When lending an ear turns into mistreatment: An episodic examination of leader mistreatment in response to venting at work

Venting—an emotion‐focused form of coping involving the discharge of negative feelings to others—is common in organizational settings. Venting may benefit the self via the release of negative emotion, or by acting as a catalyst for changes to problematic work situations. Nonetheless, venting might have unintended consequences via its influence on those who are the recipients of venting from others. In light of this idea, we provide a theoretical explanation for how leaders in particular are affected by venting receipt at work. Drawing from the transactional model of stress, we theorize that venting tends to be appraised as a threat, which triggers negative emotion that, in turn, potentiates deviant action tendencies (i.e., interpersonal mistreatment). Yet, our theory suggests that not all leaders necessarily experience venting in the same way. Specifically, leaders with higher need for cognition are less influenced by surface‐level cues associated with others’ emotional expressions and find challenging interpersonal situations to be less aversive, thereby attenuating the deleterious effects of receipt of venting. In an experience sampling study of 112 managers across 10 consecutive workdays, we find support for our theoretical model. Altogether, our findings provide insight into the costs incurred when leaders lend an ear to those who vent, which can result in negative downstream consequences.     

Longitudinal study of quality of life in acquired brain injury: A self- and proxy-report evaluation

Background/ObjectiveAfter an acquired brain injury (ABI), the person remains with several impairments and disabilities that cause a decrease in his/her quality of life (QoL), which could change over time. The objective of the study was to analyse the evolution patterns of QoL in a sample of persons with ABI for one-year as well as the differences in proxy- and self-report versions of a QoL instrument. Method: The sample comprised 402 persons with ABI with ages ranging between 18 and 91 years, whom 36.20% had had the accident recently (i.e., three years or less). Patients, professionals and relatives responded at three evaluation points to the CAVIDACE scale, an ABI-specific QoL tool. Results: ANOVAs showed an improvement in QoL in the two follow-ups; the improvement was especially significant in the period between baseline and six months. The respondent factor did not interact with the evaluation time, but significant differences were found between respondents, with scores of patients higher than that for proxies. Finally, the QoL’s evolution interacts with the time elapsed since injury, showing significant improvements in the most recent group (i.e., three years or less). Conclusions: QoL must be considered from the earliest moments after ABI to obtain more significant improvements.     

Attentional networks,vigilance, and distraction as a function of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder symptoms in an adult community sample

Attentional difficulties are a core axis in attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). However, establishing a consistent and detailed pattern of these neurocognitive alterations has not been an easy endeavour. Based on a dimensional approach to ADHD, the present study aims at comprehensively characterizing three key attentional domains: the three attentional networks (alerting, orienting, and executive attention), two components of vigilance (executive and arousal vigilance), and distraction. To do so, we modified a single, fine-grained task (the ANTI-Vea) by adding irrelevant distractors. One hundred and twenty undergraduates completed three self-reports of ADHD symptoms in childhood and adulthood and performed the ANTI-Vea. Despite the low reliability of some ANTI-Vea indexes, the task worked successfully. While ADHD symptoms in childhood were related to alerting network and arousal vigilance, symptoms in adulthood were linked to executive vigilance. No association between ADHD symptom severity and executive attention and distraction was found. In general, our hypotheses about the relationships between ADHD symptoms and attentional processes were partially supported. We discuss our findings according to ADHD theories and attention measurement.     

Personal Belief in a Just World and Conscientiousness: A meta-analysis,facet-level examination,and mediation model

Extensive research efforts have been devoted to understanding the nature of Conscientiousness, the only Big Five personality trait that has been robustly linked to professional achievement and longevity. We proposed that Conscientiousness is associated with Personal Belief in a Just World (PBJW), that is, the extent to which an individual believes that her or his efforts will be rewarded. To investigate this proposition, we undertook a meta-analysis synthesizing past findings regarding the relationship between PBJW and Conscientiousness; we confirmed a positive relationship between the two constructs (r = .16) based on 17 samples and 5,810 individuals. We further proposed a theoretical framework linking PBJW to specific facets of Conscientiousness. A survey of a representative sample of the US population (n = 311) confirmed that PBJW is positively correlated with the specific facets of Self-efficacy, Achievement-striving, and Self-discipline. Internal Locus of Control mediated these associations, elucidating the underlying processes linking PBJW and Conscientiousness.     

Successfully Contesting the Policy Sphere: Examining Through the Press a Case of Local Protests Changing New Ecological Laws

It is crucial to gain better insights into how psychosocial processes can limit the power of the political/legislative sphere for promoting social change through new laws. One form of accomplishing this is by illuminating the arguments and the content and value of social representations at play in cases in which the public sphere succeeds in contesting new laws. In this article, we explore a case of successful resistance to new ecological laws in a Portuguese Natura site. The laws, restricting recreational fishing, were made less stringent after meeting with local opposition. Content analysis of 122 articles published from 2006 to 2014 in regional and national newspapers reveals that protestors (fishermen, local authorities) received higher visibility and support and had more direct voice than the political sphere in both presses. Dialogical analysis of direct quotations of protestors shows how they seek legitimacy by establishing common ground with valued representations, vividly invoking people‐place bonds and tradition, and also how they attempt to undermine the law's legitimacy by linking local and national concerns, avoiding (potentially devalued) “Nimby” (“not in my backyard”) arguments. The discussion highlights what can be learned from using the press to investigate policy struggles that successfully organized their argumentation to contest new laws.     

