Must "service with a smile" be stressful? The moderating role of personal control for American and French employees

Suppressing and faking emotional expressions depletes personal resources and predicts job strain for customer-contact employees. The authors argue that personal control over behavior, in the job and within the national culture, provides compensatory resources that reduce this strain. With a survey study of 196 employees from the United States and France, the authors supported that high job autonomy buffered the relationship of emotion regulation with emotional exhaustion and, to a lesser extent, job dissatisfaction. The relationship of emotion regulation with job dissatisfaction also depended on the emotional culture; the relationship was weaker for French customer-contact employees who were proposed to have more personal control over expressions than U.S. employees. Theoretical and research implications for the emotion regulation literature and practical suggestions for minimizing job strain are proposed.     

Processing of facial expressions of negative emotion in alexithymia: the influence of temporal constraint

Alexithymia, a characteristic involving a limited affective vocabulary appears to involve three components: difficulty identifying feelings, difficulty describing feelings, and externally oriented thinking. There is evidence that alexithymic characteristics are associated with differences in emotion information-processing. We examined the role of temporal factors in alexithymic emotion-processing deficits, taking into account the confound between alexithymic characteristics and positive and negative affectivity. One hundred forty-six participants completed the 20-item Toronto Alexithymia Scale and the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule. In a signal-detection paradigm, participants judged facial expressions depicting neutral or negative emotions under slow and rapid presentation conditions. The alexithymia component of difficulty in describing feelings was inversely related to the ability to detect expressions of negative emotion in the speeded condition. This relationship was independent of positive and negative affectivity. Alexithymic components positive and negative affectivity were unrelated to response bias. The results emphasize the influence of difficulty describing feelings within the alexithymia construct and its difference from positive and negative affectivity. They suggest that an alexithymic deficit in describing feelings is associated with a deficit in processing negative emotions that is most apparent when processing capacity is challenged. Theoretical and methodological implications are discussed.     

A cognitive complexity metric applied to cognitive development

Two experiments tested predictions from a theory in which processing load depends on relational complexity (RC), the number of variables related in a single decision. Tasks from six domains (transitivity, hierarchical classification, class inclusion, cardinality, relative-clause sentence comprehension, and hypothesis testing) were administered to children aged 3-8 years. Complexity analyses indicated that the domains entailed ternary relations (three variables). Simpler binary-relation (two variables) items were included for each domain. Thus RC was manipulated with other factors tightly controlled. Results indicated that (i) ternary-relation items were more difficult than comparable binary-relation items, (ii) the RC manipulation was sensitive to age-related changes, (iii) ternary relations were processed at a median age of 5 years, (iv) cross-task correlations were positive, with all tasks loading on a single factor (RC), (v) RC factor scores accounted for 80% (88%) of age-related variance in fluid intelligence (compositionality of sets), (vi) binary- and ternary-relation items formed separate complexity classes, and (vii) the RC approach to defining cognitive complexity is applicable to different content domains.     

Children''s ability to make transitive inferences: The importance of premise integration and structural complexity

Four experiments investigated 4- to 6-year-olds' transitive inferences. In Experiments 1–3, there was a nonmapping condition in which inferences were made either about stacked blocks, or about sticks ordered left to right. In the mapping condition, inferences were made by mapping either from blocks to sticks, or the reverse. In Experiments 2–4, relational complexity was manipulated by requiring either 1 or 2 premise relations to be processed in a single decision. Mapping was harder than nonmapping, but relational complexity was the main source of variance, with 2 relations being harder in both mapping and nonmapping conditions. The percentage of participants integrating 2 relations in a single decision was estimated at 20% at age 4, 53% at age 5 and 57% at age 6, suggesting gradual development of transitive inference ability. Results suggest that relational complexity has a strong effect on transitive inference in 4- to 6-year-old children.     

