The professional career on the right track: A study on the interaction between career self-management and organizational career management in explaining employee outcomes

This article explores the relationship between organizational career management and career self-management and addresses the impact on employee outcomes. Within six large organizations, a sample of 491 employees reported on their career self-management initiatives, on their expectations towards organizational career support, and on their commitment and career success. This was complemented by information from their supervisors on career management support offered by HR and line management to these employees. Results show that individuals who take more initiatives to manage their career expect more career support from their employer. Career self-management positively impacts affective commitment and perceived career success, while organizational career management is positively related with affective commitment and career progress. Career self-management moderates the relationship of organizational career management with affective commitment and subjective career success.     

The Current Discourse on Islam in Germany

Islam has become a dominant issue in the German debate about the integration of “foreigners”. This debate has generated several buzzwords such as “Islamophobia” on the one hand and the fear of “fundamentalism” and the need for “security” on the other. Initial empirical studies of that deconstruct those concepts. The paper gives an overview of these attempts, including several undertaken by the author. It shows that the organizational development of Islam in Germany and the intergenerational change of its clientele have little correspondence with the conditions for inclusion established by the discourse of the German majority. At the same time, the discourse itself proves to be complex and more determined by conflicting interests between various groups within the Muslim and German communities than simply a Muslim–German divide.     

Negative priming is stronger for task-relevant dimensions: Evidence of flexibility in the selective ignoring of distractor information

The finding that in selective attention tasks responses to previously ignored stimuli are usually retarded is known as negative priming (NP). In previous studies it has been suggested that NP can depend on behavioural goals—that is, NP was observed only for task-relevant object dimensions. We extend these findings with two experiments demonstrating that stronger NP can be observed for task-relevant dimensions than for task-irrelevant dimensions (a) even if participants' tasks vary blockwise within an experiment and (b) if behavioural goals vary from trial to trial. These results suggest that selective NP is a much more flexible process than previously assumed.     

Salient stimuli capture attention and action

Reaction times in a visual search task increase when an irrelevant but salient stimulus is presented. Recently, the hypothesis that the increase in reaction times was due to attentional capture by the salient distractor has been disputed. We devised a task in which a search display was shown after observers had initiated a reaching movement toward a touch screen. In a display of vertical bars, observers had to touch the oblique target while ignoring a salient color singleton. Because the hand was moving when the display appeared, reach trajectories revealed the current selection for action. We observed that salient but irrelevant stimuli changed the reach trajectory at the same time as the target was selected, about 270 ms after movement onset. The change in direction was corrected after another 160 ms. In a second experiment, we compared manual selection of color and orientation targets and observed that selection occurred earlier for color than for orientation targets. Salient stimuli support faster selection than do less salient stimuli. Under the assumption that attentional selection for action and perception are based on a common mechanism, our results suggest that attention is indeed captured by salient stimuli.     

Gender differences in emotion recognition: Impact of sensory modality and emotional category

Results from studies on gender differences in emotion recognition vary, depending on the types of emotion and the sensory modalities used for stimulus presentation. This makes comparability between different studies problematic. This study investigated emotion recognition of healthy participants (N = 84; 40 males; ages 20 to 70 years), using dynamic stimuli, displayed by two genders in three different sensory modalities (auditory, visual, audio-visual) and five emotional categories. The participants were asked to categorise the stimuli on the basis of their nonverbal emotional content (happy, alluring, neutral, angry, and disgusted). Hit rates and category selection biases were analysed. Women were found to be more accurate in recognition of emotional prosody. This effect was partially mediated by hearing loss for the frequency of 8,000 Hz. Moreover, there was a gender-specific selection bias for alluring stimuli: Men, as compared to women, chose “alluring” more often when a stimulus was presented by a woman as compared to a man.     

From Addition to Multiplication … and Back: The Development of Students’ Additive and Multiplicative Reasoning Skills

This study builds on two lines of research that have so far developed largely separately: the use of additive methods to solve proportional word problems and the use of proportional methods to solve additive word problems. We investigated the development with age of both kinds of erroneous solution methods. We gave a test containing missing-value problems to 325 third, fourth, fifth, and sixth graders. Half of the problems had an additive structure and half had a proportional structure. Moreover, in half of the problems the internal and external ratios between the given numbers were integer, while in the other cases numbers were chosen so that these ratios were noninteger. The results indicate a development from applying additive methods “anywhere” in the early years of primary school to applying proportional methods “anywhere” in the later years. Between these two stages many students went through an intermediate stage where they simultaneously applied additive methods to proportional problems and proportional methods to additive problems, switching between them based on the numbers given in the problem.     

