Navigation assistance: a trade-off between wayfinding support and configural learning support

Current GPS-based mobile navigation assistance systems support wayfinding, but they do not support learning about the spatial configuration of an environment. The present study examined effects of visual presentation modes for navigation assistance on wayfinding accuracy, route learning, and configural learning. Participants (high-school students) visited a university campus for the first time and took a predefined assisted tour. In Experiment 1 (n = 84, 42 females), a presentation mode showing wayfinding information from eye-level was contrasted with presentation modes showing wayfinding information included in views that provided comprehensive configural information. In Experiment 2 (n = 48, 24 females), wayfinding information was included in map fragments. A presentation mode which always showed north on top of the device was compared with a mode which rotated according to the orientation of the user. Wayfinding accuracy (deviations from the route), route learning, and configural learning (direction estimates, sketch maps) were assessed. Results indicated a trade-off between wayfinding and configural learning: Presentation modes providing comprehensive configural information supported the acquisition of configural knowledge at the cost of accurate wayfinding. The route presentation mode supported wayfinding at the cost of configural knowledge acquisition. Both presentation modes based on map fragments supported wayfinding. Individual differences in visual-spatial working memory capacity explained a considerable portion of the variance in wayfinding accuracy, route learning, and configural learning. It is concluded that learning about an unknown environment during assisted navigation is based on the integration of spatial information from multiple sources and can be supported by appropriate visualization.     

Organizational Citizenship Behavior,Job Attitudes,and the Psychological Contract

Previous research has shown a positive relationship between job satisfaction and various dimensions of organizational citizenship behavior. These studies, however, have focused almost exclusively on civilian sector organizations. While insight gained from these studies is instructive, it remains to be seen if these relationships also exist in the context of military organizations. The relationships between job satisfaction as well as cynicism (as moderated by psychological contracts) with organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) are explored. Data were collected from military officers (n = 151) attending a 10-month professional military education school. As an improvement over other similar studies, control measures were incorporated to address potential confounds associated with self-reported attitudes. Results showed job satisfaction was a strong predictor of OCB, cynicism was negatively related to the altruism dimension of OCB, and the relationship between cynicism and the altruism dimension of organizational citizenship behavior was moderated such that the relationship was stronger when there were high levels of perceived psychological contract support than when there were low levels of support.     

Epitaxial growth of electrodeposited cadmium selenide on (111) gallium arsenide

Epitaxial growth of CdSe has been achieved on (111) GaAs by electrodeposition from an aqueous electrolyte. The structure of the film corresponds to the cubic modification of CdSe. The quality of epitaxy has been investigated by reflection high-energy electron diffraction, transmission electron microscopy and X-ray diffraction techniques.     

Risk sectors for undesirable behaviour and mobbing

The aim of this short note was to get an impression of risk sectors for the prevalence of undesirable behaviour and mobbing in The Netherlands. Data were collected from 1995 to 1999 with the Questionnaire on The Assessment and Experience of Work (Vragenlijst Beleving en Beoordeling van de Arbeid; VBBA; van Veldhoven & Meijman, 1994). The sample consisted of 66,764 employees representing 11 sectors in The Netherlands. Four questions were indicative of the occurrence of undesirable behaviour and mobbing. The main conclusion of this study is that there are large differences in the occurrence of undesirable behaviour between sectors.     

Religious leaders' perceptions of their emotional and psychological needs

This study investigates religious leaders' perceptions of their emotional and psychological needs using a qualitative Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis design consisting of semi-structured in-depth interviews. This study found that there are different factors contributing to becoming a religious leader; the participants are seeing their profession as a vocation, a job, a service, a calling but not as a career. Participants indicated having emotional problems but also having strong commitment to continue their work. Religious leaders are shown to have role conflicts and are not finding it easy to maintain their relationships. And participants used different coping strategies to overcome their emotional problems. This is the first study in psychology to explore in detail how religious leaders perceive their own emotional problems and interpret their own experiences, and as a result, a number of implications of the findings and recommendations for future research are discussed.     

The Return of the Myth of the Mental∗

McDowell's claim that “in mature human beings, embodied coping is permeated with mindedness”,1 1. “What Myth?”, this issue, p. 339. suggests a new version of the mentalist myth which, like the others, is untrue to the phenomenon. The phenomena show that embodied skills, when we are fully absorbed in enacting them, have a kind of non‐mental content that is non‐conceptual, non‐propositional, non‐rational and non‐linguistic.

This is not to deny that we can monitor our activity while performing it. For solving problems, learning a new skill, receiving coaching, and so forth, such monitoring is invaluable. But monitoring what we are doing as we are doing it degrades performance to at best competence. On McDowell's view, there is no way to account for such a degradation in performance since the same sort of content would be involved whether we were fully absorbed in or paying attention to what we were doing.

