Job stressors, emotional exhaustion, and need for recovery: A multi-source study on the benefits of psychological detachment

This paper examines psychological detachment (i.e., mentally “switching off”) from work during non-work time as a partial mediator between job stressors and low work-home boundaries on the one hand and strain reactions (emotional exhaustion, need for recovery) on the other hand. Survey data were collected from a sample of protestant pastors (N = 136) and their spouses (N = 97). Analyses showed that high workload, emotional dissonance, and low spatial work-home boundaries were related to poor psychological detachment from work during non-work time. Poor psychological detachment in turn predicted high levels of emotional exhaustion and need for recovery. Psychological detachment was a partial mediator between job stressors and strain reactions. This study avoids same-source bias and demonstrates the importance of psychological detachment in the stressor–strain relationship.     

Spatial inattention abolishes voice adaptation

Adaptation to male voices causes a subsequent voice to be perceived as more female, and vice versa. Similar contrastive aftereffects have been reported for phonetic perception, and in vision for face perception. However, while aftereffects in the perception of phonetic features of speech have been reported to persist even when adaptors were processed inattentively, face aftereffects were previously reported to be abolished by inattention to adaptors. Here we demonstrate that auditory aftereffects of adaptation to voice gender are eliminated when the male and female adaptor voices are spatially unattended. Participants simultaneously heard gender-specific male or female adaptor voices in one ear and gender-neutral (androgynous) adaptor voices in the contralateral ear. They selectively attended to the adaptor voices in a designated ear, by either classifying voice gender (Exp. 1) or spoken syllable (Exp. 2). Voice aftereffects were found only if the gender-specific voices were spatially attended, suggesting capacity limits in the processing of voice gender for the unattended ear. Remarkably, gender-specific adaptors in the attended ear elicited comparable aftereffects in test voices, regardless of prior attention to voice gender or phonetic content. Thus, within the attended ear, voice gender was processed even when it was irrelevant for the task at hand, suggesting automatic processing of gender along with linguistic information. Overall, voice gender adaptation requires spatial, but not dimensional, selective attention.     

At the boundaries of automaticity: negation as reflective operation

The present research investigated whether automatic social-cognitive skills are based on the same representations and processes as their controlled counterparts. Using the cognitive task of negating valence, the authors demonstrate that enhanced practice in negating the valence of a stimulus can lead to changes in the underlying associative representation. However, procedural, rule-based components of negations were generally unaffected by practice (Experiments 1-3). Moreover, negations of evaluative stimuli did not influence automatic evaluative responses to these stimuli, unless the negation was included in the associative representation of a stimulus (Experiments 4-6). These results suggest that some practice-related skill improvements are limited to conditions in which a general procedure can be substituted by the retrieval of results of previous applications from associative memory. Implications for research on automaticity and social cognition are discussed.     

A field examination of two measures of work motivation as predictors of leaders' influence tactics

The authors tested 2 motivation measures, the Motivation Sources Inventory (MSI; J. E. Barbuto & R. W. Scholl, 1998) and the Job Choice Decision-Making Exercise (A. M. Harrell & M. J. Stahl, 1981) as predictors of leaders' influence tactics. The authors sampled 219 leader-member dyads from a variety of organizations and communities throughout the central United States. Results strongly favored the MSI as a predictor of influence tactics. Limitations of the study include low power of relationships, sample size as limited by the research design, and education levels of participants. Future researchers should use larger and more diverse samples and test other relevant antecedents of leaders' behaviors.     

Higher-Order Contingentism,Part 1: Closure and Generation

This paper is a study of higher-order contingentism – the view, roughly, that it is contingent what properties and propositions there are. We explore the motivations for this view and various ways in which it might be developed, synthesizing and expanding on work by Kit Fine, Robert Stalnaker, and Timothy Williamson. Special attention is paid to the question of whether the view makes sense by its own lights, or whether articulating the view requires drawing distinctions among possibilities that, according to the view itself, do not exist to be drawn. The paper begins with a non-technical exposition of the main ideas and technical results, which can be read on its own. This exposition is followed by a formal investigation of higher-order contingentism, in which the tools of variable-domain intensional model theory are used to articulate various versions of the view, understood as theories formulated in a higher-order modal language. Our overall assessment is mixed: higher-order contingentism can be fleshed out into an elegant systematic theory, but perhaps only at the cost of abandoning some of its original motivations.