The experience of outsourcing transfer: implications for guidance and counselling

Outsourcing can involve the forced transfer of employees to another organisation. During or after the transfer they may find their jobs have changed or go through a process of downsizing. They also often have to maintain a relationship with their previous employer as they continue to work on joint projects. In this paper we review relevant research literature and identify important psychological and organisational processes involved in this process, which are of specific interest to guidance and counselling. We also present data from a longitudinal research study in which employees undergoing an outsourcing transfer discussed their experiences. A number of these employees required career counselling and some were undergoing psychological counselling to reduce depression and anxiety. In conclusion, we summarise important issues to be considered by the counsellor when advising individuals going through this process.     

Spirituality and transformation in a community-based group in the Bahamas

Understanding the specific contexts where spirituality may or may not be helpful has been identified as a priority in spirituality and health research. The study aims were to clarify the helpfulness of spirituality and the interrelationships among transformation, spirituality, and forgiveness in this community-based group offered in a societal context of violence. Sixteen group participants from the Bahamas were selected and interviewed. Nine participants were female (56%); 75% identified as Black and 25% identified as White/Caucasian. NVivo 11 software was used. Transformation and spirituality themes were prevalent: themes related to prayer, group connection, and compassion were prominent. Selected spirituality themes were proximal to transformation themes, particularly forgiving others. The group process themes were closely linked to transformation themes. Participants noted that modelling by the group provided support for them to forgive and change. These findings may inform future efforts to intervene in communities experiencing violence and societal fragmentation.     

The influence of divided attention on holistic face perception.

There is evidence that upright, but not inverted, faces are encoded holistically. The holistic coding of faces was examined in four experiments by manipulating the attention allocated to target faces. In Experiment 1, participants in a divided attention condition were asked to match two upright flanker faces while encoding a centrally presented upright target face. Although holistic coding was evident in the full attention conditions, dividing attention disrupted holistic coding of target faces. In Experiment 2, we found that while matching upright flanker faces disrupted holistic coding, matching inverted flanker faces did not. Experiment 3 demonstrated that the differential effects of flanker orientation were not due to participants taking longer to match upright, than inverted, flanker faces. In Experiment 4, we found that matching fractured faces had an intermediate effect to that of matching upright and inverted flankers, on the holistic coding of the target faces. The findings emphasize the differences in processing of upright, fractured and inverted faces and suggest that there are limitations in the number of faces that can be holistically coded in a brief time.     

The role of metacognitive beliefs in auditory hallucinations

The mechanisms contributing to the occurrence of auditory hallucinations have not been fully described, although many researchers agree that they may result from some type of misattributed cognitive event. A number of authors have shown that this misattribution may be influenced by ‘top down' processes such as beliefs and expectations. This type of cognitive bias has also been implicated in other psychological disorders. One area of focus, particularly within the anxiety disorders, has been on metacognitive beliefs and their role in the occurrence and maintenance of symptoms. Metacognitive beliefs have not been widely investigated in psychosis and tools to investigate them have not been developed. In this study, a metacognitions questionnaire [MCQ; Cartwright-Hatton, S., & Wells, A. (1997). Journal of Anxiety Disorders, 11(3),279–296.] (previously used with anxiety disorders) was modified and used to assess metacognitive beliefs with schizophrenic patients. Metacognitive beliefs were compared between schizophrenic patients who were currently experiencing auditory hallucinations and schizophrenic patients who had never had hallucinations. A group of patients with anxiety disorders and a group of non-patients were used as controls. Hallucinating and non-hallucinating schizophrenics scored significantly higher than both the non-patient group and the anxiety patient group on the amount to which they believed their thoughts should be consistent with each other. Hallucinators and anxiety controls had significantly lower confidence in their cognitive processes than non-hallucinating schizophrenics and normal controls. The significance of these findings are discussed in relation to the literature on cognitive processes in hallucinations.     

