Job Insecurity Spillover to Key Account Management: Negative Effects on Performance,Effectiveness, Adaptiveness,and Esprit De Corps

Most of the existing research on outcomes of job insecurity has identified individual-level burdens such as reduced attitudinal attachments toward work and well being. Far fewer studies have examined work-related outcomes that are of substantial concern to organizational success. In this paper, we investigated four new work-related outcomes of job insecurity that are part of the literature on key account management (KAM): customer performance, effectiveness with customers, adaptiveness to changing competitive conditions, and esprit de corps. A total of 353 U.S. based employees participated. The findings of this research suggest that job insecure workers perceive their organizations to be ineffective in delivering on all four KAM outcomes.     

Significance of Childhood Conduct Problems to Later Development of Conduct Disorder Among Children With ADHD: A Prospective Follow-Up Study

This study investigates whether low to moderate levels of childhood oppositional defiant disorder (ODD) and conduct disorder (CD) behaviors contribute to the development of clinically diagnosed CD in adolescence, in children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Participants were 207 White boys (ages 6-12) with ADHD free of conduct disorder diagnoses. Parent and teacher ratings were obtained. Participants were assessed at mean age 18 by clinicians blind to childhood status. A non-ADHD group (recruited in adolescence) was also studied. ODD behavior ratings did not predict CD in adolescence, whereas CD behavior ratings did. No single ODD or CD behavior predicted adolescent outcome. ADHD probands with very low ratings (Not at all, Just a little) by parents and teachers on all CD behaviors were still at significantly increased risk for CD in adolescence, compared to non-ADHD controls. The same relationships were found between childhood ODD and CD behaviors, and antisocial personality disorder in adulthood (mean age, 25). We conclude that childhood ADHD is a developmental precursor of later antisocial disorder, even in the absence of comorbid ODD or CD in childhood. However, low levels of CD-type problems are not innocuous, because they predict later CD among children with ADHD without comorbid CD.     

Culture Is More than a Static Residual: Introduction to the Special Section on Culture and Foreign Policy

The literature on international relations frequently refers to culture in broad, macro-level ways to explain what cannot be explained by economic or military power. The assumptions that culture is simple, uniform and the opposite of power are, in the view of the authors, erroneous. Also, the authors note that there is a lack of scholarly interaction among psychologists interested in cross-cultural phenomena and international relations specialists interested in questions of identity and foreign policy. As an introduction to a special section on culture and foreign policy, this article calls for more communication among these scholarly communities; provides a set of observations about foreign policy and culture understood as a complex, dynamic concept; and calls for specific kinds of studies to better understand foreign policy in the context of cultural complexity and richness.     

Discovering the Alphabetic Principle: A Lost Opportunity for Educational Reform

We review the recently published report by the Committee on the Prevention of Reading Difficulties in Young Children from a behavior analytic perspective. The authors prescribe what children should learn to be successful readers based on the correlates of reading and the developmental progression of reading errors. The report offers no discussion of theoretical models that can be used by teachers and parents to reform reading instruction or specific procedures that have been shown to be effective at promoting various reading skills. We discuss these omissions in terms of the level of research included in the review, the authors' structural approach to synthesizing this research, and the constructivist orientation common to many early childhood educators. The paper concludes by identifying models and strategies from the behavior analysis literature that can be used to guide instruction and offers a modest suggestion for future reviews of reading research.     

Anxiety Symptomatology in Mexican-American Adolescents

Mexican-American adults and adolescents in general have been reported to have high levels of anxiety symptomatology. In our study of a tri-ethnic sample of 2528 junior and senior high school students, the Youth Self Report (YSR) version of the Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL) and a sociodemographic questionnaire was used to assess the anxiety symptoms of Hispanic youth. We compared the ratings on anxiety symptoms, using Achenbach's anxiety subscale on the YSR, between two populations. The anxiety levels of youth in coastal southeast Texas (Galveston County) were compared to the anxiety levels of youth in the lower Rio Grande Valley. We found that Mexican-Americans of the Lower Rio Grande Valley scored higher on anxiety symptoms than the tri-ethnic population of Galveston County. Other factors associated with higher anxiety scores for Mexican-American youths included being born outside the US, linguistic fluency, father absent from the home, mother's education, and household size. Multiple regression analyses showed that socio-economic status (SES), family composition, and linguistic fluency had a greater relative impact on anxiety symptomatology than all other factors, both for the total sample as well as for the Mexican-American sample. These results parallel previous findings, with Mexican-American adults, which suggest either higher risk for anxiety symptomatology or a culturally related bias in the reporting of such symptoms.     

An Investigation of Student-Selected and Parent-Delivered Reading Interventions

In this study, we examined whether individualized, student-selected, parent-delivered reading interventions would produce generalized oral reading fluency improvements. Three 3rd-grade students received reading fluency interventions (repeated readings, modeling, error correction, and flashcard instruction) 1 at a time and were shown the results that each intervention produced. The students then selected the intervention strategies they wanted their parents to use. We trained parents in the student-selected reading intervention package who delivered the interventions for 4–5?weeks, and students were given the opportunity to earn rewards for generalized performance improvements at the end of each week in school. Using an alternating treatments design, results of parent tutoring were compared to a control condition that included a reinforcement contingency for generalized performance improvements to control for reinforcement effects across conditions. Generalized improvements in oral reading fluency (to high-word-overlap passages) were found for all participants. Results are discussed in terms of how educators can improve parent-tutoring outcomes by influencing students’ motivation to engage in tutoring procedures.     

