Supervisor Support for Employee Performance in Australia: Mediating Role of Work‐Life Balance,Job, and Life Attitude

Drawing on the job‐demands resources model, we investigated the relationship between supervisor support and employee performance and the mediating effects of work‐life balance (WLB), job and life satisfaction, and organizational commitment in a sample of 305 financial‐sector employees in Sydney, Australia. Results reveal that supervisor support is positively related to employee performance, WLB, job and life satisfaction, and organizational commitment. In turn, WLB, job and life satisfaction, and organizational commitment are positively linked to employee performance. The findings indicate a significant mediation between supervisor support and employee performance only through WLB and organizational commitment. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.     

Development of the Spanish short version of Negative Attitudes Toward Masturbation Inventory

Background/Objective: Masturbation has historically been a sexual behaviour associated with negative connotations, as a consequence of traditional orthodox positions, despite its positive impact on health. The instruments developed to measure the attitude towards masturbation are scarce, and none of them have been validated in the Spanish adult population. This study aims to propose a short version of the Negative Attitudes Toward Masturbation Inventory (NATMI) and examine their psychometric properties (reliability and evidence of validity) in the Spanish adult population. Method: A total of 4,116 heterosexual adults aged 18-83 years (M = 40.58; SD = 12.24; 54.64% women) participated in the study. In addition to the NATMI, they answered other scales to assess sexual attitudes, sexual desire, propensity to become sexually excited/inhibited and sexual functioning. Results: Analysis of the construct validity of the NATMI resulted in a reduced version of ten items grouped into a single factor explaining 66% of the variance (ordinal alpha = .95). The evidence of validity is clear, as subjects with negative and positive attitude towards masturbation differed in religiousness, frequency of masturbation, erotophilia, positive attitude towards sexual fantasies, sexual inhibition and sexual functioning. Conclusions: The Spanish short version of NATMI provides reliable and valid measures in the Spanish adult population.     

The role of working memory and updating in Coloured Raven Matrices performance in typically developing children

A large body of evidence indicates that working memory correlates with performance on fluid intelligence tasks such as Raven's tests. However, light still needs to be shed on which particular aspects of working memory might be most critically related to fluid intelligence, and whether working memory updating—which appears crucial to intellectual functioning—has a prominent role. To address these issues more closely, our study presented participants (aged 5–11 years) with the Raven's Coloured Progressive Matrices, an updating task, and a battery of working memory tasks. Our findings confirm that working memory indeed plays an important part in explaining fluid intelligence, in particular that updating information in working memory is critical to fluid intelligence in the context of development.     

Reversing presentation order of semantically related words reverses memory

In the Deese-Roediger-McDermott paradigm, words (e.g., sour, candy, sugar,…) related to one critical word (e.g., sweet) typically are encoded in descending order of their association with the critical word. When recognition is tested, memory is greater for related words than for critical words, as predicted by extant memory models. Surprisingly, however, memory is not greater for unrelated words (presented in other encoding lists) than for related words, in contrast with predictions from these same models. In two experiments, we tested whether intralist presentation order is responsible for the unexplained results. Word lists were studied in standard or reversed order (ascending order of association to critical words). Subsequent recognition for related words was high when lists were presented in the standard order but very low when lists were presented in reverse. Results indicate that presentation order affects related-word false alarms, providing important new constraints for memory models.     

Directed Forgetting of Related Words: Evidence for the Inefficient Inhibition Hypothesis

Fifth-grade children and college students were asked to remember some words and to forget others in an item-cued-directed-forgetting task. Taxonomically related pairs of words and control pairs that were unrelated in meaning were used as stimuli. Children found it more difficult than did adults to ignore forget-cued words that followed asso-ciatively related words that were remember-cued. The results provide support for D. F. Bjorklund and K. K. Harnishfeger's (1990) inefficient inhibition hypothesis (i.e., that the efficiency of inhibitory mechanisms improves as children develop). The results also suggest that the inhibition is occurring primarily in the early stages of processing.     