Selection Fairness and Outcomes: A field study of interactive effects on applicant reactions

Despite the vast amount of applicant reactions studies, few have examined combined effects of selection outcomes with perceived procedural and distributive fairness on both personal and organizational reactions. Further, most have been conducted in laboratory settings, limiting external validity. The present study examined these effects with a longitudinal design, measuring actual applicants' well‐being and organizational attractiveness preinterview and postoutcome. As expected, several interactions between outcomes and fairness were found. Applicants who were hired reported both highest well‐being and organizational attractiveness when they perceived the outcome as fair. In contrast, applicants who were rejected reported highest well‐being when they thought the outcome was unfair. Selection outcome and procedural fairness interacted for organizational attractiveness, with higher procedural fairness leading to higher attractiveness for rejected applicants.     

Arm, aber glücklich?

In a nationwide German postal survey study 371 psychotherapists who had studied psychology or pedagogic sciences were asked for their net income and job satisfaction levels. Of these, 303 worked in the public health insurance system and 68 worked as freelance psychotherapists not participating in the public health insurance system. The respondents who had practiced as psychotherapists in 1997 were also surveyed with regards to their previous income and job satisfaction at that time. Results indicated that, as expected, psychotherapists participating in the public health insurance system had higher incomes than those who do not. Since 1997 their net income had increased but was still much lower than those of comparable medical specialist groups. Both psychotherapist groups reported an overall high level of satisfaction with the profession. Additionally, psychotherapists practicing in the public health insurance system reported an increasing overall job satisfaction since 1997 while the psychotherapists who do not, remained on a constant overall job satisfaction level. When compared to these psychotherapists, those practicing in the public health insurance system showed higher satisfaction with their economic situation. Most of the respondents from both groups reported that they would still choose this profession today.     

Is overgeneral autobiographical memory an isolated memory phenomenon in major depression?

The present study explored the relation between overgeneral autobiographical memory (AM) and other aspects of memory functioning in depression. A total of 26 patients with major depressive disorder completed a set of memory tasks measuring AM specificity (AMT; Williams & Broadbent, 1986), working memory, semantic memory, verbal learning, delayed verbal recall, recognition memory, and source memory. Reduced specificity of AM was related to poor working memory (central executive functioning) and poor source memory. The former finding conforms to the idea that the voluntary retrieval of specific autobiographical memories (AMs) involves central executive processes (e.g., Conway & Pleydell-Pearce, 2000 Conway, M. A. and Pleydell-Pearce, C. W. 2000. The construction of autobiographical memories in the self-memory system. Psychological Review, 107: 261–288. [Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). The latter finding replicates and extends recent findings suggesting that overgeneral AM is part of a broader memory deficit in retrieving the specific details of the context in which information was acquired (Ramponi, Barnard, & Nimmo-Smith, 2004 Raes , F. , Hermans , D. , Williams , J. M. G. , Demyttenaere , K. , Sabbe , B. , Pieters , G . & Eelen , P. ( 2004 ). Reduced specificity of autobiographical memory: A mediator between rumination and ineffective social problem solving in major depression? Journal of affective disorders , 87 , 331 – 335  [Google Scholar]). Furthermore, in line with Ramponi et al. (2004 Raes , F. , Hermans , D. , Williams , J. M. G. , Demyttenaere , K. , Sabbe , B. , Pieters , G . & Eelen , P. ( 2004 ). Reduced specificity of autobiographical memory: A mediator between rumination and ineffective social problem solving in major depression? Journal of affective disorders , 87 , 331 – 335  [Google Scholar]), rumination was found to be related to both overgeneral AM and poor source memory.     

Operant conditioning of autobiographical memory retrieval

Functional avoidance is considered as one of the key mechanisms underlying overgeneral autobiographical memory (OGM). According to this view OGM is regarded as a learned cognitive avoidance strategy, based on principles of operant conditioning; i.e., individuals learn to avoid the emotionally painful consequences associated with the retrieval of specific negative memories. The aim of the present study was to test one of the basic assumptions of the functional avoidance account, namely that autobiographical memory retrieval can be brought under operant control. Here 41 students were instructed to retrieve personal memories in response to 60 emotional cue words. Depending on the condition, they were punished with an aversive sound for the retrieval of specific or nonspecific memories in an operant conditioning procedure. Analyzes showed that the course of memory specificity significantly differed between conditions. After the procedure participants punished for nonspecific memories retrieved significantly more specific memories compared to participants punished for specific memories. However, whereas memory specificity significantly increased in participants punished for specific memories, it did not significantly decrease in participants punished for nonspecific memories. Thus, while our findings indicate that autobiographical memory retrieval can be brought under operant control, they do not support a functional avoidance view on OGM.