Attributional Style and Engagement/Disengagement Responses in the Chinese Workforce

Internal attribution for bad events, along with stable and global attributions, has been regarded as a component of pessimism, a precursor of negative work outcomes. Most evidence in support of this conceptualisation has come from research conducted in individualist cultures. We questioned if internal attribution has the same pessimistic implication in a collectivist culture. Findings from two studies conducted on Chinese employees supported our expectations that the stability and globality dimensions (but not the internality dimension) would predict disengagement responses (such as quitting and being neglectful at work) and lack of engagement responses (such as voicing suggestions and being loyal to the organisation). A reconceptualisation of pessimism in the workplace is therefore necessary. A dimensional, rather than a composite, scoring method is proposed for maintaining the predictive and construct validities of attributional style as an indicator of pessimism.     

Preschool children's eye‐movements during pictorial recall

We investigated eye‐movements during preschool children's pictorial recall of seen objects. Thirteen 3‐ to 4‐year‐old children completed a perceptual encoding and a pictorial recall task. First, they were exposed to 16 pictorial objects, which were positioned in one of four distinct areas on the computer screen. Subsequently, they had to recall these pictorial objects from memory in order to respond to specific questions about visual details. We found that children spent more time fixating the areas in which the pictorial objects were previously displayed. We conclude that as early as age 3–4 years old, children show specific eye‐movements when they recall pictorial contents of previously seen objects.     

Instrumental responding following reinforcer devaluation

In two experiments, hungry rats were given instrumental lever-press training for an appetitive reinforcer and, in addition, were exposed to another type of food which was not contingent on lever pressing. In the first experiment, exposure to each type of food was on separate days, whereas in the second experiment rats were exposed to each type of food in strict alternation within each session. Subsequently, a food aversion was conditioned to the reinforcer for the experimental group and to the non-contingent food for the control group. In both experiments, animals with an aversion to the reinforcer responded less in an extinction test than animals with an aversion to the non-contingent food. Subsequent reacquisition tests confirmed that the aversion to the non-contingent food in the control group was of comparable strength with that to the reinforcer in the experimental group. The results were discussed in terms of whether the reinforcer is encoded in the associative structure set up by exposure to an instrumental contingency.     

Risk taking from the participant's perspective: the case of driving and accident risk.

Although perceived health risk plays a prominent role in theories of health behavior, its empirical role in risk taking is less clear. In Study 1 (N = 129), 2 measures of drivers' risk-taking behavior were found to be unrelated to self-estimates of accident concern but to be related to self-ratings of driving skill and the perceived thrill of driving. In Study 2 (N = 405), out of a wide range of potential influences, accident concern had the weakest relationship with risk taking. The authors concluded that although health risk is a key feature in many theories of health behavior and a central focus for researchers and policy makers, it may not be such a prominent factor for those actually taking the risk.