Effects of Job Conditions on Worker Perceptions: Ambient Stimuli vs. Group Influence1

This study identifies the direct effects of objective job conditions on individual perceptions of job conditions. The assumptions that (1) group perceptions mediate the relationship between objective job conditions and individual perceptions of job conditions, and (2) group consensus enhances the relationship be-between group perceptions and individual perceptions were tested. Respondents were white, male, blue collar workers (N= 1240) in a tire and rubber manufacturing plant. Work groups (N= 156), consisting of four or more men on the same shift, in the same department, and who had the same supervisor, were identified. Objective job conditions included work group size, pay style, shift, and job technology. Group and individual perceptions of amount of work-load, role conflict, responsibility pressure, and intrinsic rewards were measured. The findings indicated that objective job conditions have important effects on individual perceptions of stressful and rewarding job conditions. Smaller work groups, and jobs that pay on an hourly rather than a piece-work basis, allow for some control over the pace of work, and allow for interaction among fellow workers resulted in higher levels of intrinsic rewards and lower levels of workload, role conflict, and responsibility pressures. An intriguing pattern appeared where, in perceptions involving interpersonal relations, work group influence was relatively more important than objective job conditions. When assessing task oriented aspects of work, objective job conditions were more important than group perceptions.     

Energy and psychical pain

Several relationships between energy and psychical pain are developed in this paper. These concepts are a-structural and existential in spirit, although developed in the framework of some analytic formulations on personality. A key concept developed is that the nature of psychical pain is determined, in part, by the manner in which the state of psychical energy associated with the pain departs from a given healthy ideal.     

Age and sex differences in the cooperative and noncooperative behavior of pairs of American children

Game playing behavior of same and mixed sex pairs of 5-, 8-, and 11-year-old American children was compared, using a game in which cooperative behavior maximized reward. Pairs of 8- and 11-year-old children were relatively more cooperative and attained significantly more Joint Reward Goals than 5-year-old pairs. Older pairs were not maximally cooperative, however, in terms of all the dependent measures; in adjusting for initial differences on practice trials, 5-year-olds and 8-year-olds took less time than the 11-year-olds, and 11-year-old pairs of boys took significantly more time than all other pairs. In addition, cooperative behavior increased across trials, especially for the 11-year-old children.     

Characteristics of dropouts, remainers, and refusers at a psychosocial rehabilitation program for the chronically mentally disabled

Thirty-eight chronically mentally disabled patients who were invited to join a newly established, vocationally oriented, day treatment program in Raleigh, North Carolina, served as subjects. We attempted to determine whether demographic and psychosocial characteristics significantly differed among groups of clients who dropped out of, remained in, or refused membership in this community-support program. A variety of demographic, expectancy, psychological, and psychosocial measures were administered to each subject. Most significant was the finding that the subjects' perceived level of help and support from friends was a significant determinant of the level of program participation. Those subjects who refused to participate (refusers) perceived themselves as receiving proportionately less support than did members of the other two groups (dropouts and remainers).     

Direction- and velocity-specific responses from beyond the classical receptive field in the middle temporal visual area (MT)

The true receptive field of more than 90% of neurons in the middle temporal visual area (MT) extends well beyond the classical receptive field (crf), as mapped with conventional bar or spot stimuli, and includes a surrounding region that is 50 to 100 times the area of the crf. These extensive surrounds are demonstrated by simultaneously stimulating the crf and the surround with moving stimuli. The surrounds commonly have directional and velocity-selective influences that are antagonistic to the response from the crf. The crfs of MT neurons are organized in a topographic representation of the visual field. Thus MT neurons are embedded in an orderly visuotopic array, but are capable of integrating local stimulus conditions within a global context. The extensive surrounds of MT neurons may be involved in figure-ground discrimination, preattentive vision, perceptual constancies, and depth perception through motion cues.     

