Breaking apart the typical mortality salience manipulation: Two questions,two outcomes

The typical mortality salience manipulation asks participants to reflect on two questions, one about the emotions associated with the thought of death and the other about what happens after one dies. In five experiments, we separated these two questions and gave participants either one or a control question. In Experiment 1, participants' responses to the afterlife question were coded as being informed more by cultural knowledge and values compared with responses to the emotion question. Experiments 2 and 3 demonstrated that participants responding to the afterlife question showed greater stereotype usage compared with those responding to the emotion or a control question. In Experiment 4, results illustrate that the afterlife and emotion question differ on various coding dimensions related to self‐focus, emotion, and culturally related death words, but not death‐related words. In addition, participants who responded to the afterlife question demonstrated greater cultural worldview defense by setting a higher bail for an alleged prostitute compared with those who answered the emotion or a control question. In Experiment 5, participants responding to the emotion question demonstrated a greater preference for personally endorsed values compared with those who responded to the emotion or a control question. These results suggest that the two questions used in the common mortality salience manipulation produce different results when separated. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Enhancing Teen Pregnancy Prevention in Local Communities: Capacity Building Using the Interactive Systems Framework

Getting To Outcomes (GTO), an innovative framework for planning, implementing, evaluating, and sustaining interventions has been shown to be effective in helping community‐based organizations (CBOs) introduce science‐based approaches into their prevention work. However, the Interactive Systems Framework (ISF) suggests that adopting innovations like GTO requires a significant amount of capacity building through training and technical assistance (T/TA). In this study, 11 CBOs and three schools in South Carolina entered into a 3 year program of intense and proactive T/TA based on the ISF to learn how to apply an adaptation of GTO (Promoting Science‐Based Approaches‐Getting To Outcomes, PSBA‐GTO) to their teen pregnancy prevention programs. Using semi‐structured interviews, the partnering organizations were assessed at three points in time, pre‐T/TA, 12 months, and post T/TA (30 months) for their performance of the steps of GTO in their work. The seven organizations which participated in T/TA until the end of the project received an average of 76 h of TA and 112 h of training per organization. Interview results showed increased performance of all 10 steps of PSBA‐GTO by these organizations when conducting their teen pregnancy programs. These results suggest targeted and proactive T/TA can successfully bridge the gap between research and practice by using a three part delivery system, as prescribed in the ISF, which relies on an intermediary prevention support system to ensure accurate and effective translation of research to the everyday work of community‐based practitioners. Special Issue: Advances in Bridging Research and Practice Using the Interactive System Framework for Dissemination and Implementation; Guest Editors: Abraham Wandersman, Paul Flaspohler, Catherine A. Lesesne, Richard Puddy; Action Editor: Emilie Phillips Smith     

Does personality matter? Openness correlates with vote choice,but particularly for politically sophisticated voters

Though psychologists show that personality predicts socio-political attitudes, political scientists caution that most voters are incapable of such disciplined voting. We integrate these competing traditions by arguing that personality correlates with vote choice, but primarily among the politically sophisticated. Utilising two nationally-representative datasets (Study 1: n = 6518; Study 2: n = 17434) from two countries (New Zealand and the United States, respectively), we show that Openness to Experience is inversely associated with conservative vote choice (Studies 1–2) and socio-political attitudes (Study 2). As predicted, these relationships were particularly robust among the politically sophisticated. These studies provide a much-needed qualification to the literature and demonstrate the benefits of using an interdisciplinary approach when examining the personality correlates of socio-political attitudes.     

Rejection as a call to arms: inter-racial hostility and support for political action as outcomes of race-based rejection in majority and minority groups

Both majority and minority group members fear race-based rejection, and respond by disparaging the groups that they expect will reject them. It is not clear, however, how this process differs in minority and majority groups. Using large representative samples of White (N= 4,618) and Māori (N= 1,163) New Zealanders, we found that perceptions of race-based rejection predicted outgroup negativity in both groups, but in different ways and for different reasons. For White (but not Māori) New Zealanders, increased intergroup anxiety partially mediated the relationship between cognitions of rejection and outgroup negativity. Māori who expected to be rejected on the basis of their race reported increased ethnic identification and, in part through this, increased support for political action benefiting their own group. This finding supports collective-action models of social change in historically disadvantaged minority groups.     

