Behavioral Consequences of Exposure to Uncontrollable and Unpredictable Noise1

A laboratory experiment was conducted to investigate behavioral consequences of exposure to high-intensity predictable and unpredictable noise, under conditions where subjects believed or did not believe they had control over noise termination. Subjects were a group of men and women, averaging 50 years of age, who had lived in an urban environment for most of their lives. Results showed that the work of adapting to uncontrollable, in contrast to controllable noise, produced greater performance impairments following termination of the noise. Predictable noise had minimal effects on postadaptive performance, even though subjects could not control its offset. Comparisons of these data with previous findings reported by the authors indicated that people living in urban settings for long periods of time show essentially the same negative consequences of noise adaptation as those living in cities for shorter durations.     

Why do employees undertake creative action?

There is much research identifying factors that lead to a creative outcome, but little on what leads employees to begin the creative process in the first place. This research used semi‐structured interviews with 65 engineers to explore the factors and processes involved in this phenomenon. We found that general work motivation, creativity requirements, cultural support for creativity, time resources, and autonomy were all used as cues in deciding whether undertaking creative action would be worthwhile via judgmental processes of expectancy and instrumentality. We also discovered overlaps with the cognate literatures of organizational citizenship and proactivity and explore these in discussing new areas for research.     

Visual identity and uncertainty in repetition blindness

Repetition blindness (RB) was investigated in 6 experiments. In the first 3 experiments participants detected vowel targets in 11-letter sequences. When all letters were uppercase, detection was poorer for same (e.g., AA) than for different (e.g., AO) targets. However, when one target was uppercase and the other lowercase, RB was found only for targets visually identical except for size (e.g., Oo), not for visually different pairs (e.g., Aa). Experiment 4 found RB for visually identical versus different consonant-vowel-consonant words. Experiments 5 and 6 replicated Kanwisher's (1987) experiment in which RB was insensitive to word case but revealed these effects to be artifacts of poor recognition of 5-letter words coupled with a biased guessing strategy. Overall, these experiments found RB only at a low level of visual information processing.     

The relationship among positive emotional dispositions,career adaptability,and satisfaction in Italian high school students

Using a sample of 242 Italian high school students, we examined the direct relation of hope and optimism on four dimensions of career adaptability (i.e. curiosity, confidence, control, and concern) as well as the mediating effect of these four adaptability dimensions on the relations of hope and optimism on the subcomponents of satisfaction. The results of the study demonstrated that both hope and optimism significantly predicted various dimensions of career adaptability. Additionally, the degree to which hope related to students' subcomponents of satisfaction was mediated by two of the four dimensions of career adaptability (i.e. curiosity and confidence). The dimensions of adaptability did not mediate the relations of optimism on satisfaction. These findings have implications for both research and practice.     

Against the Indifference Hypothesis: The Holocaust and the Enthusiasts for Murder

This essay takes issue with what is known as the "indifference" hypothesis regarding the murder of Jews during the Holocaust. The Germans' fear of typhus, their perception of the Jew as poisonous, biological matter, "life unworthy of life," created a group state of mind in which many individual Germans, particularly those in the professions, enthusiastically participated in the logistics, machinery, ideology and legitimation of mass murder.     

A comparison of hyponym and synonym decisions

Is class inclusion (hyponymy) a more primitive or simpler semantic relation than synonymy? This question was addressed by comparing the time required to identify examples of the two relations in a semantic decision task. In two experiments subjects made truelfalse decisions about statements of the form “An A is a B.” In Experiment 1 category-member and synonym pairs were randomly intermixed; there was no difference between the two relations. In Experiment 2 one group was presented with the two relations randomly intermixed, as in Experiment 1 (mixed condition), while two other groups were each presented with just one of the relations (separate condition). In the separate condition responses were faster to class inclusion than to synonym pairs, while in the mixed condition there was no difference, as in Experiment 1. The results suggest that class inclusion may be a simpler relation than synonymity, although the difference may simply reflect the use to which the two relations are put in common use. The fact that the difference occurred in the separate but not in the mixed conditions suggests that the latencies reflected the evaluation of the relations against a decision criterion rather than directly reflecting lexical organization or everyday usage.     

The comprehension of idioms

Four experiments will performed to examine how familiar idioms are interpreted. Subjects had to respond as rapidly as possible whether an idiom had the same or different meaning as a phrase which, on half of the trials, was a paraphrase of either the figurative or literal meaning of the idiom. When subjects were instructed to respond on the basis of either figurative or literal meaning, idioms were matched to their literal and figurative paraphrases equally rapidly. When subjects were instructed to respond only on the basis of literal meaning, idiom-phrase pairs that shared a figurative interpretation took longer to reject as different than idiom pairs that shared no interpretation. These results domonstrated that whenever a familiar idiom is comprehended, both its literal and figurative interpretations are made.     

The facilitation of lexical decisions by a prime occurring after the target

Three experiments are reported that investigate priming effects in a lexical decision task. when the prime was presented after the target. In Experiment 1, the lexical decision target was presented for 50 msec, followed 80 msec later by the prime. No significant facilitation of responses was observed in the related prime condition. In Experiment 2, the target was presented for 30 msec, followed 35 msec later by the prime. Targets followed by related primes were responded to significantly faster than targets with unrelated primes. Experiment 3 replicated the result of Experiment 2. The data are interpreted as supporting parallel processing of the prime and target in semantic priming experiments. The theoretical implications of the “backward” priming effect are discussed.