Hardiness Promotes Work Engagement,Prevents Burnout,and Moderates Their Relationship

We examined the relationships between hardiness, work engagement, and burnout. Participants were Belgian service members involved in the International Security and Assistance Force (ISAF) operation. They completed a questionnaire containing hardiness items from the revised Norwegian Hardiness Scale, items concerning vigor and dedication from the Utrecht Work Engagement Scale, and those tapping cynicism and emotional exhaustion from the Utrecht Burnout Scale. Results showed that hardiness was positively related to dedication and vigor, and negatively to cynicism and emotional exhaustion. Our results further suggest that work engagement and burnout are the opposite ends of a continuum. However, analyses concerning the moderation effect of hardiness suggest that individual differences could imply different processes in the relationship between work engagement and burnout.     

Criminal victimisation fosters conservatism among people living in areas with high unemployment rates: A multilevel longitudinal study

Using a multilevel, longitudinal model, we tested the mugging thesis, which states that ‘a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged’, in a national sample of Italians (N = 457, nested in 54 counties) surveyed four times between October 2002 and January 2007. We predicted participants' increase in conservatism as a function of the cross‐level interactions between criminal victimisation on the one hand and the unemployment and the crime rates for their areas of residence on the other. Conservatism increased among victimised participants living in areas characterised by high unemployment rates, but not among those living in areas with low unemployment rates. The cross‐level interaction between victimisation and crime rate did not influence our dependent variable. The strengths, implications and limitations of this research are discussed. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Disentangling the Effects of Applicant Defensive Impression Management Tactics in Job Interviews

This study explores (1) the effects that three kinds of applicant defensive impression management (IM) tactics (apologies, justifications, and excuses) have on interviewer evaluation and (2) the moderating effects that two types of interviewer negative concerns (competence‐related and integrity‐related concerns) have on the aforementioned relationship. Two hundred and one managers from Taiwan participated in this study by watching a simulated interview. Compared with the control group, applicants using defensive IM tactics received higher interviewer ratings when negative concerns surfaced. Moreover, the type of interviewer negative concern moderated the effects of defensive IM tactics. All three tactics had similar effects on interviewer evaluation when the concern was competence related. Apology was, however, the most effective tactic when the concern was integrity related.     

Faces are special for newly hatched chicks: evidence for inborn domain‐specific mechanisms underlying spontaneous preferences for face‐like stimuli

It is currently being debated whether human newborns’ preference for faces is due to an unlearned, domain‐specific and configural representation of the appearance of a face, or to general mechanisms, such as an up‐down bias (favouring top‐heavy stimuli, which have more elements in their upper part). Here we show that 2‐day‐old domestic chicks, visually naïve for the arrangement of inner facial features, spontaneously prefer face‐like, schematic, stimuli. This preference is maintained when the up‐down bias is controlled for (Experiment1) or when put in direct conflict with facedness (Experiment 4). In contrast, we found no evidence for the presence of an up‐down bias in chicks (Experiment 2). Moreover, our results indicate that the eye region of stimuli is crucial in determining the expression of spontaneous preferences for faces (Experiments 3 and 4).     

Bystanders' reactions towards co‐punishment events in the Taiwanese military: Examining the moderating effects of organizational norms

The present study examined bystanders' justice perceptions about co‐punishment events. In a sample of 169 logistic officers in the Taiwanese military, responsibility attributions (i.e. liability attributed to co‐punished persons) had a negative relationship with perceived harshness, and a positive relationship with perceived procedural justice. In addition, the effects of responsibility attributions on procedural justice were weaker if the person perceived stronger rather than weaker organizational norms of co‐punishment.     

Visual cues of motion that trigger animacy perception at birth: the case of self‐propulsion

Self‐propelled motion is a powerful cue that conveys information that an object is animate. In this case, animate refers to an entity's capacity to initiate motion without an applied external force. Sensitivity to this motion cue is present in infants that are a few months old, but whether this sensitivity is experience‐dependent or is already present at birth is unknown. Here, we tested newborns to examine whether predispositions to process self‐produced motion cues underlying animacy perception were present soon after birth. We systematically manipulated the onset of motion by self‐propulsion (Experiment 1) and the change in trajectory direction in the presence or absence of direct contact with an external object (Experiments 2 and 3) to investigate how these motion cues determine preference in newborns. Overall, data demonstrated that, at least at birth, the self‐propelled onset of motion is a crucial visual cue that allowed newborns to differentiate between self‐ and non‐self‐propelled objects (Experiment 1) because when this cue was removed, newborns did not manifest any visual preference (Experiment 2), even if they were able to discriminate between the stimuli (Experiment 3). To our knowledge, this is the first study aimed at identifying sensitivity in human newborns to the most basic and rudimentary motion cues that reliably trigger perceptions of animacy in adults. Our findings are compatible with the hypothesis of the existence of inborn predispositions to visual cues of motion that trigger animacy perception in adults.     

WOMEN'S HERITAGE IN PSYCHOLOGY

The American Psychological Association's Centennial provides a unique opportunity to celebrate, preserve, and interpret women's heritage in the origins and development of psychology. This special issue documents women's contributions to, and the impact of feminist critiques on, the discipline of psychology and its organizations. The articles in this special issue demonstrate how psychological theories and practice, research methods, and interpretation of data are embedded in social, political, and historical contexts. Moreover, they document how feminist critiques have challenged traditional assumptions about knowledge and served as a catalyst for the transformation of psychological theories, methods, and practice—a transformation that has just begun.     

Spacing effects in recognition memory: When meaning matters

The present study showed that using incidental learning tasks promoting structural/perceptual processing of targets it is possible to obtain a reliable spacing effect for nonwords in a yes/no recognition memory task, whereas no spacing effect is detected for words. These data are, collectively, incompatible with current theories of spacing effects. A theoretical proposal to account for these findings is outlined.     

Integration of base rates and new information in an abstract hypothesis‐testing task

In two studies, we investigated how people use base rates and the presence versus the absence of new information to judge which of two hypotheses is more likely. Participants were given problems based on two decks of cards printed with 0–4 letters. A table showed the relative frequencies of the letters on the cards within each deck. Participants were told the letters that were printed on or absent from a card the experimenter had drawn. Base rates were conveyed by telling participants that the experimenter had chosen the deck by drawing from an urn containing, in different proportions, tickets marked either ‘deck 1’ or ‘deck 2’. The task was to judge from which of the two decks the card was most likely drawn. Prior probabilities and the evidential strength of the subset of present clues (computed as ‘weight of evidence’) were the only significant predictors of participants’ dichotomous (both studies) and continuous (Study 2) judgments. The evidential strength of all clues was not a significant predictor of participants’ judgments in either study, and no significant interactions emerged. We discuss the results as evidence for additive integration of base rates and the new present information in hypothesis testing.     

Correlates of Suicidal Ideation in Physically Injured Trauma Survivors

Epidemiologic studies have documented that injury survivors are at increased risk for suicide. We evaluated 206 trauma survivors to examine demographic, clinical, and injury characteristics associated with suicidal ideation during hospitalization and across 1 year. Results indicate that mental health functioning, depression symptoms, and history of mental health services were associated with suicidal ideation in the hospital; being a parent was a protective factor. Pre‐injury posttraumatic stress disorder symptoms, assaultive injury mechanism, injury‐related legal proceedings, and physical pain were significantly associated with suicidal ideation across 1 year. Readily identifiable risk factors early after traumatic injury may inform hospital‐based screening and intervention procedures.