Mind the ad: How personality requirements affect older and younger job seekers' job attraction

Age discrimination may explain lower labour market chances of older and younger job seekers. What remains underresearched, however, is how older/younger job seekers might self-select out from early recruitment procedures due to stigmatizing information in job ads. Building on theories of metastereotypes and the linguistic category model, two experimental studies investigated how personality requirements that older/younger job seekers hold negative metastereotypes about and the way in which these requirements are worded (behavioural vs. dispositional) affected their job attraction. Within-participant mediation analyses showed that as expected, job attraction was higher for older (N = 123, aged 50 years or more) and younger (N = 151, 30 years or less) job seekers when requirements were worded in a behavioural way (e.g., ‘You can be flexible’), compared with a dispositional way (e.g., ‘You are flexible’). This relation was mediated by perceptions of challenge among younger but not older job seekers. Contrary to expectations, perceptions of threat did not explain the effects of negatively metastereotyped personality requirements on job attraction. Understanding how job seekers perceive information in job ads might help recruiters to design age-sensitive recruitment policies.     

Social Contact,Academic Satisfaction,COVID-19 Knowledge,and Subjective Well-being Among Students at Turkish Universities: a Nine-University Sample

Adverse effects of COVID-19 are seen not only on the physical health of infected individuals but also on their subjective well-being. Sudden changes in social lives, lockdowns, and shifts towards online education have had a negative impact on many people, especially university students. As part of an international study, the current study focused on the well-being of students at Turkish universities in relation to social contact, academic satisfaction, and COVID-19 knowledge. A total of 7363 students from nine universities (86.6% from state universities, 71.04% female, and 73.52% at bachelor’s level) participated in an online survey. Results revealed that females had lower levels of subjective well-being and academic satisfaction. According to a mediation model in the study, the relationship between social contact and well-being was mediated by academic satisfaction and COVID-19 knowledge. Our findings can guide future researchers, mental health professionals, universities, and policymakers to understand and improve subjective well-being of university students.

     

Measurement of Quality of Life in Spanish Regions

Applied Research in Quality of Life - The present paper measures quality of life through a set of dimensions included in the following partial indicators of objective well-being: demography,...     

Conscious awareness of action potentiates sensorimotor learning

Many everyday skills are unconsciously learned through repetitions of the same behaviour by binding independent motor acts into unified sets of actions. However, our ability to be consciously aware of producing newly and highly trained motor skills raises the question of the role played by conscious awareness of action upon skill acquisition. In this study we strengthened conscious awareness of self-produced sequential finger movements by way of asking participants to judge their performance in terms of maximal fluency after each trial. Control conditions in which participants did not make any judgment or performance-unrelated judgments were also included. Findings indicate that conscious awareness of action, enhanced via subjective appraisal of motor efficiency, potentiates sensorimotor learning and skilful motor production in optimising the processing and sequencing of action units, as compared to the control groups. The current work lends support to the claim that the learning and skilful expression of sensorimotor behaviours might be grounded upon our ability to be consciously aware of our own motor capability and efficiency.     

How normative and social identification processes predict self‐determination to engage in derogatory behaviours against outgroup hockey fans

Bringing together self‐determination theory, intergroup theories based on the social identity approach, and normative approaches, three studies conducted among hockey fans tested if social norms and social identity predict greater self‐determined motivation to engage in derogatory behaviours against an outgroup team and higher frequency of these behaviours. Higher self‐determination was conceptualised as an indicator of internalisation. In Study 1, hockey fans who identified more strongly as fans of the Montreal Canadiens (N = 181) displayed a stronger positive association between the perceived norm in favour of outgroup derogation and self‐determined motivation to engage in derogatory behaviours against fans of an outgroup team. This interaction also emerged on the frequency with which the derogatory behaviours were enacted. In Studies 2 and 3 (Ns = 105 and 116), this norm by social identity interaction was replicated on both the self‐determination and the frequency outcomes for fans of a diversity of teams in the National Hockey League. In Study 3, these findings were observed over and above a manipulation that framed derogatory behaviours as being either harmful or beneficial. Results are discussed in light of motivational theories, normative approaches, and intergroup theories based on the social identity approach. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Acceptability of virtual reality interoceptive exposure for the treatment of panic disorder with agoraphobia

Interoceptive exposure (IE) is a standard component of cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT) for panic disorder and agoraphobia. The virtual reality (VR) program ‘Panic-Agoraphobia’ has several virtual scenarios designed for applying exposure to agoraphobic situations; it can also simulate physical sensations. This work examines patients' acceptability of the IE component as applied in two different ways: using VR versus traditional IE. Additionally, it explores the relationship between users' treatment expectations and satisfaction and clinically significant change. Results showed that VR and traditional IE were well accepted by all participants. Furthermore, treatment expectations predicted efficacy.     

