggle. The situation in Soviet philosophy is still ambiguous so long as ideological attitudes persist which could hinder the development of autonomous philosophical thought.     

Spatial ecology: Its effects on the choice of friends and enemies

The present research examined relationships between physical distance, frequency of face-to-face contacts, and the probability that individuals would be chosen as friends or enemies. Consistent with previous research, the probability of being chosen as a friend increased as the distance between people decreased. There was also a positive linear relationship between the frequency of contact and the strength of linking. In contrast, the probability of being chosen as a disliked individual was even more dependent upon physical distance (more disliked than liked individuals lived close to the subjects), but the strength of disliking was unrelated to the frequency of face-to-face contact. Friends also tended to live farther away from the subjects the longer the latter had lived in their residences, but the distance that disliked individuals lived from the subjects did not depend upon time. The overall pattern of results was consistent with an “environment-spoiling” hypothesis which proposed that many negative interpersonal relationships primarily occur because the actions of specific others spoil one's living environment, whereas most positive interpersonal relationships result from frequent face-to-face contacts.     

Arousal,positive and negative affect,and preference for Renaissance and 20th-century paintings

Treatments expected to raise the level of arousal and induce different degrees of positive and negative affect were paired on some trials with Renaissance or 20th-century paintings, whereas no paintings were shown on other trials. The design was within-subjects (24 females); the dependent measures were skin conductance (SC) and the preference for paintings. All treatments, including the paintings/no paintings factor, raised SC over the base-line, and the pattern was essentially additive. The perceived failure to attain control over aversive auditory stimulation (resulting in negative affect) raised SC to a higher level than did the unavoidable aversive stimulation (minimal affect) or monetary gains (positive affect). Paintings paired with affect (positiveor negative) were rated as more pleasing than were those paired with no affect. The Renaissance works were preferred to the 20th-century works when negative affect was induced, whereas the opposite was true in the case of positive affect. The collative-motivation model could not account for the fact that pleasingness of paintings was not related to SC by an inverted-U function. The contiguity model could not explain the considerable rated pleasingness of paintings paired with negative affect. In contrast, there was considerable support for a more comprehensive hypothesis (distraction/soothingness) based on attentional and affective considerations, and the differential cognitive labeling of fluctuations of arousal.This research was supported by Grant GS-42802 from the National Science Foundation to VJK. Some of the findings were presented at the 6th International Colloquium of Empirical Aesthetics, and the 21st International Congress of Psychology, both held during July 1976 in Paris, France.     

Evaluative and skin-conductance responses to Renaissance and 20th-century paintings

Normative data on paintings from two periods are reported. Subjects rated the pleasingness and interestingness of 60 Renaissance and 60 20th-century (abstract) works, and indicated how much they wished to own a reproduction of each painting. Skin-conductance changes elicited by the paintings were also assessed. The data may facilitate the inclusion of real works of art in future experiments involving visual aesthetic materials (on either the independent- or the dependent-variable side) and are relevant for the research on some motivational and cognitive issues of current interest in the psychology of art.     

A cut-free gentzen-type system for the logic of the weak law of excluded middle

The logic of the weak law of excluded middleKC _p is obtained by adding the formula A A as an axiom scheme to Heyting's intuitionistic logicH _p . A cut-free sequent calculus for this logic is given. As the consequences of the cut-elimination theorem, we get the decidability of the propositional part of this calculus, its separability, equality of the negationless fragments ofKC _p andH _p , interpolation theorems and so on. From the proof-theoretical point of view, the formulation presented in this paper makes clearer the relations betweenKC _p ,H _p , and the classical logic. In the end, an interpretation of classical propositional logic in the propositional part ofKC _p is given.