The “pure-study” learning curve: The learning curve without cumulative testing

The customary assumption in the study of human learning using alternating study and test trials is that learning occurs during study trials and that test trials are useful only to measure learning. In fact, tests seem to play little role in the development of learning, because the learning curve is similar even when the number of test trials varies widely (Tulving, Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 6:175-184, 1967). However, this outcome seems odd, because other research has shown that testing fosters greater long-term learning than does studying. We report three experiments addressing whether tests affect the shape of the learning curve. In two of the experiments, we examined this issue by varying the number of spaced study trials in a sequence and examining performance on only a single test trial at the end of the series (a "pure-study" learning curve). We compared these pure-study learning curves to standard learning curves and found that the standard curves increase more rapidly and reach a higher level in both free recall (Exp. 1) and paired-associate learning (Exp. 2). In Experiment 3, we provided additional study trials in the "pure-study" condition to determine whether the standard (study-test) condition would prove superior to a study-study condition. The standard condition still produced better retention on both immediate and delayed tests. Our experiments show that test trials play an important role in the development of learning using both free-recall (Exps. 1 and 3) and paired-associate (Exp. 2) procedures. Theories of learning have emphasized processes that occur during study, but our results show that processes engaged during tests are also critical.     

Does Complex or Simple Rhetoric Win Elections? An Integrative Complexity Analysis of U.S. Presidential Campaigns

Research suggests that the integrative complexity of political rhetoric tends to drop during election season, but little research to date directly addresses if this drop in complexity serves to increase or decrease electoral success. The two present studies help fill this gap. Study 1 demonstrates that, during the Democratic Party primary debates in 2003–2004, the eventual winners of the party nomination showed a steeper drop in integrative complexity as the election season progressed than nonwinning candidates. Study 2 presents laboratory evidence from the most recent presidential campaign demonstrating that, while the complexity of Obama's rhetoric had little impact on college students' subsequent intentions to vote for him, the complexity of McCain's rhetoric was significantly positively correlated with their likelihood of voting for him. Taken together, this research is inconsistent with an unqualified simple is effective view of the complexity‐success relationship. Rather, it is more consistent with a compensatory view: Effective use of complexity (or simplicity) may compensate for perceived weaknesses. Thus, appropriately timed shifts in complexity levels, and/or violations of negative expectations relevant to complexity, may be an effective means of winning elections. Surprisingly, mere simplicity as such seems largely ineffective.     

Comparison between Gudjonsson Suggestibility Scale 2 (GSS2) and Bonn Test of Statement Suggestibility (BTSS) in measuring children’s interrogative suggestibility

Susceptibility of children to leading questions and interrogative pressure is an important forensic issue. The most used techniques for assessing interrogative suggestibility are the Gudjonsson Suggestibility Scales (GSS) and the Bonn Test of Statement Suggestibility (BTSS). Apart from minor differences, the two tests, investigate the same dimensions: Yield, Shift, Immediate Recall, and Total Suggestibility. In this study, to investigate correlation measures for the corresponding variables in the two tests, we individually examined 84 children from the fourth and fifth grades (44 boys and 40 girls). All the participants completed the GSS2 the BTSS-1, the Vocabulary and the Similarity subtests of the WISC-R, and Raven’s Colored Progressive Matrices. No significant gender differences were observed for any of the variables studied. Comparison between the corresponding variables for the two tests showed a positive correlation. Yield and Total Suggestibility scores correlated negatively with the three cognitive variables. We conclude that although the two suggestibility scales measure analogous variables, the BTSS seems more suitable than the GSS2 for assessing a child’s suggestibility during police and forensic interviews.     

Rhetorics of Health Citizenship: Exploring Vernacular Critiques of Government’s Role in Supporting Healthy Living

This article explores how older adults negotiate and partially counter normative expectations of “health citizenship” that stress individual responsibility for maintaining health and preventing health problems. Based on interviews with 55 participants in Canada and the U.K. about what healthy living means to them in their everyday lives, we examine how the dominant discourse of personal responsibility in participants’ responses is counterpointed by a more muted, yet significant, alternative critical perspective on the relative roles and responsibilities of government and citizens in making healthy living possible. Drawing on Hauser’s (1999) concept of vernacular rhetoric along with recent theories of environmental citizenship, we analyze how participants exercise their civic-political judgment by using a logic of dissociation to argue that what government says about the importance of healthy living is incompatible with what government does to support citizens’ abilities to eat healthily and live actively. By deploying this technique of argumentation to address structural-political-economic dimensions of healthy living, participants enact, in modest ways, an alternative, critical-collective mode of health citizenship that complicates and, at least partially, disrupts neoliberal constructions of the individually responsible, “good” health citizen.