Naming speed as a predictive diagnostic measure in reading and attentional problems

This study aimed to describe and compare naming speed abilities in children diagnosed with either Reading Learning Difficulties (RLD) or Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), or comorbidity for both (ADHD+RLD). To examine the explanatory power of naming speed and ADHD symptomatology in predicting group associations (while controlling for gender and age), the “Rapid Automatized Naming and Rapid Alternating Stimulus Tests” (RAN/RAS) were utilized. A sample of 101 children (age range = 5–16 years) was divided into four groups: RLD (n = 14), ADHD (n = 28), comorbid (n = 19), and control (n = 40). There were statistically significant differences in RAN/RAS results among the diagnostic groups. Moreover, discriminant analysis revealed that naming speed tasks significantly predicted reading and attentional problems, especially at earlier ages. These results demonstrate the potential usefulness of RAN/RAS in the diagnosis of reading and attentional problems, particularly if the children are aged from 5 to 9.     

Differential aversive learning enhances orientation discrimination

A number of recent studies have documented rapid changes in behavioural sensory acuity induced by aversive learning in the olfactory and auditory modalities. The effect of aversive learning on the discrimination of low-level features in the visual system of humans remains unclear. Here, we used a psychophysical staircase procedure to estimate discrimination thresholds for oriented grating stimuli, before and after differential aversive learning. We discovered that when a target grating orientation was conditioned with an aversive loud noise, it subsequently led to an improvement of discrimination acuity in nearly all subjects. However, no such change was observed in a control group conditioned to an orientation shifted by ±90° from the target. Our findings cannot be explained by contextual learning or sensitisation factors. The results converge with those reported in the olfactory modality and provide further evidence that early sensory systems can be rapidly modified by recently experienced reinforcement histories.     

Are brand names special words? Letter visual-similarity affects the identification of brand names,but not common words

Brand names are often considered a special type of words of special relevance to examine the role of visual codes during reading: unlike common words, brand names are typically presented with the same letter-case configuration (e.g., IKEA, adidas). Recently, Pathak et al. (European Journal of Marketing, 2019, 53 , 2109) found an effect of visual similarity for misspelled brand names when the participants had to decide whether the brand name was spelled correctly or not (e.g., tacebook [baseword: facebook] was responded more slowly and less accurately than xacebook). This finding is at odds with both orthographically based visual-word recognition models and prior experiments using misspelled common words (e.g., viotin [baseword: violin ] is identified as fast as viocin ). To solve this puzzle, we designed two experiments in which the participants had to decide whether the presented item was written correctly. In Experiment 1, following a procedure similar to Pathak et al. (European Journal of Marketing, 2019, 53 , 2109), we examined the effect of visual similarity on misspelled brand names with/without graphical information (e.g., anazon vs. atazon [baseword: amazon ]). Experiment 2 was parallel to Experiment 1, but we focused on misspelled common words (e.g., anarillo vs. atarillo ; baseword: amarillo [yellow in Spanish]). Results showed a sizeable effect of visual similarity on misspelled brand names – regardless of their graphical information, but not on misspelled common words. These findings suggest that visual codes play a greater role when identifying brand names than common words. We examined how models of visual-word recognition can account for this dissociation.     

Attentional Processing of Threat in Bipolar Disorder: Going Beyond Mood-Congruency

Emotional processing in bipolar disorder (BD) entails a complex attentional pattern not merely restricted to happy or sad biases, but also directed towards threatening information. This study examined threat-related bias on attentional orienting when participants were not instructed about the presentation of emotional stimuli (i.e., implicit instructions). An emotional dot-probe task in which an emotional face (i.e., threat, sad, happy) is simultaneously displayed with a neutral face was applied to BD individuals in their different episodes: mania (n?=?26), depression (n?=?24), and euthymia (n?=?28) as well as to a group of healthy controls (n?=?28). Symptomatic BD patients (i.e., in a manic or depressive episode) showed an attentional orienting bias toward threatening faces but not for happy or sad faces, while euthymic BD patients did not exhibit any attentional bias for emotional stimuli. A bias toward happy faces was found in the control group. Threat-related bias was not related to the severity of affective and anxiety symptoms in BD. When attention is not explicitly directed to emotional information, threat-related bias may characterize attentional orienting during mania and depression, but may be attenuated during euthymia.

     

Examining Direct and Indirect Mechanisms of Parental Influences on Youth Physical Activity and Body Mass Index

Journal of Child and Family Studies - This study used social cognitive theory to compare the direct versus indirect effects of parent physical activity, sedentary behavior, and body mass index...