Twin and sibling attachment in a nationally representative sample

The objective of this research was to evaluate the hypothesis that twin relationships are attachments, using data from a nationally representative sample. The results indicated that twin siblings were more likely than nontwin siblings to be attached to their siblings. Moreover, analyses indicated that both attachment theoretical and inclusive fitness perspectives are necessary for explaining these findings. Namely, twins were more likely to be attached than nontwin siblings, as expected from an attachment perspective. But identical twins were more likely than fraternal twins to be attached to one another, as might be expected from an inclusive fitness perspective. Cross-sectional analyses indicated that older people are less likely than younger people to use their sibling as an attachment figure compared to younger people and that married adults are less likely to use their sibling as an attachment figure than nonmarried people.     

Politics and Practical Wisdom: Rethinking Aristotle’s Account of Phronesis

This paper examines the nature of Aristotelian phronesis, how it is attained, and who is able to attain it inside the polis. I argue that, for Aristotle, attaining phronesis does not require an individual to perfect his practical wisdom to the point where he never makes a mistake, but rather it is attained by certain individuals who are unable to make a mistake of this kind due to their education, habituation, and position in society.     

Job Design and the Employee Innovation Process: The Mediating Role of Learning Strategies

Purpose

The purpose of this article is to examine whether employee learning strategies is a mechanism through which job design affects the employee innovation process. In particular, we test whether work-based learning strategies mediate the relationship between job design characteristics (job control and problem demand) and key components of the innovation process (idea generation, idea promotion, and idea implementation).

Design/Methodology/Approach

Data were collected from a survey of 327 employees in a UK manufacturing organization.

Findings

Structural equation modeling confirmed the mediating role of learning strategies in the relationship between job design and idea generation. The effects of job control on idea generation were mediated by work-based learning strategies and the effects of problem demand on idea generation were partially mediated by work-based learning strategies. Problem demand also had a direct relationship with idea generation and idea promotion. The findings provide support for the general idea that learning is a mechanism thorough which job design affects outcomes.

Implications

The results of the study show practitioners that creating jobs with high control or high problem demand can help to promote the employee innovation process; and that this is partly due to the role that such jobs play in stimulating the use of learning strategies at work.

Originality/Value

This article develops and tests a new theoretical model that explains how learning is a route through which job design influences employee innovation.     

Consolidation and translation regulation

mRNA translation, or protein synthesis, is a major component of the transformation of the genetic code into any cellular activity. This complicated, multistep process is divided into three phases: initiation, elongation, and termination. Initiation is the step at which the ribosome is recruited to the mRNA, and is regarded as the major rate-limiting step in translation, while elongation consists of the elongation of the polypeptide chain; both steps are frequent targets for regulation, which is defined as a change in the rate of translation of an mRNA per unit time. In the normal brain, control of translation is a key mechanism for regulation of memory and synaptic plasticity consolidation, i.e., the off-line processing of acquired information. These regulation processes may differ between different brain structures or neuronal populations. Moreover, dysregulation of translation leads to pathological brain function such as memory impairment. Both normal and abnormal function of the translation machinery is believed to lead to translational up-regulation or down-regulation of a subset of mRNAs. However, the identification of these newly synthesized proteins and determination of the rates of protein synthesis or degradation taking place in different neuronal types and compartments at different time points in the brain demand new proteomic methods and system biology approaches. Here, we discuss in detail the relationship between translation regulation and memory or synaptic plasticity consolidation while focusing on a model of cortical-dependent taste learning task and hippocampal-dependent plasticity. In addition, we describe a novel systems biology perspective to better describe consolidation.