“A Study in Nature”: The Tuskegee Experiments and the New South Plantation

This essay rethinks the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiments in light of a long history of experimentation in plantation geographies of the U.S. South. Turning to late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century discourses of the New South and to Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute, this essay illuminates the extension of the laboratory life of the plantation into the twentieth century. The focus on personal hygiene at the Tuskegee Institute opened the door for alliances with public health initiatives early on, making the school’s student population as well as residents of surrounding counties subjects of intense hygienic surveillance well before the official start of the syphilis study.     

The Stigma of Psychological Problems in a Work Environment: Evidence From the Screening of Service Members Returning From Bosnia1

The present research examined the stigma associated with psychological problems among service members returning from the United States peacekeeping mission to Bosnia. The results show that admitting a psychological problem in the military is perceived as muchmore stigmatizing than admitting a medical problem. Service members had more concerns about stigmatization and felt more uncomfortable discussing psychological problems than medical problems, and these feelings were magnified when service members were being screened with their units rather than alone. Service members also reported a lesser likelihood of following through with a psychological referral than with a medical referral. However, participants who discussed psychological issues with a therapist felt the screening was more beneficial than those who did not discuss their responses. The results address the neglected topic of the stigma associated with psychological problems in the workplace.     

Empowerment or Intrusion? The Input and Output Legitimacy of Introductory Programs for Recent Immigrants

Recent changes in the social policy regimes of western European countries have raised questions about the normative legitimacy of policy measures. Welfare states may face difficult dilemmas when efficient social policy measures clash with principles of the liberal state, like equal treatment and individual autonomy. Is output legitimacy achieved at the expense of the input legitimacy dimensions of individual autonomy and human dignity? In this paper, a standard for evaluating the normative legitimacy of social policy interventions is proposed, and subsequently applied on the concrete example of the Norwegian introductory programs for immigrants. The paper concludes that activation measures in some of its implementations may actually represent fewer threats to input legitimacy than does the alternative regime of unconditional social assistance.     

Self‐Engagement Magnifies the Relationship Between Qualitative Overload and Performance in a Training Setting1

The present study examined whether personal engagement in a leadership course would predict rated performance for the course, and whether qualitative overload would moderate the relationship. Participants were Army Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) cadets participating in a 5‐week long leadership assessment course. Participants completed measures of qualitative overload (the extent to which they felt they lacked the skills and expertise required for effective performance) and the degree to which they were engaged in the course during the 4^th week. Results revealed that course engagement was a significant predictor of rated leadership performance, even after controlling for the personality variable of conscientiousness. Course engagement interacted with qualitative overload to predict rated performance, indicating that qualitative overload was a stronger predictor of rated performance for those cadets engaged in the course. Discussion of the results focuses on engagement as a predictor of performance, and how work‐related impediments matter more for engaged individuals.     

Integrating new soldiers: The role of leaders and unit members

The benefits of positively integrating newcomers into organizations are well known in civilian contexts. Less known is the role of integration among US soldiers who frequently relocate and integrate into new units. Perceptions of integration were examined both cross-sectionally and longitudinally as predictors of mental health, anger reactions, unit climate and functional impairment for soldiers who recently joined their unit. In addition to rating their perceptions of integration, soldiers also rated their leader and unit member support for integration. Cross-sectional correlations indicated that positive personal integration was significantly associated with fewer mental health problems, fewer anger reactions, better unit climate, and less functional impairment. Positive leader and unit support for integration was significantly associated with better unit climate. Positive leader support was also associated with fewer mental health symptoms. Only the associations of positive personal integration, with anxiety symptoms and unit climate held over time. Mediation analyses showed that personal integration fully mediated the cross-sectional relationship between leader support for integration and depression symptoms and partially mediated the relationship between leader support for integration and anxiety symptoms and unit climate. Personal integration also partially mediated the relationship between unit member support for integration and unit climate. These findings identify the importance of the individual’s personal perception of integration in predicting reduced mental health symptoms and increased unit climate, both in the short and long term. Leaders and unit members facilitate this process and could therefore benefit from training on how best to integrate new members to the unit.     

Work–Family Balance, Well-Being, and Organizational Outcomes: Investigating Actual Versus Desired Work/Family Time Discrepancies

Purpose

The purpose of the current study was to describe and test two new correlates of work?Cfamily balance, based on discrepancies between actual and desired hours spent in the work domain (work hour discrepancy, WHD) and family domain (family hour discrepancy, FHD).

Design/Methodology/Approach

Participants were 330 employees of a moderate-sized, southeastern university who responded to a survey sent via e-mail.

Findings

Analyses indicated support for the utility of work and FHD scores for individual and organizational outcomes. Data also indicated FHD predicted work?Cfamily balance, well-being, and intention to leave above and beyond the individual components of actual and desired family hours, whereas WHD did not predict beyond individual components. Work?Cfamily balance mediated relationships between FHD and quality of life, stress, depression, and intention to leave.

Implications

This study provides support for incorporation of discrepancy indices in future work?Cfamily research. FHD predicted outcomes over and above the individual components of actual and desired hours whereas WHD did not, suggesting that compatibility between what an individual desires and experiences in the family domain may have a stronger influence on well-being and organizational outcomes compared to compatibility in the work domain.

Originality/Value

These results are important given past focus on concepts such as work schedule fit (e.g., Moen, It??s about time: couples and careers, 2003), in that we extend past findings by also incorporating fit between values and experiences in the family domain, and linking discrepancies with work?Cfamily balance, well-being, and organizational outcomes.     

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.     

Attention improves perceptual quality

Attention has been demonstrated to affect response speed, signal detection, and perceptual enhancement. We wished to determine whether exogenously cued attention had the additional effect of improving the veridicality of perceptual representations. We determined the accuracy and precision of orientation judgments for static and dynamic stimuli when they were, and when they were not, exogenously cued (luminance change). Valid exogenous cues led to more accurate responses that were also quicker. The attentional accuracy benefits were robust to stimulus degradation. Since our task displayed only one test stimulus at a time, response biases cannot account for our results. We concluded that exogenous cues can lead to percepts that are, on average, more similar to the external stimulus. Thus, exogenous cuing can improve perceptual quality.     

Effect of repetition proportion on language-driven anticipatory eye movements

Previous masked priming research in word recognition has demonstrated that repetition priming is influenced by experiment-wise information structure, such as proportion of target repetition. Research using naturalistic tasks and eye-tracking has shown that people use linguistic knowledge to anticipate upcoming words. We examined whether the proportion of target repetition within an experiment can have a similar effect on anticipatory eye movements. We used a word-to-picture matching task (i.e., the visual world paradigm) with target repetition proportion carefully controlled. Participants' eye movements were tracked starting when the pictures appeared, one second prior to the onset of the target word. Targets repeated from the previous trial were fixated more than other items during this preview period when target repetition proportion was high and less than other items when target repetition proportion was low. These results indicate that linguistic anticipation can be driven by short-term within-experiment trial structure, with implications for the generalization of priming effects, the bases of anticipatory eye movements, and experiment design.