Reliability among Senior Managers of the Marlowe–Crowne Short-Form Social Desirability Scale

The majority of scholarly management studies are based on self-report surveys. Consequently, the need to control for social desirability response is important, although few management studies in fact include the use of relevant scales commonly incorporated in psychology research. The full Marlowe–Crowne scale is disaffectingly long for senior-manager sample usage, so one of its short forms is more practical. However, the reliability of the most popular of these, the Strahan–Gerbasi scale, has not been tested with senior-manager samples. This study tests the scale amongst several senior-manager samples and finds it consistently lacks adequate reliability and unidimensionality.     

Attentional inhibition has social-emotional consequences for unfamiliar faces

Visual attention studies often rely on response time measures to show the impact of attentional facilitation and inhibition. Here we extend the investigation of the effects of attention on behavior and show that prior attentional states associated with unfamiliar faces can influence subsequent social-emotional judgments about those faces. Participants were shown pairs of face images and were asked to withhold a response if a transparent stop-signal cue appeared over one of the faces. This served to associate the cued face with an inhibitory state. Later, when asked to make social-emotional choices about these face pairs, participants chose uncued faces more often than cued faces as "more trustworthy" and chose cued faces more often than uncued faces as "less trustworthy." For perceptual choices, there was no effect of how the question was framed (which face is "on a lighter background" vs. "on a darker background"). These results suggest that attentional inhibition can be associated with socially relevant stimuli, such as faces, and can have specific, deleterious effects on social-emotional judgments.     

Fos protein expression in olfactory-related brain areas after learning and after reactivation of a slowly acquired olfactory discrimination task in the rat

Fos protein immunodetection was used to investigate the neuronal activation elicited in some olfactory-related areas after either learning of an olfactory discrimination task or its reactivation 10 d later. Trained rats (T) progressively acquired the association between one odor of a pair and water-reward in a four-arm maze. Two groups of pseudotrained rats were used: PO rats were not water restricted and were submitted to the olfactory stimuli in the maze without any reinforcement, whereas PW rats were water-deprived and systematically received water in the maze without any odorous stimulation. When the discrimination task was well mastered, a significantly lower Fos immunoreactivity was observed in T rats compared to PW and PO rats in most of the analyzed brain areas, which could reflect the post-acquisition consolidation process. Following memory reactivation, differences in Fos immunoreactivity between trained and some pseudotrained rats were found in the anterior part of piriform cortex, CA3, and orbitofrontal cortex. We also observed that Fos labeling was significantly higher in trained rats after memory reactivation than after acquisition of the olfactory task in most of the brain areas examined. Our results support the assumption of a differential involvement of neuronal networks after either learning or reactivation of an olfactory discrimination task.     

Validation of three dimensions of childhood psychopathology in young clinic-referred boys

Short measures of child inattention-overactivity (IO), aggression-defiance (AG), and anxiety-depression or emotionality (EM) derived through a double validation procedure are administered to mothers of 243 clinic-referred suburban New York boys between 6 and 10 years of age. Mother-rated IO is uniquely related to poor performance on cognitive and achievement tests; observed inattentive, hyperactive, and impulsive behaviors in a restricted academic setting; less father education and lower family income; and most mother-reported impairments and treatment use. Mothers of high-IO boys describe themselves and their sons as having similar childhood symptoms. AG is uniquely related to child-reported disruptive behavior and sensation seeking, many measures of family conflict and negative parenting styles, and mother-reported symptom pervasiveness and number of treatments. EM is uniquely related only to poorer cognitive and achievement test performance, living with one parent, parents who considered themselves too busy, and fewer friends. Each dimension also is associated with parallel teacher-rated factors.     

Cortical regions associated with different aspects of object recognition performance

In the present object recognition study, we examined the relationship between brain activation and four behavioral measures: error rate, reaction time, observer sensitivity, and response bias. Subjects perceptually matched object pairs in which structural similarity (SS), an index of structural differentiation, and exposure duration (DUR), an index of task difficulty, were manipulated. The SS manipulation affected the fMRI signal in the left anterior fusiform and parietal cortices, which in turn reflected a bias to respond same. Conversely, an SS-modulated fMRI signal in the right middle frontal gyrus reflected a bias to respond different. The DUR manipulation affected the fMRI signal in occipital and posterior fusiform regions, which in turn reflected greater sensitivity, longer reaction times, and greater accuracy. These findings demonstrate that the regions most strongly implicated in processing object shape (SS-modulated regions) are associated with response bias, whereas regions that are not directly involved in shape processing are associated with successful recognition performance.     

Temporal variation in Irish suicide rates

Using Irish suicide data for the period 1990-1998, the independent effects of month and day adjusting for age, gender, and calendar year effects and distinguishing between holiday and working Mondays were assessed. The male suicide rate was significantly higher on working Mondays (+31%) and Saturdays (+14%), and during April, June, and August (+17%), after adjustment for the other variables. In contrast, female suicide rates were higher only in August (+35%) and exhibited no day effect. Teenage men had a greater elevation of risk on Saturdays, Sundays, and both working and holiday Mondays than any other group. The study findings should be taken into account in the planning of specialized health care services and helplines for suicidal people. Furthermore, the findings provide support for Gabennesch's (1988) broken promise theory and the relationship between dysfunctions of the serotonergic system and suicidal behavior.     

High familiarity enhances visual change detection for face stimuli

Does high familiarity with a face enable particularly efficient visual processing? In three experiments, we presented briefly and successively two pairs of faces (either famous or recently learned), masking each presentation. Between the first and the second presentations, one face changed, and the task was to locate this change. Performance was significantly better when the change involved a famous face. This superfamiliarity effect was found only for changes occurring in the left visual field and was abolished by inverting the faces. Extended prior study of the recently learned faces did not improve performance with these stimuli. The results suggest that superfamiliarity promotes highly efficient visual processing and may especially activate a configural mode of analysis.