Perceived corporate ethical values and individual cynicism of working students

This study explored a proposed relationship between the corporate ethical values and cynicism of 195 working students. Analysis indicated students' perceived ethical values were negatively related to individual cynicism after accounting for several variables.     

Making syntax of sense: number agreement in sentence production

Grammatical agreement flags the parts of sentences that belong together regardless of whether the parts appear together. In English, the major agreement controller is the sentence subject, the major agreement targets are verbs and pronouns, and the major agreement category is number. The authors expand an account of number agreement whose tenets are that pronouns acquire number lexically, whereas verbs acquire it syntactically but with similar contributions from number meaning and from the number morphology of agreement controllers. These tenets were instantiated in a model using existing verb agreement data. The model was then fit to a new, more extensive set of verb data and tested with a parallel set of pronoun data. The theory was supported by the model's outcomes. The results have implications for the integration of words and structures, for the workings of agreement categories, and for the nature of the transition from thought to language.     

Is Workplace Harassment Hazardous to Your Health?

We examined cross-sectional and lagged effects of sexual harassment (SH) and generalized workplace harassment (GWH) on incidence of self-reported illness, injury, or assault in a sample of over 1,500 university employees. SH and GWH, but not other job stressors, were related to increased odds of illness, injury, or assault. This was true when SH, GWH, and illness, injury, or assault were measured at the same time point, as well as when SH and GWH were measured in year prior to illness, injury, or assault.The data presented here are part of an ongoing longitudinal study of workplace harassment conducted at the Department of Psychiatry of the University of Illinois at Chicago. This research was supported by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (grants AA09989 and AA13332). Portions of this paper were presented at the annual meeting of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology, April 2004, Chicago, Illinois. The data were collected by the Survey Research Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Chicago.     

Possible influence of linguistic musical background on perceptual pitch-matching tasks: a pilot study

Linguistic background has been identified as important in the perception of pitch, particularly between tonal versus nontonal languages. In addition, a link between native language and the perception of musical pitch has also been established. This pilot study examined the perception of pitch between listeners from tonal and nontonal linguistic cultures where two different styles of music originate. Listeners were 10 individuals born in China who ranged in age from 25 to 37 years and had spent on the average 30 mo. in the USA and 10 individuals, born on the Indian subcontinent, who ranged in age from 22 to 31 years, and had spent an average of 13 mo. in the USA. Listeners from both groups participated in two conditions. One condition involved listening to a selection of music characteristic of the individual's culture (China, pentatonic scale; Indian subcontinent, microtones), and one condition involved no music. All listeners within each condition participated in two voice pitch-matching tasks. One task involved matching the lowest and highest pitch of tape-recorded voices to a note on an electronic keyboard. Another task involved matching the voice pitch of tape-recorded orally read words to a note on the keyboard. There were no differences between the two linguistic groups. Methodological limitations preclude generalization but provide the basis for further research.     

Perceptual functions in prosopagnosia

Some patients with prosopagnosia may have an apperceptive basis to their recognition defect. Perceptual abnormalities have been reported in single cases or small series, but the causal link of such deficits to prosopagnosia is unclear. Our goal was to identify candidate perceptual processes that might contribute to prosopagnosia, by subjecting several prosopagnosic patients to a battery of functions that may be necessary for accurate facial perception. We tested seven prosopagnosic patients. Three had unilateral right occipitotemporal lesions, two had bilateral posterior occipitotemporal lesions, and one had right anterior-to-occipital temporal damage along with a small left temporal lesion. These lesions all included the fusiform face area, in contrast to one patient with bilateral anterior temporal lesions. Most patients had impaired performance on face-matching tests and difficulty with subcategory judgments for non-face objects. The most consistent deficits in patients with lesions involving the fusiform face area were impaired perception of spatial relations in dot patterns and reduced contrast sensitivity in the 4 to 8 cycles deg(-1) range. Patients with bilateral lesions were impaired in saturation discrimination. Luminance discrimination was normal in all but two patients, and spatial resolution was uniformly spared. Curvature and line-orientation discrimination were impaired in only one patient, who also had the most difficulty with more basic-level object recognition. We conclude that deficits in luminance, spatial resolution, curvature, line orientation, and contrast at low spatial frequencies are unlikely to contribute to apperceptive prosopagnosia. More relevant may be contrast sensitivity at higher spatial frequencies and the analysis of object spatial structure. Deficits in these functions may impair perception of subtle variations in object shape, and may be one mechanism by which the recognition defect in prosopagnosia can extend to other classes of object subcategorization.     

Spatial learning in rats is impaired by microinfusions of protein kinase C-gamma antisense oligodeoxynucleotide within the nucleus accumbens

The nucleus accumbens (NAcc) has been shown to play a role in motor and spatial learning. Protein kinase C (PKC) has been implicated in the mechanisms of initiation and maintenance of long-term potentiation that is thought to be involved in the storage of long-term memory. In the present study, the importance of de novo synthesis of PKC-gamma within the NAcc in the acquisition and retention of spatial discrimination learning was assessed using an antisense knockdown approach. Separate groups of Long-Evans rats were exposed to acute microinfusions (6microg/microl) of PKC-gamma antisense oligodeoxynucleotide (AS-ODN), control oligodeoxynucleotide (C-ODN) or vehicle into the NAcc at 24 and 3h before each training session. Behavioral findings showed that the blockade of NAcc-PKC-gamma translation caused impairments in the early phase of learning and retention of spatial information. Biochemical experiments showed that PKC-gamma expression was reduced and Ca(2+)/phospholipid-dependent protein kinase C (PKC) activity was blocked significantly in the AS-ODN-treated rats in comparison with control rats. The present findings suggest that NAcc-PKC-gamma plays a role during the early acquisition of spatial learning. Also, retention test results suggest that NAcc-PKC-gamma may be working as an intermediate factor involved in the onset of molecular mechanisms necessary for spatial memory consolidation within the NAcc.     

The generality of working memory capacity: a latent-variable approach to verbal and visuospatial memory span and reasoning

A latent-variable study examined whether verbal and visuospatial working memory (WM) capacity measures reflect a primarily domain-general construct by testing 236 participants in 3 span tests each of verbal WM. visuospatial WM, verbal short-term memory (STM), and visuospatial STM. as well as in tests of verbal and spatial reasoning and general fluid intelligence (Gf). Confirmatory' factor analyses and structural equation models indicated that the WM tasks largely reflected a domain-general factor, whereas STM tasks, based on the same stimuli as the WM tasks, were much more domain specific. The WM construct was a strong predictor of Gf and a weaker predictor of domain-specific reasoning, and the reverse was true for the STM construct. The findings support a domain-general view of WM capacity, in which executive-attention processes drive the broad predictive utility of WM span measures, and domain-specific storage and rehearsal processes relate more strongly to domain-specific aspects of complex cognition.     

School-year employment among high school students: effects on academic, social, and physical functioning

This study describes the effects of different weekly work intensity levels on adolescent functioning in a sample of 3,083 high school students in rural South Texas, where economically disadvantaged and Hispanic youth are heavily represented. Anonymous surveys were conducted in 10th- and 12th-grade students' classrooms in 1995. The following effects were associated with long hours of weekly employment during the school year: (1) decreased performance/engagement in school and satisfaction with amount of leisure time, and (2) increased health risk behaviors and psychological stress. The effects of school-year work on academic factors and health behaviors differed by grade, but not by race/ethnicity, parent education, or race/ethnicity and parent education considered together. It was concluded that parents and professionals should continue to monitor the number of weekly hours that students work during the school year.