THE BIG FIVE PERSONALITY TRAITS, GENERAL MENTAL ABILITY, AND CAREER SUCCESS ACROSS THE LIFE SPAN

The present study investigated the relationship of traits from the 5-factor model of personality (often termed the "Big Five") and general mental ability with career success. Career success was argued to be comprised of intrinsic success (job satisfaction) and extrinsic success (income and occupational status) dimensions. Data were obtained from the Intergenerational Studies, a set of 3 studies that followed participants from early childhood to retirement. The most general findings were that conscientiousness positively predicted intrinsic and extrinsic career success, neuroticism negatively predicted extrinsic success, and general mental ability positively predicted extrinsic career success. Personality was related to career success controlling for general mental ability and, though adulthood measures of the Big Five traits were more strongly related to career success than were childhood measures, both contributed unique variance in explaining career success.     

Perceived stress in prodromal Huntington disease

This study examines perceived stress and its relationship to depressive symptoms, life changes and functional capacity in a large sample of individuals who are positive for the Huntington disease (HD) gene expansion but not yet diagnosed. Participants were classified by estimated proximity to HD diagnosis (far, mid, near) and compared with a non-gene-expanded comparison group. Persons in the mid group had the highest stress scores. A significant interaction between age and time since HD genetic testing was also found. Secondary analyses using data from a different data collection point and including a diagnosed group showed the highest stress scores in the diagnosed group. Possible explanations and implications are discussed.     

Personal Debt,Cognitive Delinquency and Techniques of Governmentality: Neoliberal Constructions of Financial Inadequacy in the UK

In the UK in recent years, there has been a considerable and sustained increase in both levels of personal debt and over‐indebtedness. This commentary argues that recent UK policy formulation on personal debt management has sidelined problematic macroscopic political and economic changes by locating personal debt as a problem of individual financial incompetence. Through specific institutions, tools, techniques and practices, certain configurations of people in debt have been rendered knowable and changeable. In doing so, public policies that have brought about a greater need for a greater number of people to rely on personal debt remain largely beyond public view and have instead been reconstituted as problems of access to financial capability training. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Vowels in early words: an event-related potential study

Previous behavioural research suggests that infants possess phonologically detailed representations of the vowels and consonants in familiar words. These tasks examine infants' sensitivity to mispronunciations of a target label in the presence of a target and distracter image. Sensitivity to the mispronunciation may, therefore, be contaminated by the degree of mismatch between the distracter label and the heard mispronounced label. Event-related potential (ERP) studies allow investigation of infants' sensitivity to the relationship between a heard label (correct or mispronounced) and the referent alone using single picture trials. ERPs also provide information about the timing of lexico-phonological activation in infant word recognition. The current study examined 14-month-olds' sensitivity to vowel mispronunciations of familiar words using ERP data from single picture trials. Infants were presented with familiar images followed by a correct pronunciation of its label, a vowel mispronunciation or a phonologically unrelated non-word. The results support and extend previous behavioural findings that 14-month-olds are sensitive to mispronunciations of the vowels in familiar words using an ERP task. We suggest that the presence of pictorial context reinforces infants' sensitivity to mispronunciations of words, and that mispronunciation sensitivity may rely on infants accessing the cross-modal associations between word forms and their meanings.     

Conceptualizing and Measuring Engagement: An Analysis of the Utrecht Work Engagement Scale

This article analyzes the Utrecht Work Engagement Scale (UWES; Schaufeli et al. in J Happiness Stud 3:71?C92, 2002b) on a variety of levels. Study 1 critiques the method by which the original scale was developed, and analyzes a similar sample using both exploratory and, subsequently, confirmatory factor analyses. Study 2 uses three samples to explore the 17-item UWES-17, and the recent shorter version of the scale, the 9-item UWES-9. Factor structures and reliabilities of scores for both scale versions were examined for each sample. Although some cautions are warranted when using the UWES, this research leans toward supporting a multifactorial conceptualization of the construct. Preliminary construct validation of the use of the measures was also established via correlations with other pertinent constructs. Although research on the measure remains sparse, the UWES-9 holds promise as a parsimonious version of the UWES-17 that appears valid in use, appears to yield reliable scores in the samples herein, and also appears to capture the purported three-factor dimensionality of the engagement construct better than does the original UWES-17 version.