Collective aspirations: collective regulatory focus as a mediator between transformational and transactional leadership and team creativity

Journal of Business and Psychology - This paper examines the mediating role of two emergent team states—collective regulatory focus (CRF) and team initiative—for transmitting the...     

The Acculturation of Community Psychology: Is There a Best Way?

In this paper I describe a community psychology perspective on acculturation and adjustment of immigrants and refugees and suggest that this field of acculturation research has in turn something to offer heuristically as we consider our identity and training for future generations of community psychologists over the next 50 years. I suggest that honoring our heritage, maintaining our disciplinary identity as community psychologists, and sustaining doctoral programs that offer training specific to community psychology are crucial for our survival as a field and is not antithetical to, and is indeed necessary for, interdisciplinary collaborations.     

Acculturation and psychological distress among adolescent immigrants from the former Soviet Union: exploring the mediating effect of family relationships

The present study investigated the potential mediating effect of adolescents' perceptions of family relationships using a structural equation modeling approach. The sample consisted of 226 immigrant adolescents from the former Soviet Union resettled in a suburban county in the mid-Atlantic region of the U.S. who were selected at random from the local public schools. The study included independent assessment of acculturation to the host (American) and native (Russian) culture. Results confirm the mediational role of family relationships on the impact of Russian acculturation on reduced distress. In addition, family relationships partially mediated the link between American acculturation and reduced psychological distress for these youth. The findings suggest that for this immigrant population native acculturation was related to less distress only when linked to positive familial relationships, whereas American acculturation was related to less distress directly, as well as through its positive impact on familial relationships.     

The costs of caring: Gender identification increases threat following exposure to sexism

The current research examined whether group identification moderates the extent to which perceived ingroup discrimination is threatening, as indexed by physiological and self-report measures. Women read and gave a speech summarizing an article describing sexism as prevalent or rare. They then completed a distraction task and sat for a recovery period. Cardiovascular reactivity (CVR) was used to index threat experienced on an automatic level and self-reported anxiety was used to index threat experienced on a controlled level. Regardless of group identification, participants in the prevalent sexism (vs. rare sexism) condition exhibited a pattern of CVR consistent with threat during the speech and reported greater anxiety post-speech. During recovery, however, highly identified participants in the prevalent sexism condition exhibited a sustained threat pattern of CVR and reported higher anxiety post-recovery compared to low identifiers. High group identification may heighten the psychological and physiological burden of discrimination.     

The Distinctiveness of Emotion Words: Does It Hold for Foreign Language Learners? The Case of Arab EFL Learners

Empirical evidence has recently been provided for the distinctiveness of emotion words as compared to abstract and concrete words for monolinguals, calling for a reconsideration of the relation between emotion and language. The present study investigates whether the distinctiveness of emotion words among monolinguals holds for foreign language learners. To this end, three groups (n?=?120 per group) of late Arabic-English bilinguals who learned English as a foreign language completed tasks including free recall, rating, and discrete word association. One group completed the tasks in Arabic while the other two groups, representing two levels of foreign language exposure, completed the tasks in English. Planned comparisons indicated the distinctiveness of emotion words in the participants’ first and foreign languages in the free recall and rating tasks while no significant differences were found in the word association task. The results are discussed in light of the existing literature and relevant theoretical models.     

Determinants and Consequences of Child Culture Brokering in Families from the Former Soviet Union

Child culture brokering occurs when immigrant children help their families navigate the new culture and language. The present study develops a model of the child culture broker role that situates it within the family and community economic and acculturative contexts of 328 families from the former Soviet Union. Path analysis was utilized to explore the relationships of community and family economic and cultural contexts with child culture brokering, child emotional distress, and family disagreements. All children reported some culture brokering for their parents. Less English proficient parents with lower status jobs, and living in areas with more Russian speaking families tended to utilize their children as brokers more often. Further, community economic conditions also predicted brokering indirectly, mediated by parent job social status. Brokering was related to child emotional distress and family disagreements. Further, culture brokering was a mediator of the impact of parent job social status on both child emotional distress and family disagreements. These results add to our understanding of the culture broker role and emphasize the utility of approaching research on it from an ecological perspective.     

Just the two of us: misalignment of theory and methods in examining dyadic phenomena

Many organizational phenomena such as leader-member exchange, mentoring, coaching, interpersonal conflict and cooperation, negotiation, performance appraisal, and the employment interview involve inherently dyadic relationships and interactions. Even when theories explicitly acknowledge the dyadic nature of such phenomena, it is not uncommon to observe a disconnection or misalignment between the level of theory and method. Our purpose in the current paper is to discuss how organizational scholars might better align these components of their research endeavors. We discuss how recent developments involving the actor-partner interdependence model (APIM) and reciprocal one-with-many (OWM) models are applicable to studying dyadic phenomena in organizations. The emphasis is on preanalytic considerations associated with collecting and organizing reciprocal dyadic data, types of research questions that APIM and reciprocal OWM models can help answer, and specific analytic techniques involved in testing dyadic hypotheses.     

Poster presentations

We analysed the organisation of semantic network using associative mechanisms between different types of information and studied the progression of the use of these associative relations during development. We aimed to verify the linkage of concepts with the use of semantic associative relations. The goal of this study was to analyse the cognitive ability to use associative relations between various items when describing old and/or new concepts. We examined the performance of 100 subjects between the ages of 4 and 7 years on an experimental task using five associative relations based on verbal encoding. The results showed that children are able to use the five semantic associative relations at age 4, but performance with each of the different associative relations improves at different times during development. Functional and part/whole relations develop at an early age, whereas the superordinate relations develop later. Our study clarified the characteristics of the progression of semantic associations during development as well as the roles that associative relations play in the structure and improvement of the semantic store.     

Creativity and dementia: a review

In these last years, creativity was found to play an important role for dementia patients in terms of diagnosis and rehabilitation strategies. This led us to explore the relationships between dementia and creativity. At the aim, artistic creativity and divergent thinking are considered both in non-artists and artists affected by different types of dementia. In general, artistic creativity can be expressed in exceptional cases both in Alzheimer's disease and Frontotemporal dementia, whereas divergent thinking decreases in dementia. The creation of paintings or music is anyway important for expressing emotions and well-being. Yet, creativity seems to emerge when the right prefrontal cortex, posterior temporal, and parietal areas are relatively intact, whereas it declines when these areas are damaged. However, enhanced creativity in dementia is not confirmed by controlled studies conducted in non-artists, and whether artists with dementia can show creativity has to be fully addressed. Future research directions are suggested.