The relationship between perceived organizational support and proactive behaviour directed towards the organization

Numerous studies have shown that perceived organizational support has positive consequences on both employees and organizations. However, no study has examined the causal relationship between perceived organizational support and proactive behaviour directed towards the organization and few studies have identified potential mechanisms underlying this relationship. We first investigated the direction of causality between perceived organizational support and proactive behaviour, and hypothesized that perceived organizational support leads to proactive behaviour directed towards the organization. Second, based on social exchange and motivational perspectives, we examined two potential mechanisms underlying this relationship, i.e., felt obligation and work engagement. Employees from a Belgian Federal Public Service were invited to take part in a three-wave longitudinal survey. Using a cross-lagged panel design, our results (N = 1963) revealed that Time 2 perceived organizational support was positively related to Time 3 proactive behaviour towards the organization, whereas the reverse was not true. Additionally, our results (N = 1293) showed that Time 2 felt obligation and Time 2 work engagement mediated the positive relationship between Time 1 perceived organizational support and Time 3 proactive behaviour directed towards the organization.     

Cognitive events in a problem-solving task: a qualitative method for investigating interactivity in the 17 Animals problem

Outside the cognitive psychologist's laboratory, problem-solving is an activity that takes place in a rich web of interactions involving people and artefacts. This interactivity is constituted by fine-grained action–perception cycles, and it allows a reasoner's comprehension of the problem to emerge from a coalition of internal and external resources. Taking an ecological approach to problem-solving, this paper introduces a qualitative method, Cognitive Event Analysis, for studying the fine-grained interactivity between a problem-solving agent and his/her environment. To demonstrate the potential of this method, it is used to study a single subject solving the so-called 17 Animals problem using a material model. The fine-grained procedure allows tracking the solution to a serendipity that was brought about because of the participant's aesthetic considerations and a change in her perceptual figure-ground configuration. While a qualitative single-case method cannot prove specific models of problem-solving, it questions prevalent mentalist models, and it generates new hypotheses on insight problem-solving, because it allows the researcher to attend to outliers and to variability on a fast and fine-grained between-measurement timescale.     

Odorization of a novel object can influence infant's exploratory behavior in unexpected ways

Although much is known about the development of object exploration during infancy, it remains to be understood whether and how olfaction can influence infants' interactions with novel objects. To address these issues, sixteen infants aged 7-15 months were videotaped during two consecutive 5-min free play sessions with a scented or an unscented version of visually similar objects. Results indicate that adding an odor to a novel object influenced the infants' behavior: the infants exhibited more and longer manipulations and mouthing of the unscented object than of the scented object. The differential responsiveness to the scented, relative to the unscented, object was noted after a 2-min delay following test onset, suggesting that in the present conditions infants do not immediately detect or react to the added odor. It may be concluded that infants do detect an odorant added on a novel object, show odor-based discrimination of visually similar objects, and express withdrawal of the scented, relative to the unscented, object. The implications of these findings for understanding how infants use their senses, namely their olfactory sense, in early exploratory behavior are discussed.     

Long-term plasticity of intrinsic excitability: learning rules and mechanisms

Spatio-temporal configurations of distributed activity in the brain is thought to contribute to the coding of neuronal information and synaptic contacts between nerve cells could play a central role in the formation of privileged pathways of activity. Synaptic plasticity is not the exclusive mode of regulation of information processing in the brain, and persistent regulations of ionic conductances in some specialized neuronal areas such as the dendrites, the cell body, and the axon could also modulate, in the long-term, the propagation of neuronal information. Persistent changes in intrinsic excitability have been reported in several brain areas in which activity is elevated during a classical conditioning. The role of synaptic activity seems to be a determinant in the induction, but the learning rules and the underlying mechanisms remain to be defined. We discuss here the role of synaptic activity in the induction of intrinsic plasticity in cortical, hippocampal, and cerebellar neurons. Activation of glutamate receptors initiates a long-term modification in neuronal excitability that may represent a parallel, synergistic substrate for learning and memory. Similar to synaptic plasticity, long-lasting intrinsic plasticity appears to be bidirectional and to express a certain level of input or cell specificity. These nonsynaptic forms of plasticity affect the signal propagation in the axon, the dendrites, and the soma. They not only share common learning rules and induction pathways with the better-known synaptic plasticity such as NMDA receptor dependent LTP and LTD, but also contribute in synergy with these synaptic changes to the formation of a coherent engram.     

