Evaluating a ward staff program for increasing spontaneous and varied communicative gesturing with individuals who are mentally retarded

In the present study we assessed the effect of a multifaceted program for ward staff members, which was intended to have severely/profoundly mentally retarded individuals improve their use of communicative gestures. The program consisted of instruction, verbal and visual (publicly posted) graphic feedback. There were two categories of dependent variables. The first category involved the number of gesture prompts by staff, number of unused opportunities to evoke gestures, and number of consequences given for gestures. The second category involved handicapped individuals' number of prompted gestures, number of spontaneous gestures, and number of different gestures. Results show that the program was effective with regard to all these variables. Changes in the number of spontaneous gestures were especially remarkable, as this variable had not been influenced directly. Follow-up data underline the effectiveness of the program.     

On the origin of intermediate effects in clinical case recall

In two experiments, the effects of level of medical expertise and study time on free recall of a clinical case were assessed. In Experiment 1, a nonmonotonic relationship between level of expertise and recall was found: Subjects of intermediate levels of expertise remembered more information from the case than both experts and novices. This “intermediate effect” disappeared, however,when study time was restricted. Analysis of post hoc acquired protocols of pathophysiological knowledge active during case processing suggested that this phenomenon could be attributed to the nature of the pathophysiological knowledge mobilized to comprehend the case. In Experiment 2, this assumption was directly tested by priming relevant pathophysiological knowledge for either a short or a longer period, before enabling subjects to study the case briefly. Free-recall data confirmed and extended the results of Experiment 1. Again, an intermediate effect was found; this time, however, it was generated experimentally. The findings were interpreted in terms of qualitative differences in the nature of the knowledge structures underlying performance between novices, advanced students, and medical experts: Experts use knowledge in an encapsulated mode while comprehending a case, whereas students use elaborated knowledge.     

Item bias detection using loglinear irt

A method is proposed for the detection of item bias with respect to observed or unobserved subgroups. The method uses quasi-loglinear models for the incomplete subgroup × test score × Item 1 × ... × itemk contingency table. If subgroup membership is unknown the models are Haberman's incomplete-latent-class models.The (conditional) Rasch model is formulated as a quasi-loglinear model. The parameters in this loglinear model, that correspond to the main effects of the item responses, are the conditional estimates of the parameters in the Rasch model. Item bias can then be tested by comparing the quasi-loglinear-Rasch model with models that contain parameters for the interaction of item responses and the subgroups.The author thanks Wim J. van der Linden and Gideon J. Mellenbergh for comments and suggestions and Frank Kok for empirical data.     

Disentangling the effects of word frequency and contextual diversity on serial recall performance

Research shows that contextual diversity (CD; the number of different contexts in which a word appears within a corpus) constitutes a better predictor of reading performance than word frequency (WF), that it mediates the access to lexical representations, and that controlling for contextual CD abolishes the effect of WF in lexical decision tasks. Despite the theoretical relevance of these findings for the study of serial memory, it is not known how CD might affect serial recall performance. We report the first independent manipulation of CD and WF in a serial recall task. Experiment 1 revealed better performance for low CD and for high WF words independently. Both effects affected omissions and item errors, but contrary to past research, word frequency also affected order errors. These results were confirmed in two more experiments comparing pure and alternating lists of low and high CD (Experiment 2) or WF (Experiment 3). The effect of CD was immune to this manipulation, while that of WF was abolished in alternating lists. Altogether the findings suggest a more difficult episodic retrieval of item information for words of high CD, and a role for both item and order information in the WF effect.     

Situational and Personality Factors as Direct or Personal Norm Mediated Predictors of Pro-environmental Behavior: Questions Derived From Norm-activation Theory

Studies that use the norm activation theory (Schwartz, 1977 Schwartz , S. H. ( 1977 ). Normative influences on altruism . In L. Berkowitz (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 10 , pp. 221 – 279 ). New York : Academic Press .[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]) to explain pro-environmental behavior often focus on personal norms and on two situational activators, i.e., awareness of need and situational responsibility (e.g., Vining &; Ebreo, 1992 Vining , J. , &; Ebreo , A. ( 1992 ). Predicting recycling behavior from global and specific environmental attitudes and changes in recycling opportunities . Journal of Applied Social Psychology , 22 , 1580 – 1607 .[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). The theory's other situational activators, efficacy and ability, and its personality trait activators, awareness of consequences and denial of responsibility, are generally ignored. The current article reports on two studies - a mail survey among the general public (N = 345) and a laboratory experiment among university freshmen (N = 166)–that found that (1) inclusion of additional activators improved the norm activation theory's potential to explain pro-environmental behavior and (2) personal norms significantly mediated the impact of activators on pro-environmental behavior. Theoretical issues and issues concerning environmental management evoked by these results are discussed.     

