Loving thy work: developing a measure of work passion

ABSTRACT

Passion for work has become increasingly valued, as reflected by its ubiquity in popular and empirical discourse. Yet we lack scientific consensus on the definition of work passion, and a reliable, well-validated measure of work passion that is relevant to workers across various vocations. In this paper, we identified and integrated key themes from existing scientific conceptualizations into a precise definition: Passion for work means to strongly identify with a line of work that one feels motivated to engage in and derives positive affect from doing. We developed a 10-item Work Passion (WP) scale, which we tested across multiple studies with a total of 858 adults, including working adults from two different English-speaking cultural backgrounds (i.e., United States and Singapore), and a two-wave study of employees from various vocations. Our results showed that work passion is associated with a host of beneficial outcomes, including greater career commitment, lower levels of job burnout, less work-home conflict, and fewer physical symptoms. Our research (1) provides an integrated definition of work passion, (2) offers a reliable, cross-culturally tested scale, and (3) highlights important implications for work outcomes associated with being passionate towards one’s line of work.     

Category-specific impairments? No. A critique of Sartori et al.

In this paper we examine the claim by Sartori, Miozzo, and Job (this issue) that their patient Michelangelo exhibits a category-specific deficit in naming living things. We conclude that their data are flawed in many respects and offer no reasonable basis for the conclusions they wish to draw. In addition their further claim that the data reported by Stewart, Parkin, and Hunkin (1992) are artefactual is not supported in any substantial way by examination of the findings.     

The New Trolley Problem: Driverless Cars and Deontological Distinctions

Discussion of the ethics of driverless cars has often focused on supposed real-life versions of the famous trolley problem. In these cases, a driverless car is in a position where crashing is unavoidable and all possible crashes risk harm: for example, it can either continue on its current path and crash into five pedestrians or swerve and crash into one pedestrian. There are significant disanalogies between the human versions of the trolley problem and situations faced by driverless cars which affect the application and moral significance of key deontological distinctions, such as the distinction between doing and allowing harm. The application and moral significance of the doing/allowing distinction in the context of the behaviour of driverless cars depend on (a) our conception of the behaviour of driverless cars; (b) the forms of driverless cars that are developed and used; (c) the background expectations of programmers/manufacturers/owners of driverless cars and the conditions of being able to put those cars on the roads. These are as yet unsettled – and may even be undetermined. Nonetheless, trolley problems may still be useful in thinking about the ethics of driverless cars.     

Text-based E-contact: Harnessing cooperative Internet interactions to bridge the social and psychological divide

ABSTRACT

In order to bridge the psychological and physical divide between different groups, researchers have harnessed the positive elements of the Internet to improve intergroup contact. One new and effective Internet strategy is Electronic- or E-contact. Unlike other contact approaches, E-contact is an experimental intergroup intervention that uniquely accommodates Allport’s contact theory and recategorisation processes, to create a structured, cooperative, synchronous and goal-directed online text interaction between members from different groups. E-contact has been found to successfully improve intergroup relations between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland and Muslims and Catholics in Australia; and reduce bias against lesbian women and gay men, people with schizophrenia, Indigenous Australians, and transgender individuals. This paper discusses the unique engineering and advantages of E-contact interventions in comparison to existing contact strategies, identifies the theories that guide E-contact interventions, provides meta-analytic evidence of its effects, and discusses the strengths, limitations and future directions for E-contact research.