The role of teachers’ motivation and mindsets in predicting a (de)motivating teaching style in higher education: a circumplex approach

Motivation and Emotion - Although different measures for (de)motivating teaching are available for primary and secondary education, a fine-grained instrument to assess a variety of motivating and...     

Changes in disengagement coping mediate changes in affect following mindfulness‐based cognitive therapy in a non‐clinical sample

Past research has shown that mindfulness‐based interventions increase positive affect in non‐clinical populations. However, the mechanisms underlying this increase are poorly understood. On the basis of previous empirical and theoretical accounts, we hypothesized that a decreased use of disengagement coping strategies in daily life would explain the benefits of a mindfulness‐based intervention in terms of increased positive affect. We analysed the data of 75 healthy adult participants (58 women; 17 men) of different ages (M = 49 years old; SD = 13; age range 19–81) who had been randomly allocated to 8‐week Mindfulness‐Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) or to a waitlist control group. The results confirmed our hypothesis: Participants in the MBCT group showed significant improvements in positive affect compared to the control group, with decreased use of disengagement coping styles mediating these improvements. The implications of this study are discussed.     

Impact of the 1998 football World Cup on suicide rates in France: results from the national death registry

Our objective was to determine whether the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) World Cup in 1998 had a short-term impact on the number of suicides in France. Exhaustive individual daily data on suicides from 1979 to 2006 were obtained from the French epidemiological center on the medical causes of death (CepiDC-INSERM; France). These data were analyzed using the seasonal ARIMA model. The overall effect of the World Cup was tested together with potential specific impact on days following the French team games. Between 11th June and 11th July, a significant decline of 95 suicides was observed (-10.3%), this effect being the strongest among men and people aged between 30 and 44. A significant decrease was also observed for the days following French team games (-19.9%). Our results are in favor of an effect of nationwide sport events on suicidal behaviors and are consistent with other studies. Many of the theories explaining the relationship between sports and suicide are related to sense of belongingness and social integration, highlighting the importance of social link reinforcement in suicide prevention.     

Personality modulation of (un)conscious processing: Novelty Seeking and performance following supraliminal and subliminal reward cues

This study provides evidence that personality traits associated with responsiveness to conscious reward cues also influence responsiveness to unconscious reward cues. Participants with low and high levels of Novelty Seeking (NS) performed updating tasks in which they could either gain 1 euro or 5 cents. Gains were presented either supraliminally or subliminally at the beginning of each trial. Results showed that low NS participants performed better in the high-reward than in the low-reward condition, whereas high NS participants' performance did not differ between reward conditions. Interestingly, we found that low NS participants performed significantly better when rewards were presented unconsciously, whereas high NS participants' performance did not differ whether reward cues were presented subliminally or supraliminally. Our findings highlight the necessity of taking personality into account in unconscious cognition research. They also suggest that individual differences might determine whether implicit and explicit motives have similar or complementary influences.     

Modus Tollens,Modus Shmollens: Contrapositive reasoning and the pragmatics of negation

The utterance of a negative statement invites the pragmatic inference that some reason exists for the proposition it negates to be true; this pragmatic inference paves the way for the logically unexpected Modus Shmollens inference: “If p then q; not-q; therefore, p.” Experiment 1 shows that a majority of reasoners endorse Modus Shmollens from an explicit major conditional premise and a negative utterance as a minor premise: e.g., reasoners conclude that “the soup tastes like garlic” from the premises “If a soup tastes like garlic, then there is garlic in the soup; Carole tells Didier that there is no garlic in the soup they are eating.” Experiment 2 shows that this effect is mediated by the derivation of a pragmatic inference from negation. We discuss how theories of conditional reasoning can integrate such a pragmatic effect.     

Seeking positive experiences can produce illusory correlations

Individuals tend to select again alternatives about which they have positive impressions and to avoid alternatives about which they have negative impressions. Here we show how this sequential sampling feature of the information acquisition process leads to the emergence of an illusory correlation between estimates of the attributes of multi-attribute alternatives. The sign of the illusory correlation depends on how the decision maker combines estimates in making her sampling decisions. A positive illusory correlation emerges when evaluations are compensatory or disjunctive and a negative illusory correlation can emerge when evaluations are conjunctive. Our theory provides an alternative explanation for illusory correlations that does not rely on biased information processing nor selective attention to different pieces of information. It provides a new perspective on several well-established empirical phenomena such as the ‘Halo’ effect in personality perception, the relation between proximity and attitudes, and the in-group out-group bias in stereotype formation.