Challenging conventional wisdom about who quits: revelations from corporate America

Findings from 20 corporations from the Attrition and Retention Consortium, which collects quit statistics about 475,458 professionals and managers, extended and disputed established findings about who quits. Multilevel analyses revealed that company tenure is curvilinearly related to turnover and that a job's past attrition rate strengthens the (negative) performance- exit relationship. Further, women quit more than men, while African Americans, Hispanic Americans, and Asian Americans quit more than White Americans, though racial differences disappeared after confounds were controlled for. African American, Hispanic American, and Asian American women quit more than men of the same ethnicities and White Americans, but statistical controls nullified evidence for dual discrimination toward minority women. Greater corporate flight among women and minorities during early employment nonetheless hampers progress toward a more diversified workforce in corporate America.     

Biological Sensitivity to Context

ABSTRACT— Conventional views suggest that exaggerated biological reactivity to stress is a harmful vestige of an evolutionary past in which threats to survival were more prevalent and severe. Recent evidence, however, indicates that effects of high reactivity on behavior and health are bivalent rather than univalent in character, exerting both risk-augmenting and risk-protective effects depending on the context. These observations suggest that heightened stress reactivity may reflect increased biological sensitivity to context, with potential for negative health effects under conditions of adversity and for positive effects under conditions of support. From an evolutionary perspective, the developmental plasticity of the stress-response systems, along with their structured, context-dependent effects, suggests that variation in these systems has been adaptively patterned to increase the capacity of children to match their stress-response profiles to anticipated developmental environments. Taken together, these theoretical perspectives generate a novel hypothesis: that there is a curvilinear, U-shaped relation between early exposures to adversity and the development of stress-reactive profiles, with high-reactivity phenotypes disproportionately emerging within both highly stressful and highly protected early social environments.     

Phenomenology-Friendly Neuroscience: The Return To Merleau-Ponty As Psychologist

This paper reports on the Kuhnian revolution now occurring in neuropsychology that is finally supportive of and friendly to phenomenology – the “enactive” approach to the mind-body relation, grounded in the notion of self-organization, which is consistent with Husserl and Merleau-Ponty on virtually every point. According to the enactive approach, human minds understand the world by virtue of the ways our bodies can act relative to it, or the ways we can imagine acting. This requires that action be distinguished from passivity, that the mental be approached from a first person perspective, and that the cognitive capacities of the brain be grounded in the emotional and motivational processes that guide action and anticipate action affordances. It avoids the old intractable problems inherent in the computationalist approaches of twentieth century atomism and radical empiricism, and again allows phenomenology to bridge to neuropsychology in the way Merleau-Ponty was already doing over half a century ago.     

RATIONAL EMOTIVE BEHAVIOR THERAPY AFTER ELLIS: PREDICTIONS FOR THE FUTURE

The 9 members of the Institute for Rational-Emotive Therapy’s International Training Standards and Review Committee (of which Albert Ellis is currently one) predict the status of Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT) after the death of Albert Ellis, its progenitor. Most respondents addressed whether REBT will exist in its own right or be subsumed under the broad umbrella of Cognitive Behavior Therapy. Reprinted from Journal of Mental Health Counseling, 17, 413–427, 1995. AMHCA. Reprinted with permission. No further reproduction authorized without written permission from the American Mental Health Counselors Association. Stephen G. Weinrach was a professor of counseling and human relations at Villanova University, Villanova, Pennsylvania. He died in 2004. The authors expressed their appreciation to Martin Gerstein and Allen Ivey for their generous contributions to a draft version of this article. Colleen Deeter provided valuable editorial assistance in the preparation and coordination of this project.     

The social function of imitation in severe dementia

We report the case of Jessie, an individual with severe Alzheimer's disease. Over two sessions, we examine Jessie's spontaneous conversation behaviour and urge to communicate using the ‘still face’ paradigm. Spontaneous and deliberate imitation are also examined to identify their importance in social interactions in severe dementia. Although Jessie has difficulty producing meaningful conversation, she retains the urge to communicate and participate in social interactions. These results confirm the importance of imitation in facilitating and maintaining people with communication problems in the social world. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Evolving Landscape of Global Surgery: A Qualitative Study of North American Surgeons’ Perspectives on Faith-Based and Academic Initiatives

Journal of Religion and Health - Faith-based missions have played a large role in surgical care delivery in low- and middle-income countries (LMIC). As global surgery is now an academic discipline,...     

Coping with challenge and hindrance stressors in teams: Behavioral,cognitive, and affective outcomes

The purpose of this study was to utilize the challenge–hindrance framework to examine the discrete and combined effects of different environmental stressors on behavioral, cognitive, and affective outcomes at the team level. Results from 83 teams working on a command and control simulation indicated that the introduction of a challenge stressor positively affected team performance and transactive memory. The introduction of a hindrance stressor negatively affected team performance and transactive memory and positively affected psychological withdrawal. When the hindrance stressor was combined with the challenge stressor, teams exhibited the lowest levels of performance and transactive memory, and the highest levels of psychological withdrawal. These effects were due to the adoption of specific coping strategies by team members. Implications are discussed, as well as limitations and directions for future research.     

The Effect of Accuracy of Performance Evaluation on Learning From Experience: The Moderating Role of After-Event Reviews

Two studies (one field, one experimental) found that the more accurately individuals evaluated their performance, the better they performed on a subsequent task. The first study also found that the more individuals overestimated their previous performance, the lower was their performance on the next task. In contrast, the evaluation accuracy of the underestimators was unrelated to their subsequent performance. The second study found that when participants received feedback from an external authority, the effect of the inaccuracy of self-performance evaluation on subsequent performance was reduced. The results of the 2 studies are explained in motivational and cognitive terms.