The roles of stimulus repetition and hemispheric activation in visual half-field asymmetries

Hardyck, Tzeng, and Wang (1978, Brain and Language, 5, 56–71) hypothesized that ample repetition of a small number of stimuli is required in order to obtain VHF differences in tachistoscopic tasks. Four experiments, with varied levels of repetition, were conducted to test this hypothesis. Three experiments utilized the general task of object-picture naming and one utilized a word-naming task. Naming latencies constituted the dependent measure. The results demonstrate that for the object-naming paradigm repetition is required for RVF superiority to emerge. Repetition was found to be unnecessary for RVF superiority in the word-naming paradigm, with repetition actually reducing RVF superiority. Experiment I suggested the possibility that RVF superiority developed for the second half of the trials as a function of practice or hemispheric activation, regardless of repetition level. Subsequent experiments, better designed to assess this possibility, clearly refuted it. It was concluded that the effect of repetition depends on the processing requirements of the task. We propose that, for tasks which can be processed efficiently by one hemisphere, the effect of repetition will be to reduce VHF asymmetries; but tasks requiring substantial processing by both hemispheres will show shifts to RVF superiority as a function of repetition.     

Intelligence and fertility in the United States: 1912-1982

Results are presented for the 1st analysis of the relationship between IQ and completed fertility using a large, representative sample of the US population. Correlations are predominantly negative for cohorts born between 1894 and 1964 but are significantly more positive for cohorts whose fertility was concentrated in the baby boom years. Previous studies reporting slightly positive correlations appear to have been biased in their restriction of samples to atypical cohorts. The National Opinion Research Center (NORC), a nonprofit research organization affiliated with the University of Chicago, conducted the General Social Survey (GSS) in the US each year from 1972 to 1982, except for 1979. A combination of block quota and full probability sampling was employed. Hour-long interviews were completed with 12,120 respondents who were English-speaking, noninstitutionalized adults (18 years or older) living within the continental US. Such questions as age, place of birth, income and occupation, were asked in each interview. Other questions about attitudes on various social, political, and moral issues were rotated in different years. The unique opportunity this data set affords is an overview of the relationship between intelligence and fertility for a nationally representative sample of Americans whose major reproductive years fell between 1912 and 1982. Data were consolidated from the 4 surveys in which the vocabulary test was given (1974, 1976, 1978, and 1982). Respondents were divided into 15 birth cohorts of 5-year intervals ranging from before 1894 to 1964. Correlations between vocabulary scores and number of siblings are markedly negative across all 15 cohorts. Vocabulary sibling correlations are more negative in every cohort than vocabulary offspring correlations. Previous reports of a neutral or slightly eugenic relationship appear to be due to the nature of the samples used, in part because the cohorts chosen were atypical, and in part because they did not include nonwhites. Childless respondents averaged slightly higher scores than did those with 1 or more children, indicating that the automatic exclusion of the childless from sibling-IQ studies has not spuriously inflated negative correlations.     

Appetitive differential conditioning of the rabbit’s jaw movement response

Two experiments examined appetitive differential conditioning of the rabbit’s jaw movement response (JMR) in a two-phase procedure. The first phase entailed reinforced training with one conditioned stimulus (CS+), and the second phase involved intermixed presentations of CS+ and an unreinforced stimulus (CS?). In Experiment 1, CS+ was a 600-Hz tone, and CS-was either a 660-,1,000-, or 2,100-Hz tone. In Experiment 2, the magnitude of the water unconditioned stimulus (US) paired with CS+ was either 1, 3, or 9 ml. The experiments revealed that 1) the level of responding to CS-rose for several days and then declined over the remainder of training; 2) the physical similarity between CS+ and CS?directly affected the level of responding to CS?but had no discernable effect on the level of responding to CS+ ; and 3) US magnitude positively affected the level of responding to CS + and, to a lesser extent, CS?. The results are discussed in terms of their implications for Spence’s gradient interaction theory and Pavlov’s external inhibition hypothesis.