Diakonia Trinitatis Dei as/and Transformational Development

The paper acknowledges that different agencies acting against poverty and participating in poverty alleviation use different languages, for example, diakonia versus development and transformational development, while dealing with the same issues. Against the background of poverty in South Africa as well as development policies from South Africa, this paper discusses the importance of diakonia as founded in the trinitarian God, Father, Son, and Spirit. Using a missional paradigm, the paper discusses the missio Dei as it unites with the covenant, forgiveness, empowerment, and to make God known. The paper concludes that although diakonia has a more holistic and comprehensive approach, it is important to use language which is generally understood and accepted. It therefore suggests using the term “transformational development” to educate society about the concept of diakonia.     

Effects of redundant auditory stimuli on reaction time

Auditory redundancy gains were assessed in two experiments in which a simple reaction time task was used. In each trial, an auditory stimulus was presented to the left ear, to the right ear, or simultaneously to both ears. The physical difference between auditory stimuli presented to the two ears was systematically increased across experiments. No redundancy gains were observed when the stimuli were identical pure tones or pure tones of different frequencies (Experiment 1). A clear redundancy gain and evidence of coactivation were obtained, however, when one stimulus was a pure tone and the other was white noise (Experiment 2). Experiment 3 employed a two-alternative forced choice localization task and provided evidence that dichotically presented pure tones of different frequencies are apparently integrated into a single percept, whereas a pure tone and white noise are not fused. The results extend previous findings of redundancy gains and coactivation with visual and bimodal stimuli to the auditory modality. Furthermore, at least within this modality, the results indicate that redundancy gains do not emerge when redundant stimuli are integrated into a single percept.     

Young children know that trying is not pretending: a test of the "behaving-as-if" construal of children's early concept of pretense

In 3 studies, young children were tested for their understanding of pretend actions. In Studies 1 and 2, pairs of superficially similar behaviors were presented to 26- and 36-month-old children in an imitation game. In one case the behavior was marked as trying (signs of effort), and in the other case as pretending (signs of playfulness). Three-year-olds, and to some degree 2-year-olds, performed the real action themselves (or tried to really perform it) after the trying model, whereas after the pretense model, they only pretended. Study 3 ruled out a simple mimicking explanation by showing that children not only imitated differentially but responded differentially with appropriate productive pretending to pretense models and with appropriate productive tool use to trying models. The findings of the 3 studies demonstrate that by 2 to 3 years of age, children have a concept of pretense as a specific type of intentional activity.     

Redundancy gain for semantic features

In a go/no-go experiment, semantic redundancy gain was assessed for responses to single written words. Specifically, we asked participants to respond only to words whose meaning matched at least one semantic target feature—that is, the target category (e.g., animal), the target color (e.g., gray), or both. On redundant-target trials, the word (e.g., elephant) matched both semantic target features (i.e., gray and animal). On single-target trials, the word (e.g., beaver) matched one target feature (i.e., animal) and a nontarget feature (i.e., brown). We observed shorter reaction times in the redundant-target condition than in the faster single-target condition. Hence, the present study provides the first evidence that redundancy gain is not limited to responses to redundant proximal stimulus features but can also be observed for responses to semantic feature information.     

Young at heart,old at work? Relations between age, (meta-)stereotypes,self-categorization,and retirement attitudes

The aims of this study were to examine how workers' negative age stereotypes (i.e., denying older workers' ability to develop) and negative meta-stereotypes (i.e., beliefs that the majority of colleagues feel negative about older workers) are related to their attitudes towards retirement (i.e., occupational future time perspective and intention to retire), and whether the strength of these relationships is influenced by workers' self-categorization as an “older” person. Results of a study among Dutch taxi drivers provided mixed support for the hypotheses. Negative meta-stereotypes, but not negative age stereotypes, were associated with fewer perceived opportunities until retirement and, in turn, a stronger intention to retire. Self-categorization moderated the relationships between negative age (meta-)stereotypes and occupational future time perspective. However, contrary to expectations, the relations were stronger among workers with a low self-categorization as an older person in comparison with workers with a high self-categorization in this regard. Overall, results highlight the importance of psychosocial processes in the study of retirement intentions and their antecedents.     

The role of consolidation for perceptual learning in temporal discrimination within and across modalities

Training people on temporal discrimination can substantially improve performance in the trained modality but also in untrained modalities. A pretest–training–posttest design was used to investigate whether consolidation plays a crucial role for training effects within the trained modality and its transfer to another modality. In the pretest, both auditory and visual discrimination performance was assessed. In the training phase, participants performed only the auditory task. After a consolidation interval of either 5 min or 24 h, participants were again tested in both the auditory and visual tasks. Irrespective of the consolidation interval, performance improved from the pretest to the posttest in both modalities. Most importantly, the training effect for the trained auditory modality was independent of the consolidation interval whereas the transfer effect to the visual modality was larger after 24 h than after 5 min. This finding shows that transfer effects benefit from extended consolidation.     

Micro-breaks matter: A diary study on the effects of energy management strategies on occupational well-being

Organizational researchers and practitioners are increasingly interested in self-regulatory strategies employees can use at work to sustain or improve their occupational well-being. A recent cross-sectional study on energy management strategies suggested that many work-related strategies (e.g., setting a new goal) are positively related to occupational well-being, whereas many micro-breaks (e.g., listening to music) are negatively related to occupational well-being. We used a diary study design to take a closer look at the effects of these energy management strategies on fatigue and vitality. Based on conservation of resources theory, we hypothesized that both types of energy management strategies negatively predict fatigue and positively predict vitality. Employees (N = 124) responded to a baseline survey and to hourly surveys across one work day (6.7 times on average). Consistent with previous research, between-person differences in the use of work-related strategies were positively associated with between-person differences in vitality. However, results of multilevel analyses of the hourly diary data showed that only micro-breaks negatively predicted fatigue and positively predicted vitality. These findings suggest that taking micro-breaks during the work day may have short-term effects on occupational well-being, whereas using work-related strategies may have long-term effects.     

Within-person relationships between daily individual and job characteristics and daily manifestations of career adaptability

Previous research showed that daily manifestations of career adaptability fluctuate within individuals over short periods of time, and predict important daily job and career outcomes. Using a quantitative daily diary study design (N = 156 employees; 591 daily entries), the author investigated daily job characteristics (i.e., daily job demands, daily job autonomy, and daily supervisory career mentoring) and daily individual characteristics (i.e., daily Big Five personality characteristics, daily core self-evaluations, and daily temporal focus) as within-person predictors of daily career adaptability and its four dimensions (concern, control, curiosity, and confidence). Results showed that daily job demands, daily job autonomy, daily conscientiousness, daily openness to experience, as well as daily past and future temporal focus positively predicted daily career adaptability. Differential results emerged for the four career adaptability dimensions. Implications for future research on within-person variability in career adaptability are discussed.