Forgiveness and Moral Development

Forgiveness is clearly an important aspect of our moral lives, yet surprisingly Kant, one of the most important authors in the history of Western ethics, seems to have very little to say about it. Some authors explain this omission by noting that forgiveness sits uncomfortably in Kant’s moral thought: forgiveness seems to have an ineluctably ‘elective’ aspect which makes it to a certain extent arbitrary; thus it stands in tension with Kant’s claim that agents are autonomous beings, capable of determining their own moral status through rational reflection and choice. Other authors recognise that forgiveness plays a role in Kant’s philosophy but fail to appreciate the nature of this duty and misrepresent the Kantian argument in support of it. This paper argues that there is space in Kant’s philosophy for a genuine theory of forgiveness and hopes to lay the grounds for a correct interpretation of this theory. I argue that from a Kantian perspective, forgiveness is not ‘elective’ but, at least in some cases, morally required. I claim that, for Kant, we have an imperfect duty of virtue to forgive repentant wrongdoers that have embarked on a project of self-reflection and self-reform. I develop a novel argument in support of this duty by drawing on Kant’s theory of rational agency, the thesis of radical evil, Kant’s theory of moral development, and the formula of humanity. However, it must be noted that this is a conditional duty and Kant’s position also entails that absence of repentance on the part of the wrongdoer should be taken as evidence of a lack of commitment to a project of self-reflection and self-reform. In such cases, Kant claims, we have a perfect duty to ourselves not to forgive unrepentant wrongdoers. I argue that this duty should be understood as one of the duties of self-esteem, which involves the duty to respect and recognise our own dignity as rational beings.     

Good-Fast-Cheap: Pick Any Two: Dilemmas About the Value of Applicable Research1

Questions of internal validity vs. external validity have long been of concern to social and organizational psychologists. In recent years, the issue of applicability of research data has been emphasized as well. The present paper distinguishes between basic, applied, and applicable research. It is concluded that sufficient criteria for judging basic and applied research are available. However, there appears to be little agreement about the value and the quality of most applicable research. To help alleviate this problem, criteria for judging applicable research are suggested. The potential contributions of basic, applied, and applicable research to policy formation and to the search for solutions which are relevant to social, organizational, and governmental problems are considered.     

Integration of weight and distance information in young children: The role of relational complexity

Young children's integration of weight and distance information was examined using a new methodology that combines a single-armed apparatus with functional measurement. Weight and distance values were varied factorially across the item set. Children estimated how far the beam would tilt when different numbers of weights were placed at different distances from the pivot. There was a developmental progression from non-systematic responding (3-year-olds) to responding based on a single variable, usually weight (4-year-olds) to responding based on integration of weight and distance (5-, 6- and 7-year-olds). Individual analyses revealed additive and multiplicative integration rules in children aged from 5 years. Weight–distance strategy complexity increased with age and was associated with better performance on independent measures of relational processing, especially the more complex items. Thus weight–distance integration involves processing of complex relational information. The findings enhance the explanatory power of Relational Complexity theory as a domain-general approach to cognitive development.     

Understanding others by doing things together: an enactive account

Enactivists claim that social cognition is constituted by interactive processes and even more radically that there is ‘no observation without interaction’. Nevertheless, the notion of interaction at the core of the account has not yet being characterized in a way that makes good the claim that interactions actually constitute social understanding rather than merely facilitating or causally contributing to it. This paper seeks to complement the enactivist approach by offering an account of basic joint action that involves and brings with it basic forms of mental understanding. The paper turns to theories of joint action rather than theories of perception as some enactivists have done (cfr. Gallagher in Conscious Cognit 17(2):535–543, 2008; Thompson in J Conscious Stud 8(5–7):1–32, 2001), to gain insight into the kind of interactions that underpin our understanding of other minds, and in that way, supplement the interactionist-enactive account. In line with Enactivism, the paper argues that this kind of social understanding is practical rather than theoretical and that it is cognitively more basic and developmentally prior when compared to other ways we come to understand other minds.

     

Misattributions in attribution research: Choices of scientific certainty vs. understanding of reality: A rejoinder

Fincham (1984) has argued that Nogami and Streufert (1983) advanced a thesis which (1) attempts to empirically demonstrate that attributions for an accident are lower with severe as opposed to less severe outcomes and (2) applies these data to account for previous contradictory findings of the ‘defensive attribution’ literature. The present authors show that Fincham's attribution of intent to Nogami and Streufert is in error and that the divergent views of Nogami and Streufert versus those of Fincham and associates reflect legitimate but different approaches toward the problem of attribution theory and research.