Type A behavior and work situation: associations with burnout and work engagement

The aim of the present study was to investigate Type A behavior as well as perceived work situation, and associations with burnout and work engagement. The associations in focus were investigated through hierarchical regressions in a sample (N= 329) of Swedish Information Communication Technology consultants. The findings indicated that both work situation and Type A behavior was correlated with work engagement and burnout; however, no interactions between Type A behavior and work situation were elicited. The main conclusion was that the achievement striving aspect of Type A behavior appears as "non-toxic" and is related only to work engagement. However, the irritability/impatience aspect appears to be responsible for burnout complaints among Type A individuals, possibly through negative effects of the mood itself than through perceived stress at work.     

Quantification of rats' behavior during reinforcement periods

What is treated as a single unit of reinforcement often involves what could be called a reinforcement period during which two or more acts of ingestion may occur, and each of these may have associated with it a series of responses, some reflexive, some learned, that lead up to ingestion. Food-tray presentation to a pigeon is an example of such a “reinforcement period.” In order to quantify this behavior, a continuous-reinforcement schedule was used as the reinforcement period and was chained to a fixed-ratio schedule. Both fixed-ratio size and reinforcement-period duration were manipulated. Rats were used as subjects, food as reinforcement, and a lever press as the operant. Major findings included (a) a rapid decline in response rates during the first 15 to 20 seconds of the reinforcement periods, and (b) a strong positive relationship between these response rates and the size of the fixed ratio. Also revealed was a short scallop not normally found in fixed-ratio response patterns, whose length was a function of fixed-ratio size and reinforcement-period duration. It is suggested that rapidly fluctuating excitatory processes can account for many of these findings and that such processes are functionally significant in terms of behavioral compensation.     

Effects of tonic and phasic respiratory sinus arrhythmia on affective stress responses

Adaptive affective responses in the face of environmental challenges require flexible physiological responding. The present study examined the extent to which tonic respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA)-a putative marker of regulatory capacity-moderated the association between stress-related changes in RSA (i.e., phasic RSA) and concurrent changes in affect. Ninety-eight healthy, young adults completed ratings of affect during a resting baseline and following the recall of a recent stressor. Tonic RSA moderated the association of phasic RSA with stress-related change in positive affect (PA), such that change in RSA had a positive association with PA for individuals with higher tonic RSA and a negative association for those with lower tonic RSA. Examination of specific aspects of PA indicated that phasic RSA was positively associated with changes in ratings of attentive engagement among individuals with higher tonic RSA. These findings inform our understanding of phasic RSA and support the notion that flexible parasympathetic nervous system functioning is an important component of adaptive stress regulation.     

Work values among the unemployed: changes over time and some gender differences

Work involvement (psychological identification with work in general) has generally been considered as a stable, dispositional characteristic, although some studies of unemployment have contradicted this view. Using longitudinal data from a Swedish representative sample (n= 888), this study examines employment status change (e.g. from work to unemployment) and work values development in a 15-month time period. Furthermore, the relationship between employment status change and well-being is explored, with a special focus on the roles played by work values and gender differences. Results indicated that work values are fairly stable over 15 months. As expected, the long-term unemployed (mostly active job seekers) had higher measures of work involvement after 15 months. Further, no gender difference was found with regard to work involvement but females were more likely to agree that there is an entitlement to work. Becoming unemployed was associated with negative health effects, but only among unemployed men.     

The complexities of complex span: explaining individual differences in working memory in children and adults

Two studies are presented that investigated the constraints underlying working memory performance in children and adults. In each case, independent measures of processing efficiency and storage capacity are assessed to determine their relative importance in predicting performance on complex span tasks,which measure working memory capacity. Results show that complex span performance was independently constrained by individual differences in domain-general processing efficiency and domain-specific storage capacity. Residual variance, which may reflect the ability to coordinate storage and processing, also predicted academic achievement. These results challenge the view that complex span taps a limited-capacity resource pool shared between processing and storage operations. Rather, they are consistent with a multiple-component model in which separate resource pools support the processing and storage functions of working memory.     

Structural alignment facilitates the noticing of differences

High-similarity concept pairs that elicit many commonalities also elicit many related differences (Gentner & Markman, 1994; A. B. Markman & Gentner, 1993a, 1993b, 1996; A. B. Markman & Wisniewski, 1997). This finding has been used to support the claim that the comparison process is one of structural alignment. However, it is possible that the difference advantage results from some other property of high-similarity pairs, such as a greater number of stored differences. The present experiments demonstrate that the comparison process itself leads to the greater psychological availability of differences. In three experiments, participants listed commonalities for word pairs and then listed differences under a time pressure for these old pairs and new pairs. In Experiment 1, participants listed more differences for old than for new pairs, consistent with the claim that the comparison process facilitates noticing differences. In Experiment 2, we showed that the difference-listing advantage is specific to the comparison process: Mere coprocessing of the pairs (specifically, providing thematic relations) does not facilitate, and in fact appears to inhibit, difference listing. In Experiment 3, pairs with deeper common systems elicited a larger number of specific alignable differences than did pairs with shallow sets of commonalities. Overall, the results support the structural alignment claim that the comparison process promotes the noticing of both commonalities and related differences.