Cetacean responses to violation of expectation paradigm in a free-swim context

Animal Cognition - The investigation of individual responses to unexpected stimuli or outcomes provides insights into basic cognitive processes, such as mental representations, emotional states of...     

Investigating employees’ emotional and cognitive reactions to customer mistreatment: an experimental study

ABSTRACT

With increasing market competitiveness, companies strive to deliver high-quality services. Negative reactions from employees to customer mistreatment erodes the quality of the service provided. This study investigated whether negative emotions and cognitive impairment are mechanisms through which customer mistreatment is related to generalized customer-directed incivility. 157 Italian (Study 1) and 259 Irish (Study 2) research participants completed questionnaires which included an experimental task that manipulated customer misbehaviour levels through scenarios to create three conditions (control, incivility, verbal aggression). Emotional reactions, cognitive impairment and generalized customer-directed incivility intentions as a result of the scenarios were investigated. In both studies, participants in the mistreatment conditions reported more negative emotions, greater cognitive impairment and higher generalized customer-directed incivility intentions than those in the control condition. In Italy (Study 1) negative emotions mediated the relationship between exposure to a customer mistreatment event and generalized customer-directed incivility intentions, but not in Ireland (Study 2), demonstrating the importance of considering contextual conditions in understanding such mediating mechanisms. This study extends research by showing how a single encounter with a misbehaving customer can contribute to the development of incivility intentions towards customers as entities. The implications of these findings for theory and practice are discussed.     

Who is Offering and How Often?: Gender Differences in Drug Offers Among American Indian Adolescents of the Southwest

This exploratory study examines gender differences in the patterns of drug offers among a sample of 71 American Indian middle school students. Participants respond to an inventory of drug-related problem situations specific to the cultural contexts of Southwestern American Indian youth. They are asked to consider the frequency of drug offers from specific groups in their social networks and the difficulty associated with refusing drugs from various offerers. The results indicate that female and male American Indian youth differ in the degree of exposure to drug offers and the degree of perceived difficulty in handling such offers. Even after controlling for differences in age, grade level, socioeconomic status, family structure, and residence on a reservation, girls report significantly more drug offers than boys from friends, cousins, and other peers. Compared to boys, girls also report a significantly higher sense of difficulty in dealing with drug offers from all sources.     

Mindful Emotion Regulation,Savouring and Proactive Behaviour: The Role of Supervisor Justice

The global financial crisis and recession-prompted budget cuts represent significant challenges to public sector organisations, limiting their ability to make changes to job design and increasing job demands. In such environments, primary interventions targeted at changing the job or the work are not always viable. In this research, we examine the effectiveness of a mindful emotion regulation (MER) intervention versus a “control” savouring nature (SN) intervention in terms of facilitating the investment of work engagement into proactive behaviours. We also examine how the job resource of supervisor justice impacts these relationships. We collected data from an Irish public sector organisation using a cluster randomised controlled trial design. The final sample comprised 108 participants (MER = 74; SN = 34). Results highlight the valuable role that job resources play as boundary conditions of psychological-based interventions since the success of MER and SN depended on the participants’ perceptions of supervisor justice. When supervisor justice was high, a restorative SN exercise was effective in promoting proactive behaviours. When supervisor justice was low, a more complex cognitive and emotional exercise in the form of MER was required. We explain these results and consider their implications for future research.