Unconscious goal activation and the hijacking of the executive function

Building on research on unconscious human goal pursuit and the dynamic nature of our mental and physical world, this study examined the idea that an unconsciously activated goal hijacks executive control for its own attainment. This "hijacking" of the executive function by an unconscious goal should be evidenced by impaired performance on an unrelated task relying on executive control. The results of 6 experiments show that subliminal activation of a socializing goal, or an idiosyncratic personal goal, or an academic goal, harmed participants' performance on an executive function task, such as inhibition of prepotent responses and detection of text errors during reading. These effects were unique to executive control, were similar when the goal was activated consciously, and were independent of task motivation and perceived inter-goal relatedness between the primed goal and task goal. Furthermore, an unconscious goal occupied executive control to advance itself more strongly when the goal had personal value. Implications for theory and research on unconscious goal pursuit and the executive function are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved).     

The effect of cultural orientation and leadership style on self‐ versus other‐oriented organizational citizenship behaviour in Turkey and the Netherlands

This paper investigated the effects of a paternalistic and empowering leadership style on organizational citizenship behaviour (OCB) in an experimental design using 100 Turkish and 100 Dutch students who held part‐time jobs. Confirming our expectations, a paternalistic leadership style had a more positive effect on job dedication and organizational support in Turkey than in the Netherlands. Contradicting our expectations, an empowering leadership style did not have a more positive effect on any of the OCB dimensions in the Netherlands than it did in Turkey. However, in the Netherlands an empowering leadership style had a stronger effect on interpersonal facilitation, job dedication, and organizational support than a paternalistic leadership style. Paternalistic and empowering leadership styles both had positive effects on OCB dimensions in Turkey. As expected, collectivism moderated the relationship between paternalistic leadership style and other oriented OCB (i.e., interpersonal facilitation). Specifically, people who had more collectivistic tendencies were more positively influenced by a paternalistic leader than people who had low collectivistic tendencies in both countries. However, individualism did not have any moderating effects on the relationship between empowering leadership style and self‐oriented OCB (i.e., job dedication). Our findings are relevant for understanding the effects of leadership styles and cultural orientations on self‐ versus other‐oriented OCB in Turkey and the Netherlands.     

When moving without volition: implied self-causation enhances binding strength between involuntary actions and effects

The conscious awareness of voluntary action is associated with systematic changes in time perception: The interval between actions and outcomes is experienced as compressed in time. Although this temporal binding is thought to result from voluntary movement and provides a window to the sense of agency, recent studies challenge this idea by demonstrating binding in involuntary movement. We offer a potential account for these findings by proposing that binding between involuntary actions and effects can occur when self-causation is implied. Participants made temporal judgements concerning a key press and a tone, while they learned to consider themselves as the cause of the effect or not. Results showed that implied self-causation (vs. no implied self-causation) increased temporal binding. Since intrinsic motor cues of movement were absent, these results suggest that sensory evidence about the key press caused binding in retrospect and in line with the participant's sense of being an agent.     

The involuntary capture of attention by novel feature pairings: A study of voice—location integration in auditory sensory memory

Past researchers of the integration of information in memory have typically required participants to attend to and/or commit to memory the stimuli conveying distinct features, rendering difficult the examination of whether the maintenance of the feature pairings can occur involuntarily. To address this issue, the integration of voice and location information in auditory sensory memory was measured using a cross-modal oddball task, in which task-irrelevant auditory deviants are known to capture attention in an involuntary fashion. Participants categorized visual digits presented shortly after to-be-ignored sounds. These sounds consisted in the same phoneme played simultaneously in both ears but in different voices (female in one ear, male in the other). On most trials, the pairing of voice to location was constant (standard sound). On rare and unpredictable trials, the voices swapped locations (deviant sound). In line with past work on attention capture by auditory novelty, the participants were significantly slower to judge the visual digits following the deviant sound, indicating the involuntary encoding of the links between voice and location in auditory memory. These results suggest that voices and locations are integrated in memory and that this binding occurs in conditions in which participants do not intend to commit any information to memory.