Morale and Job Satisfaction Among Nurses: What Can Hospitals Do?

In an attempt to account for morale and job satisfaction among 314 nurses, this study investigated the influence of work-related and interpersonal variables. Morale on the unit was directly related to supervisor support, co-worker relationships, and work recognition. Personal morale was accounted for by recognition, physical environment, the job itself, and pay. Job satisfaction was predicted by personal morale, work commitment, job clarity, work pressure, and innovation. Suggestions for improving nurse morale and job satisfaction are made.     

Effect of Server Posture on Restaurant Tipping1

The effect of server posture (standing vs. squatting) on the size of tip left by restaurant customers was examined in two naturalistic experiments. In these studies, squatting down next to the tables increased servers’ tips from those tables. Both the practical implications of this effect and its similarity to other nonverbal effects on tipping are discussed.     

Literalism as a marker of hypnotic "trance": disconfirming evidence

The responses given by highly hypnotizable, hypnotic subjects and those of unhypnotizable subjects who simulated hypnosis to questions of the type, "Do you mind telling me your name?" and "Do you mind standing up?" were contrasted. The purpose was to examine Erickson's (1980) assertion that literalism (answering "yes" or "no" verbally or nonverbally without any cognitive elaboration) is a marker of hypnotic "trance." Simulators exhibited a greater rate of literalism than hypnotic "virtuosos" (i.e., extreme scorers on both group and individual hypnotizability measures). Hypnotized subjects and nonhypnotized subjects approached in the campus library responded comparably. Because less than a third of hypnotic virtuosos responded literally, our results strongly refuted Erickson's assertion that literalism is a cognitive feature of hypnosis.     

EXTENDED REDUCTIONS IN STEREOTYPIC BEHAVIOR OF STUDENTS WITH AUTISM THROUGH A SELF-MANAGEMENT TREATMENT PACKAGE

The literature suggests that self-management treatment packages have two potential strengths for the reduction or elimination of stereotypic behavior: (a) Self-management may be used for extended periods of time in the absence of a treatment provider, and (b) self-management techniques are easily adapated and used in a wide variety of natural settings. We assessed whether students with severe autistic disabilities could learn to use a self-management treatment package to reduce their stereotypic behavior within a multiple baseline across subjects design with withdrawals. The results showed that all of the students learned to use self-management procedures to reduce greatly levels of stereotypic behavior (typically to zero), and improvement occurred for extended periods of time in new settings without the presence of a treatment provider. The results are discussed in terms of the practical value of the treatment package and in terms of the implications for understanding autism.     

Brief report: Complex postformal thought in skilled research administrators

Expert research administrators responded to questions to determine to what degree they had postformal thinking skills. Postformal theory suggests that the interpersonal and institutional complexity of work roles would make them likely to exhibit postformal thought. The tests included a questionnaire about the use of postformal operations on the job, and thinking-aloud taped interviews of responses to job-related and standard postformal problems. The respondents demonstrated the use of postformal thinking operations on job-related tests and a more moderate degree of use on the standard problems. The results support prior research and our working hypothesis that a high degree of interaction with people and complex problems is associated with adults' postformal thought.     

Individual Differences in the Pursuit of Self-Uniqueness Through Consumption

In this paper, we report an original study of the relationships between self-attributed need for uniqueness and several consumer dispositions. The results indicate that the self-attributed need for uniqueness is related to consumers' desires for scarce, innovative, and customized products and to consumers' preferences for unusual shopping venues, but not to consumers' susceptibilities to normative influence. Moreover, we find that these relationships are mediated by a latent variable reflecting individual differences in the tendency to pursue uniqueness through consumption. The theoretical and practical implications of these results are discussed along with directions for future research.     

Inhibitory control over no-longer-relevant information: Adult age differences

Hartman and Hasher (1991) used a garden-path task in which younger and older adults generated the final word for each of a series of high-cloze sentences. Under instructions to remember the final word, the experiment included critical sentences for which the generated word was replaced by a new, to-be-remembered target. Using an implicit priming task, the first experiment replicated a basic finding: Younger adults showed priming only for the target words, whereas older adults showed priming for both the generated and target words. Two experiments explored boundary conditions. One showed that an additional sentence that interpreted the new target word enabled older adults to narrow access to only the target word. The provision of additional time following the introduction of the new target word did not. Specific information, not more time, is required for inefficient inhibitory mechanisms to clear the recent past from memory.     

Effects of Disaggregation on Managerial Assessment Center Validity

Assessment center validity data from a large, international petrochemical company were disaggregated by managerial level and business stream. As with previous research, the correlations were higher for the current job grade criterion than for performance ratings. Overall, disaggregating the data did not have the effect of increasing the assessment center—performance rating validities. However, when the validation data were disaggregated by business stream, there were differences in the pattern of the relationships between assessment factors and performance.     

EARLY CORTICAL INFLUENCES IN OBJECT SEGREGATION AND THE PERCEPTION OF SURFACE LIGHTNESS

Abstract— The apparent brightness of a surface is profoundly influenced by the brightness of an adjacent surface., but these contrast effects are reduced when the surface are perceived as separate three-dimensional entities. Previous work has suggested that high-level perceptual and cognitive processes involved in scence segmentation may be responsible for modifying a surface's appearance. We demonstrate large reductions in contrast effects when the sues available for segmentations are restricted to those that isolate separate groups of early cortical neurons in the visual system. Our data contradict standard contract-signaling models of brightness perception and imply that mechanisms of figure-ground segmentation are already available at low levels of visual processing.