Differences Between Young and Old University Students on a Lexical Decision Task: Evidence Through an Ex-Gaussian Approach

This work compared two common variants of a lexical decision task (LDT) through two different analysis procedures: first, the classical ANOVA method, and second, by fitting the data to an ex-Gaussian distribution function. Two groups of participants (old and young university students) had to perform, blocks of go/no-go and yes/no tasks. Reaction times and error rates were much lower in the go/no-go task than in the yes/no task. Changes in the ex-Gaussian parameter related to attention were found with word frequency but not with the type of LDT tasks. These findings suggest that word frequency shows an attentional cost that is independent of age.     

Effect of Depressive Symptoms and Sex on the Relationship Between Loneliness and Cigarette Dependence: A Moderated Mediation

Loneliness is a subjective and emotionally unpleasant experience of perceiving insufficient social relationships. Previous research has revealed that loneliness constitutes a psychosocial risk factor for depression, and is also related to unhealthy behaviors such as smoking. This study aims to examine the relation between loneliness, depression, and cigarette dependence, and to explore the role of sex in this relationship. A total sample of 275 adult treatment-seeking daily smokers (Mage = 45.3; 61.5% females) was used. Our results showed a significant correlation between higher scores of loneliness, depressive symptoms, and cigarette dependence. In addition, mediation analysis showed a significant indirect effect of loneliness on cigarette dependence, via depressive symptoms. Regarding the effect of sex, we found that this variable significantly moderated the relationship between depressive symptoms and cigarette dependence. Results of this study extend previous literature by showing that, in treatment seeking smokers, loneliness is a significant predictor of depressive symptoms, and through this relation, it predicts cigarette dependence. Additionally, sex was a significant moderator of this relation. These findings have several clinical implications, and also contribute to the understanding of cigarette dependence, which is a well-known barrier for smoking cessation.     

Important Considerations in the Counseling Process of Immigrant Venezuelan Families

Recent increases in the number of Venezuelan immigrant families in the United States and/or Canada have contributed to the need for developing effective assessment and counseling strategies to help this population integrate into their new environment. Assessment of Venezuelan families may be achieved effectively when therapists are able to delineate, without stereotyping, the contribution of culture to the presenting complaint and symptomatology. This article presents therapeutic considerations relating to Venezuelan families. Guidelines for gathering clinical information are discussed.     

Three Questions Regarding the Ecological Validity of Experimental Research on the Impact of Viewing Thin-Ideal Media Images

We experimentally examined fairness perceptions of accommodating people with disabilities by manipulating the granting of an accommodation, reward structure, and the best performer on a word search task. Data from 134 undergraduate students indicated that granting an accommodation was seen as less fair than not granting it, that having a person with a disability excel in performance was seen as less fair than when the person did not excel, and that fairness perceptions were lowest when the person with a disability received an accommodation and excelled in performance. Although the intent of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) is to level the playing field for people with disabilities, our results show that when an accommodation helps the requester, others think it is unfair.     

Lenguaje y adquisición del conocimiento

RESUMEN

El presente trabajo es un estudio empírico longitudinal y transversal de dos grupos de niños de procedencias ambientales diferentes (ambiente familiar y centro de menores) en el que se observan las diferencias en el proceso de desarrollo lingüístico, centrándose en la evolución pragmática del lenguaje mediante la cual se estudia la evolución y construcción de conceptos. Tras definir el procedimiento de estudio y analizar el desarrollo del lenguaje en los sujetos teniendo en cuenta la Longitud Media de los Enunciados (L.M.E.), las autoras concluyen que este desarrollo es mejor en los niños del medio ambiental familiar, diferenciándose también en el ritmo de adquisición y, por tanto, en la evolución del proceso de simbolización. Entre otras cuestiones, los autores destacan que el retraso tanto lingüístico como cognitivo que presentan los niños institucionalizados es consecuencia de la no adecuación de las pautas de interacción adulto-niño exigidas, afirmando que dichas pautas están determinadas por las condiciones ambientales. El trabajo finaliza resaltando que interacción, lenguaje y cognición están dialécticamente interrelacionados.