Working memory retrieval differences between medial temporal lobe epilepsy patients and controls: A three memory layer approach

Multi-store models of working memory (WM) have given way to more dynamic approaches that conceive WM as an activated subset of long-term memory (LTM). The resulting framework considers that memory representations are governed by a hierarchy of accessibility. The activated part of LTM holds representations in a heightened state of activation, some of which can reach a state of immediate accessibility according to task demands. Recent neuroimaging studies have studied the neural basis of retrieval information with different states of accessibility. It was found that the medial temporal lobe (MTL) was involved in retrieving information within immediate access store and outside this privileged zone. In the current study we further explored the contribution of MTL to WM retrieval by analyzing the consequences of MTL damage to this process considering the state of accessibility of memory representations. The performance of a group of epilepsy patients with left hippocampal sclerosis in a 12-item recognition task was compared with that of a healthy control group. We adopted an embedded model of WM that distinguishes three components: the activated LTM, the region of direct access, and a single-item focus of attention. Groups did not differ when retrieving information from single-item focus, but patients were less accurate retrieving information outside focal attention, either items from LTM or items expected to be in the WM range. Analyses focused on items held in the direct access buffer showed that consequences of MTL damage were modulated by the level of accessibility of memory representations, producing a reduced capacity.     

Attachment,Infidelity, and Loneliness in College Students Involved in a Romantic Relationship: The Role of Relationship Satisfaction,Morbidity, and Prayer for Partner

This study examined the mediating effects of relationship satisfaction, prayer for a partner, and morbidity in the relationship between attachment and loneliness, infidelity and loneliness, and psychological morbidity and loneliness, in college students involved in a romantic relationship. Participants were students in an introductory course on family development. This study examined only students (n = 345) who were involved in a romantic relationship. The average age of participants was 19.46 (SD = 1.92) and 25 % were males. Short-form UCLA Loneliness Scale (ULS-8), (Hays and DiMatteo in J Pers Assess 51:69–81, doi:10.1207/s15327752jpa5101_6, 1987); Relationship Satisfaction Scale (Funk and Rogge in J Fam Psychol 21:572–583, doi:10.1037/0893-3200.21.4.572, 2007); Rotterdam Symptom Checklist (De Haes et al. in Measuring the quality of life of cancer patients with the Rotterdam Symptom Checklist (RSCL): a manual, Northern Centre for Healthcare Research, Groningen, 1996); Prayer for Partner Scale, (Fincham et al. in J Pers Soc Psychol 99:649–659, doi:10.1037/a0019628, 2010); Infidelity Scale, (Drigotas et al. in J Pers Soc Psychol 77:509–524, doi:10.1037/0022-3514.77.3.509, 1999); and the Experiences in Close Relationship Scale-short form (Wei et al. in J Couns Psychol 52(4):602–614, doi:10.1037/0022-0167.52.4.602, 2005). Results showed that relationship satisfaction mediated the relationship between avoidance attachment and loneliness and between infidelity and loneliness. Physical morbidity mediated the relationship between anxious attachment and psychological morbidity. Psychological morbidity mediated the relationship between anxious attachment and physical morbidity. The present results expand the literature on attachment by presenting evidence that anxious and avoidant partners experience loneliness differently. Implications for couple’s therapy are addressed. Future research should replicate these results with older samples and married couples.     

Effects of the psycholinguistic variables on the lexical decision task in Spanish: A study with 2,765 words

In order to explore the role of the main psycholinguistic variables on visual word recognition, several mega-studies have been conducted in English in recent years. Nevertheless, because the effects of these variables depend on the regularity of the orthographic system, studies must also be done in other languages with different characteristics. The goal of this work was to conduct a lexical decision study in Spanish, a language with a shallow orthography and a high number of words. The influence of psycholinguistic variables on latencies corresponding to 2,765 words was assessed by means of linear mixed-effects modeling. The results show that some variables, such as frequency or age of acquisition, have significant effects on reaction times regardless of the type of words used. Other variables, such as orthographic neighborhood or imageability, were significant only in specific groups of words. Our results highlight the importance of taking into account the peculiarities of each spelling system in the development of reading models.     

Eye movements disrupt spatial but not visual mental imagery

It has long been known that eye movements are functionally involved in the generation and maintenance of mental images. Indeed, a number of studies demonstrated that voluntary eye movements interfere with mental imagery tasks (e.g., Laeng and Teodorescu in Cogn Sci 26:207–231, 2002). However, mental imagery is conceived as a multifarious cognitive function with at least two components, a spatial component and a visual component. The present study investigated the question of whether eye movements disrupt mental imagery in general or only its spatial component. We present data on healthy young adults, who performed visual and spatial imagery tasks concurrently with a smooth pursuit. In line with previous literature, results revealed that eye movements had a strong disruptive effect on spatial imagery. Moreover, we crucially demonstrated that eye movements had no disruptive effect when participants visualized the depictive aspects of an object. Therefore, we suggest that eye movements serve to a greater extent the spatial than the visual component of mental imagery.