Interpersonal Moral Conflicts Between Couples: Effects of Type of Dilemma, Role, and Partner's Judgments on Level of Moral Reasoning and Probability of Resolution

Forty-two male–female couples completed Kohlberg's test of moral development and made moral judgments about the most recent interpersonal moral conflict they had experienced in their everyday lives. Participants made lower stage moral judgments about their interpersonal moral conflicts than about the dilemmas on Kohlberg's test. The type of interpersonal moral conflict participants experienced and their role in the conflict were related to the types of moral judgments they made. Participants who reported philosophical conflicts made more mature moral judgments than participants who reported antisocial conflicts, especially if their role in the antisocial conflict was that of a transgressor. Conflicts were most likely to be resolved when partners' moral judgments about their conflict were similar in moral maturity. The implications of these findings for models of moral judgment are discussed.     

Are average and symmetric faces attractive to infants? Discrimination and looking preferences

Young infants prefer to look at faces that adults find attractive, suggesting a biological basis for some face preferences. However, the basis for infant preferences is not known. Adults find average and symmetric faces attractive. We examined whether 5-8-month-old infants discriminate between different levels of averageness and symmetry in faces, and whether they prefer to look at faces with higher levels of these traits. Each infant saw 24 pairs of female faces. Each pair consisted of two versions of the same face differing either in averageness (12 pairs) or symmetry (12 pairs). Data from the mothers confirmed that adults preferred the more average and more symmetric versions in each pair. The infants were sensitive to differences in both averageness and symmetry, but showed no looking preference for the more average or more symmetric versions. On the contrary, longest looks were significantly longer for the less average versions, and both longest looks and first looks were marginally longer for the less symmetric versions. Mean looking times were also longer for the less average and less symmetric versions, but those differences were not significant. We suggest that the infant looking behaviour may reflect a novelty preference rather than an aesthetic preference.     

ATC-lab: An air traffic control simulator for the laboratory

Air Traffic Control Laboratory Simulator (ATC-lab) is a new low- and medium-fidelity task environment that simulates air traffic control. ATC-lab allows the researcher to study human performance of tasks under tightly controlled experimental conditions in a dynamic, spatial environment. The researcher can create standardized air traffic scenarios by manipulating a wide variety of parameters. These include temporal and spatial variables. There are two main versions of ATC-lab. The medium-fidelity simulator provides a simplified version of en route air traffic control, requiring participants to visually search a screen and both recognize and resolve conflicts so that adequate separation is maintained between all aircraft. The low-fidelity simulator presents pairs of aircraft in isolation, controlling the participant’s focus of attention, which provides a more systematic measurement of conflict recognition and resolution performance. Preliminary studies have demonstrated that ATC-lab is a flexible tool for applied cognition research.     

Motion, flash, and flicker: a unified spatiotemporal model of perceived edge sharpening

Blurred edges appear sharper in motion than when they are stationary. We proposed a model of this motion sharpening that invokes a local, nonlinear contrast transducer function (Hammett et al, 1998 Vision Research 38 2099-2108). Response saturation in the transducer compresses or 'clips' the input spatial waveform, rendering the edges as sharper. To explain the increasing distortion of drifting edges at higher speeds, the degree of nonlinearity must increase with speed or temporal frequency. A dynamic contrast gain control before the transducer can account for both the speed dependence and approximate contrast invariance of motion sharpening (Hammett et al, 2003 Vision Research, in press). We show here that this model also predicts perceived sharpening of briefly flashed and flickering edges, and we show that the model can account fairly well for experimental data from all three modes of presentation (motion, flash, and flicker). At moderate durations and lower temporal frequencies the gain control attenuates the input signal, thus protecting it from later compression by the transducer. The gain control is somewhat sluggish, and so it suffers both a slow onset, and loss of power at high temporal frequencies. Consequently, brief presentations and high temporal frequencies of drift and flicker are less protected from distortion, and show greater perceptual sharpening.     

National personality characteristics: II. Adaption-innovation in Canadian,American, and British samples

On the Kirton Adaption-Innovation Inventory 1,106 Canadians scored as more adaptive than American and British standardization samples. Means for Canadian females and males were congruent with those in national samples from six other countries.