The experience of being envied at work: How being envied shapes employee feelings and motivation

We develop and test a theoretical framework delineating the dual affective and motivational experiences arising from perceptions of being envied in the workplace. We theorize that being envied can be pleasantly or unpleasantly experienced with opposite downstream effects on motivation and job performance. We test our model in two field studies using a sample of government employees (Study 1) and a sample of employees in the financial industry (Study 2). Our results indicate that being envied can elicit unpleasant mood and anxiety that influence work engagement and job performance in negative ways. In addition, we found that positive emotional experiences from being envied bolster work engagement and performance through positive mood but not pride. Implications of our findings are discussed.     

Implementing a Virtual Health Telemedicine Program in a Community Setting

Aurora Health Care in eastern Wisconsin has a clinical genetics program driven by genetic counselors in the cancer/adult and prenatal genetics settings. In 2015, the workforce shortage of genetic counselors left us with 4 open positions for genetic counselors that we were unable to fill. We explored many models of alternative service delivery, and determined virtual health (VH) via telemedicine to be the best option for our system. Historically, telemedicine technologies have been used to provide access to healthcare services to patients in remote areas. We, however, were struggling to find genetics counselors to staff both our remote clinics and urban clinics. To solve this problem, we recruited genetic counselors from across the country to work remotely from their current home or home office utilizing VH to staff our clinics. We then created clinical workflows and an implementation process of virtual health for 9 prenatal and cancer clinics across the eastern Wisconsin footprint of our healthcare system over the course of 12 months. Here we provide our experience and process in establishing a VH program in order to help other institutions that have been affected by the workforce shortage of clinical genetics professionals.     

Foundations of infants' social group evaluations

Previous research has suggested that infants exhibit a preference for familiar over unfamiliar social groups (e.g., preferring individuals from their own language group over individuals from a foreign language group). However, because past studies often employ forced‐choice procedures, it is not clear whether infants' intergroup preferences are driven by positivity toward members of familiar groups, negativity toward members of unfamiliar groups, or both. Across six experiments, we implemented a habituation procedure to independently measure infants' positive and negative evaluations of speakers of familiar and unfamiliar languages. We report that by 1 year of age, infants positively evaluate individuals who speak a familiar language, but do not negatively evaluate individuals who speak an unfamiliar language (Experiments 1 and 2). Several experiments rule out lower‐level explanations (Experiments 3–6). Together these data suggest that children's early social group preferences may be shaped by positive evaluations of familiar group(s), rather than negative evaluations of unfamiliar groups.     

Early contributions to infants’ mental rotation abilities

Some cognitive abilities exhibit reliable gender differences, with females outperforming males in specific aspects of verbal ability, and males showing an advantage on certain spatial tasks. Among these cognitive gender differences, differences in mental rotation are the most robust, and appear to be present even in infants. A large body of animal research suggests that gonadal hormones, particularly testosterone, during early development could contribute to this gender difference in mental rotation. Also, substantial evidence supports an influence of socialization on mental rotation performance. The present study investigated the relationship of two types of factors, early postnatal testosterone exposure and parental attitudes about gender, to mental rotation performance in 61 healthy infants (29 males, 32 females). We measured salivary testosterone at two time points: 1–2.5 months of age and 5–6 months of age. Infants’ mental rotation performance and parents’ attitudes about gender were assessed at 5–6 months of age. As predicted, testosterone concentrations were significantly higher in boys than girls in early infancy (d = 0.54), and boys performed significantly better than girls on mental rotation (d = 0.64). A significant positive correlation between testosterone at age 1–2.5 months and mental rotation was found only in boys (r = 0.50, p = .01). A significant negative correlation between parents’ gender‐stereotypical attitudes and mental rotation performance was found only in girls (r = ?.57, p = .002). These findings suggest that the early postnatal testosterone surge (also known as “mini‐puberty”) may have organizational influences on mental rotation performance in boys, and that parents may influence their daughters’ mental rotation abilities beginning very early in life.     

Spirituality and mental health status among Northern Plain tribes

Spirituality measures often show positive associations with preferred mental health outcomes in the general population; however, research among American Indians (AIs) is limited. We examined the relationships of mental health status and two measures of spirituality – the Midlife Development Inventory (MIDI) and a tribal cultural spirituality measure – in Northern Plains AIs, aged 15–54 (n?=?1636). While the MIDI was unassociated with mental health status, the tribal cultural spirituality measure showed a significant relationship with better mental health status. Mental health conditions disproportionately affect AIs. Understanding protective factors such as cultural spirituality that can mitigate mental health disorders is critical to reducing these health disparities.     

Object decision test (BORB): normative data for the adult Quebec population and performance in Alzheimer’s disease and the semantic variant of primary progressive aphasia

Object decision (OD) test is one subtest of the Birmingham Object Recognition Battery (BORB). It is useful for differential diagnosis among several neurodegenerative diseases. However, normative data provided with this battery count on very few subjects and do not control for the effect of age, which limits interpretability. The purpose of Study 1 was to provide normative data for the OD test of the BORB (version A—hard). The objectives of Study 2 were to establish the diagnostic validity of this task and predictive validity of the normative data in the case of the semantic variant of primary progressive aphasia (svPPA) and Alzheimer’s disease (AD).Based on multiple linear regressions, equations to calculate Z-scores corrected for age were provided for 130 participants aged from 47 to 89 years. Performance of 20 healthy participants was compared to that of 14 individuals with svPPA and 18 with AD. After controlling for confounders, participants with svPPA had a lower total score than controls and AD participants. AD participants had a poorer performance than controls only when chimeric objects were considered. Among those with a deficit on the total score of the test, 94% (17/18, including 12 with svPPA) were correctly identified as having a pathological condition (svPPA or AD). This test could help refine differential diagnosis between svPPA and AD patients, especially before the deficits of episodic memory show up.     

Improving specific autobiographical memory in older adults: impacts on mood,social problem solving,and functional limitations

Older adults have difficulty recalling specific autobiographical events. This over-general memory style is a vulnerability factor for depression. Two groups receiving interventions that have previously been successful at reducing over-general memory in depressed populations were compared to a control group. Participants were healthy older adults aged ≥70 years: memory specificity training (MEST; n = 22), life review (n = 22), and control group (n = 22). There were significant improvements in autobiographical memory specificity in the MEST and life review groups at post-training, relative to the control group, suggesting that over-general memory can be reduced in older adults. Change in social problem solving ability and functional limitations were related to change in autobiographical memory specificity, supporting the suggested role of specific retrieval in generating solutions to social problems and maintaining independence. Qualitative analysis of participants’ feedback revealed that life review may be more appropriate for older adults, possibly because it involves integrating specific memories into a positive narrative.     

Computerized cognitive training during physical inactivity improves executive functioning in older adults

The hippocampus is closely tied to spatial navigation, a central component in cognitive functioning, and critically involved in age-associated cognitive decline and dementia. This study evaluated a novel, cognitive computerized spatial navigation training (CSNT) program targeting the hippocampus, with expectation of mitigating possible cognitive decline with bed rest (BR). During a 14-day BR study with 16 healthy, older men (mean age = 60 ± 3, range = 55–65 years), half received CSNT for 12 days in 50-min sessions and half were controls (watching documentaries). This design uniquely controlled diet, sleep, and other personal and environmental activities. Although there were no cognitive declines in controls post-BR, CSNT participants demonstrated significant increases in executive/attention ability and processing speed, and continued spatial navigation testing showed improvement to 400 days post-BR. This intervention may prove useful to mitigate cognitive declines known to occur in long periods of immobilization and could have broader implications in protecting against age-related cognitive decline.