The Influence of Openness to Experience on Perceived Employee Creativity: The Moderating Roles of Individual Trust

In this paper, we explain the influence of co‐worker trust on the effect of employees' openness to experience on their perceptions of their own creativity. We surveyed 199 working professionals in Ireland and found that openness to experience was positively associated with both employees' perceptions of their radical creativity and incremental creativity. In addition, the relationship between openness to experience and incremental creativity was negatively moderated by cognition‐based trust in his or her co‐worker. In conclusion, we discuss the theoretical and managerial implications of our findings and highlight directions for future research.     

Caring: A Pluralist Account

In this paper, I argue that care ethics should be understood as a form of value pluralism. Writers on the ethics of care tend not explicitly to address issues in the theory of value, although much of what has been written about care ethics may be taken to suggest that it endorses some form of value monism. I argue against this conception of care ethics by showing that the practical reality of caregiving is more accurately represented by a pluralist account of value. Practices of care are plausibly guided by a number of distinct and potentially conflicting values. These include quality of life, autonomy, dignity, personal development, and the value of nurturant relationships. Whilst caring takes each of these values to be important in its own right, they are not always jointly realisable, and carers are sometimes forced to promote one such value at the expense of another. The possibility of conflict between values is, of course, precisely what a pluralist conception of value tells us to expect. In this respect, then, value pluralism more faithfully reflects the reality of caregiving than does value monism, and care ethicists ought for this reason to endorse it.     

Disclosure on Campus: Students’ Decisions to Tell Others About Unwanted Sexual Experiences,Intimate Partner Violence,and Stalking

The scope of student victimization occurring on college campuses is problematic, drawing the attention of researchers and campus officials. While most researchers of the disclosure of these unwanted experiences tend to examine just 1 form of victimization, a direct comparison of the disclosure of different types of campus victimization within a singular study is missing in the literature. The current study aimed to address this issue by examining 4 types of victimization experiences (unwanted sexual contact, unwanted sexual intercourse, intimate partner violence, and stalking) in a college population. A common set of possible predictors of disclosure were examined, including both demographic (e.g., gender, race, age) and situational factors (e.g., alcohol use, level of fear, relationship with perpetrator). While patterns of similarity across all victimization experiences emerged, the impact of gender, race, age, and alcohol use on disclosure decisions varied substantially by victimization type. The findings of this study address the gap in the current literature by providing a comparison and contrast of the influence of predictors across different types of victimization. Furthermore, the findings provide needed information that could help colleges and universities develop ways to encourage support-seeking and reporting among students.     

Experience of agency and sense of responsibility

The experience of agency refers to the feeling that we control our own actions, and through them the outside world. In many contexts, sense of agency has strong implications for moral responsibility. For example, a sense of agency may allow people to choose between right and wrong actions, either immediately, or on subsequent occasions through learning about the moral consequences of their actions. In this study we investigate the relation between the experience of operant action, and responsibility for action outcomes using the intentional binding effect (Haggard, Clark, & Kalogeras, 2002) as an implicit, quantitative measure related to sense of agency. We studied the time at which people perceived simple manual actions and their effects, when these actions were embedded in scenarios where their actions had unpredictable consequences that could be either moral or merely economic. We found an enhanced binding of effects back towards the actions that caused them, implying an enhanced sense of agency, in moral compared to non-moral contexts. We also found stronger binding for effects with severely negative, compared to moderately negative, values. A tight temporal association between action and effect may be a low-level phenomenal marker of the sense of responsibility.     

Learning from delayed feedback: neural responses in temporal credit assignment

When feedback follows a sequence of decisions, relationships between actions and outcomes can be difficult to learn. We used event-related potentials (ERPs) to understand how people overcome this temporal credit assignment problem. Participants performed a sequential decision task that required two decisions on each trial. The first decision led to an intermediate state that was predictive of the trial outcome, and the second decision was followed by positive or negative trial feedback. The feedback-related negativity (fERN), a component thought to reflect reward prediction error, followed negative feedback and negative intermediate states. This suggests that participants evaluated intermediate states in terms of expected future reward, and that these evaluations supported learning of earlier actions within sequences. We examine the predictions of several temporal-difference models to determine whether the behavioral and ERP results reflected a reinforcement-learning process.     

The role of working memory capacity in multiple-cue probability learning

Multiple-cue probability learning (MCPL) involves learning to predict a criterion when outcome feedback is provided for multiple cues. A great deal of research suggests that working memory capacity (WMC) is involved in a wide range of tasks that draw on higher level cognitive processes. In three experiments, we examined the role of WMC in MCPL by introducing measures of working memory capacity, as well as other task manipulations. While individual differences in WMC positively predicted performance in some kinds of multiple-cue tasks, performance on other tasks was entirely unrelated to these differences. Performance on tasks that contained negative cues was correlated with working memory capacity, as well as measures of explicit knowledge obtained in the learning process. When the relevant cues predicted positively, however, WMC became irrelevant. The results are discussed in terms of controlled and automatic processes in learning and judgement.     

Maternal illusory control predicts socialization strategies and toddler compliance

This study examined the relation between mothers' perception of their capacity for controlling infant crying and a later measure of parent-toddler social interaction-compliance with parental requests. Fifty-seven mothers participated in (a) a laboratory task when their children were 5 months old to assess mothers' perception of control and (b) a toy-cleanup task when their children were 24 months old to assess toddler compliance. Perception-of-control scores on the laboratory task reflected accuracy of perception and ranged from accurate to greatly overestimating control, with an overestimation referred to as an illusion of control. Mothers were categorized into three illusion-of-control groups: low, moderate, and high. Toddlers of mothers in the low and high illusion-of-control groups were more likely to be categorized as highly defiant than were toddlers of mothers in the moderate-illusion group. Mothers with high illusory control were most likely to use a high power-assertion strategy (negative control), and when negotiating, their toddlers' expression of autonomy was most likely to escalate into defiance.     

Assessing African American adolescents' risk for suicide attempts: attachment theory

The threat of separation from a parent theoretically increases the risk of adolescent suicide attempts. The present study evaluated this and other hypothesized risk factors in a sample of adolescent suicide attempters and nonsuicidal controls, using the Psychiatric Consultation Checklist (Lyon, 1987). Stepwise logistic regression was used to predict group membership. It was found that threat of separation from a parental figure, insomnia, neglect, substance abuse, suicidal ideation, and failing grades were the strongest predictors of suicide attempt. Ten predictor variables correctly identified 97% of suicide attempters and 86% of nonattempters. Unexpected findings included high levels of truancy, threatening others, and separation from a parent before the age of 12 among nonattempters.