We can work it out: Group decision‐making builds social identity and enhances the cognitive performance of care residents

Group‐based interventions have been argued to slow the cognitive decline of older people residing in care by building social identification and thereby increasing motivation and engagement. The present study explored the identity–cognition association further by investigating the impact of a group decision‐making intervention on cognition. Thirty‐six care home residents were assigned to one of three conditions: an Intervention in which they made decisions about lounge refurbishment as a group, a Comparison condition in which staff made these decisions, or a no‐treatment Control. Cognitive function, social identification, home satisfaction, and lounge use were measured before and after the intervention. Participants in the Intervention condition showed significant increases on all measures, and greater improvement than participants in both Comparison and Control conditions. Consistent with social identity theorizing, these findings point to the role of group activity and social identification in promoting cognitive integrity and well‐being among care residents.     

Personality and Participative Climate: Antecedents of Distinct Voice Behaviors

Based on the work of Van Dyne, Ang, and Botero (2003 Van Dyne, L., Ang, S. and Botero, I. C. 2003. Conceptualizing employee silence and employee voice as multidimensional constructs. Journal of Management Studies, 40: 1359–1392. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]), the concept of voice, generally defined as speaking up, was expanded to include three types of voice behaviors: prosocial, acquiescent, and defensive. Prosocial voice is a fundamentally positive form of voice, whereas acquiescent and defensive voice behaviors reflect more negative forms of voice. We examined individual-level personality traits of Agreeableness and Extraversion and group-level participative climate as predictors of supervisor ratings of each voice behavior. Testing these ideas with a multilevel design in a sample of Chinese workers and their managers, results demonstrated support for links of Agreeableness, Extraversion, and participative climate with supervisor ratings of voice behaviors. Further, group-level participative climate moderated relationships between individual-level Agreeableness and voice behaviors.     

How Do Consumers Perceive the Quality-of-Life Impact of Durable Goods? A Consumer Well-Being Model Based on the Consumption Life Cycle

Consumer’s overall perception of quality-of-life impact of a consumer durable (PQOLI) refers to consumer’s subjective evaluation of the degree to which marketplace experiences related to a given product impacts one’s overall quality of life (QOL). What are the factors that impact PQOLI? A model based on the concept of the consumption life cycle is developed to answer this question. The model posits that PQOLI is mostly influenced by satisfaction with product purchase, preparation, ownership, consumption, and maintenance experiences. In turn, the model also posits that with satisfaction with purchase, preparation, ownership, consumption, and maintenance are influenced by a set of consumption experiences. The data was collected using a sample of college students. Each respondent was randomly assigned to one of eight product categories: photo cameras, cell phones, athletic shoes, cologne, televisions, watches, sunglasses, and video consoles. The results were generally supportive of the model. Theoretical and managerial implications are discussed.     

How do people order stimuli?

People may find it easier to construct an order after first representing stimuli on a scale or categorizing them, particularly when the number of stimuli to be ordered is large or when some of them must be remembered. Five experiments tested this hypothesis. In two of these experiments (1 and 3), we asked participants to rank line lengths or to rank photographs by artistic value. The participants provided evidence of how they performed these tasks, and this evidence indicated that they often made use of some preliminary representation—either a metric or a categorization. Two further experiments (2 and 4) indicated that people rarely produced rankings when given a choice of assessment measures for either the length of lines or the artistic value of photographs. In Experiment 5, when the number of lines was larger or lines were only visible one at a time, participants were faster at estimating line lengths as a percentage of the card covered than at rank ordering the lengths. Overall, the results indicate that ordering stimuli is not an easy or natural process when the number of stimuli is large or when the stimuli are not all perceptible at once. An implication is that the psychological measures available to individuals are not likely to be purely ordinal when many of the elements being measured must be recalled.     

Parallels Between Action‐Object Mapping and Word‐Object Mapping in Young Children

Across a series of four experiments with 3‐ to 4‐year‐olds we demonstrate how cognitive mechanisms supporting noun learning extend to the mapping of actions to objects. In Experiment 1 (n = 61) the demonstration of a novel action led children to select a novel, rather than a familiar object. In Experiment 2 (n = 78) children exhibited long‐term retention of novel action‐object mappings and extended these actions to other category members. In Experiment 3 (n = 60) we showed that children formed an accurate sensorimotor record of the novel action. In Experiment 4 (n = 54) we demonstrate limits on the types of actions mapped to novel objects. Overall these data suggest that certain aspects of noun mapping share common processing with action mapping and support a domain‐general account of word learning.     

Life Satisfaction and Incumbent Voting: Examining the Mediating Effect of Trust in Government

Journal of Happiness Studies - An emerging body of evidence suggests a causal relationship between wellbeing and incumbent voting. However, the evidence is primarily founded upon established...