Proactive Vitality Management,Work Engagement,and Creativity: The Role of Goal Orientation

This study tested the hypothesis that individuals can proactively manage their own energetic, affective, and cognitive resources in order to be creative at work. Building on proactivity and creativity literatures, we propose a theoretical model in which employees who proactively manage their vitality are more engaged in their work and show improved creative performance. We also tested the boundary conditions of this process. Participants were Dutch employees from various occupations who filled out a background questionnaire and five weekly surveys. The results of multilevel modelling analyses offered support for our model. Weekly proactive vitality management was positively related to changes in weekly creativity through changes in weekly work engagement. As predicted, learning goal orientation strengthened and performance goal orientation weakened the links between proactive vitality management and engagement, and between engagement and creativity. We discuss the theoretical contributions, and indicate how these findings can be used in daily working life.     

Four Dimensions of Criticism Against Gender-Fair Language

Sex Roles - The gender-neutral third-person pronoun singular hen was recently introduced in Swedish as a complement to she (hon) and he (han). The initiative to add hen initially received strong...     

Do dogs rescue their owners from a stressful situation? A behavioral and physiological assessment

Animal Cognition - Rescue behavior is considered a type of pro-social response, defined as a voluntary action directed to benefit another individual who is in a stressful or dangerous situation. In...     

Social citizenship and social psychology

This paper outlines the concept of social citizenship, which was first theorized in the late 1940s alongside the creation of the UK welfare state and concerns citizens' rights to a basic income and standard of living. It suggests that social citizenship—particularly welfare provision—is a useful and important topic for social psychological research, albeit one that has been largely overlooked. We provide an overview of key developments in social citizenship and consider the impact of 30‐plus years of neoliberal governance in Western democracies, which has resulted in ongoing changes to how welfare rights and responsibilities are configured, such as policies that make social citizenship rights contingent on conduct. We outline social scientific work that examines these shifting ideas of citizenship, personhood, welfare, and conditionality and make the case for a critical discursive psychological approach, which we illustrate with a brief empirical example. We suggest that critical discursive social psychology is particularly well‐placed to examine how psychological assumptions are built into both policy and lay discourse and how these can legitimate interventions designed to work on the conduct of the unemployed, such as therapeutic and behavior change initiatives. Finally, we argue that psychology is faced with a choice; while there are opportunities for the discipline to contribute to the design and implementation of such initiatives, to do so requires accepting the basic values of the underpinning neoliberal agenda. Instead, it is vital to place these assumptions under the critical microscope and explore how they work to obscure structural disadvantage.     

Marital interaction of agoraphobic women: a controlled,behavioral observation study

Married couples with a female agoraphobic spouse (n = 22) were compared with demographically similar community control couples (n = 21) on self-report and observational measures of marital interaction. Consistent with hypotheses, husbands of agoraphobic women were more critical of their wives than were control husbands, and clinical couples were less likely to engage in positive problem solution than control couples. Contrary to hypothesis, clinical husbands were not less supportive than control husbands. Where general measures of marital distress were concerned, clinical couples, relative to control couples, evinced more distress by self-report, by their higher rate of negative nonverbal behavior, and by their longer sequences of negative exchanges.     

Relations of psychological distress with objective individual,family, and neighborhood characteristics of urban adolescents

This paper describes the relations of psychological distress with 11 ecological factors (5 community, 4 family, and 2 individual) among 423 older urban adolescents who are predominantly people of color. Data were obtained by means of self-report via group-administered questionnaires given between 1994 and 1996; most scales are multi-item. There is wide variation in distress. There are very few statistically significant relationships between the ecological factors and distress, and those are negligible. Girls whose parents have less education and live in extended families have higher distress; family and individual domains are correlated .04 and .03 with distress and the community domain .00, so this ecological model accounts for a mere 7%, of the common total variance in distress.     

Depression and its relation to light deprivation

The absence or diminution of light is potentially an anxiety-arousing situation for, perhaps, all of us. Even a cursory look at the origin myths of many cultures reveals the chaotic, destructive, and dangerous aspects of darkness. Additionally, language reflects the same qualities metaphorically and symbolically. Developmentally, the arrival of the darkness of evening potentially signals object loss and ego regression. But factors other than ubiquitous references to a consideration of light and darkness are relevant. Can it be that we are all at least prone to depression due in part to this factor? Questions regarding possible biological causes of depression are perhaps unanswerable at this time. Is the seratonin level really associated with depression and light deprivation? Research is as yet inconclusive. If a relationship exists, another question must be asked: Will certain psychological situations affect a person's seratonin production? The answer to this question of how depression is associated with biological causes is certainly beyond the scope of this paper. Yet the preceding case history reveals at least some psychological causes of depression that were initially seen as biologically based. The SAD proponents would have treated Mr. B with light therapy. The quick solution of light therapy, based on a shaky theoretical base and lacking sturdy research, has too often replaced the psychoanalytic approach. In all too many situations psychoanalysts are being replaced by lightbulbs.     

Why misinformation is more likely to be recognised over time: A source monitoring account

Although memory for actual events tends to be forgotten over time, memory for misinformation tends to be retrieved at a stable rate over long delays or at a rate greater than that found immediately after encoding. To examine whether source monitoring errors contribute to this phenomenon, two experiments investigated subjects' memory for the source of misinformation at different retention intervals. Subjects viewed a slide presentation, read a narrative containing misinformation, and, either 10 minutes or 1 week later, completed a recognition test about details seen in the slides and about the source of these details. After the longer retention interval in both experiments, participants were more likely to agree that they had seen misleading information and were also more likely to incorrectly associate the misinformation with the slide event. Theoretical implications of these findings are considered.     

A model of dual attitudes

When an attitude changes from A1 to A2, what happens to A1? Most theories assume, at least implicitly, that the new attitude replaces the former one. The authors argue that a new attitude can override, but not replace, the old one, resulting in dual attitudes. Dual attitudes are defined as different evaluations of the same attitude object: an automatic, implicit attitude and an explicit attitude. The attitude that people endorse depends on whether they have the cognitive capacity to retrieve the explicit attitude and whether this overrides their implicit attitude. A number of literatures consistent with these hypotheses are reviewed, and the implications of the dual-attitude model for attitude theory and measurement are discussed. For example, by including only explicit measures, previous studies may have exaggerated the ease with which people change their attitudes. Even if an explicit attitude changes, an implicit attitude can remain the same.