McDowell claims that it is an advantage of his conceptualism that it avoids any foundationalist attempt to build up the objective world on the basis of an indubitable Given or any other ground‐floor experience. And, indeed, if the world is all that is the case and our minds are unproblematically open to it, all experience is on the same footing. But one must distinguish motor intentionality, and the interrelated solicitations our coping body is intertwined with, from conceptual intentionality and the world of propositional structures it opens onto. The existential phenomenologist can then agree with McDowell in rejecting traditional foundationalisms, while yet affirming and describing the ground‐floor role of motor intentionality in providing the support on which all forms of conceptual intentionality are based.     

Fields of Tension in a Boundary-Crossing World: Towards a Democratic Organization of the Self

In their study of the relationship between self and society, scientists have proposed taking society as a metaphor for understanding the dynamics of the self, such as the analogy between the self and the functioning of a totalitarian state or the analogy between the self and the functioning of a bureaucratic organization. In addition to these models, the present article proposes a democratic society as a metaphor for understanding the workings of a dialogical self in a globalizing, boundary-crossing world. The article follows four steps. In the first step the self is depicted as extended to the social and societal environment and made up of fields of tension in which a multiplicity of self-positions are involved in processes of positioning and counter-positioning and in relationships of social power. In the second step, the fertility of the democratic metaphor is demonstrated by referring to theory and research from three identity perspectives: multicultural, multiracial, and transgender. In the fields of tension emerging between the multiplicity of self-positions, new, hybrid, and mixed identities have a chance to emerge as adaptive responses to the limitations of existing societal structures. In the third step, we place the democratic self in a broader societal context by linking three levels of inclusiveness, proposed by Self-Categorization Theory (personal, social, and human) to recent conceptions of a cosmopolitan democracy. In the fourth and final step, a model is presented which allows the formulation of a series of specific research questions for future studies of a democratically organized self.     

Validity of Resumé Reviewers' Inferences Concerning Applicant Personality Based on Resumé Evaluation

Recruiters infer personal traits from job applicants' resumés and use these inferences in evaluating job applicants' employability. No research to date, however, has determined if resumé reviewers' inferences of applicants' personality drawn solely from resumé biographical data are valid. In the present study, resumé reviewers (N=52) examined one of two applicant resumés and then described the applicant's personality based on the Big 5 taxonomy. Validities of reviewers' inferences concerning applicant personality were assessed by correlating resumé reviewers' judgments with applicants' self‐reported Big 5 personality scores. Results suggested that valid personality inferences are possible based solely on resumé evaluation. We also found evidence suggesting that attending a brief training session may enhance reviewers' accuracy when inferring applicants' personality from resumé information.     

Overcoming the myth of the mental

Can we accept John McDowell’s Kantian claim that perception is conceptual “all the way out,” thereby denying the more basic perceptual capacities we seem to share with prelinguistic infants and higher animals? More generally, can philosophers successfully describe the conceptual upper floors of the edifice of knowledge while ignoring the embodied coping going on on the ground floor? I argue that we shouldn’t leave the conceptual component of our lives hanging in midair and suggest how philosophers who want to understand knowledge and action can profit from a phenomenological analysis of the nonconceptual embodied coping skills we share with animals and infants, as well as the nonconceptual immediate intuitive understanding exhibited by experts.     

Screening for eating disorders in primary care: EDE-Q versus SCOFF

OBJECTIVE AND METHODS: The comparative validity of the Eating Disorder Examination Questionnaire (EDE-Q) (22 items) and SCOFF (five items) in screening for cases of the more commonly occurring eating disorders was examined in a primary care sample of young adult women (n=257). Diagnoses were confirmed in a sub-group of interviewed participants (n=147). RESULTS: Twenty-five cases, primarily variants of bulimia nervosa (BN) not meeting formal diagnostic criteria, were identified in the interviewed sample. An EDE-Q global score of >or= 2.80 yielded the optimal trade-off between sensitivity (Se) (0.80) and specificity (Sp) (0.80) (positive predictive value (PPV)=0.44), whereas a score of two or more positive responses on the SCOFF was optimal (Se=0.72, Sp=0.73, PPV=0.35). Validity coefficients for both measures varied as a function of participants' age and body weight, although these effects were more pronounced for the SCOFF. CONCLUSIONS: Both measures performed well in terms of their ability to detect cases and to exclude non-cases of the more commonly occurring eating disorders in a primary care setting. The EDE-Q performed somewhat better than the SCOFF and was more robust to effects on validity of age and weight. These findings need to be weighed against the advantage of the SCOFF in terms of its brevity.