Repression following a series of natural disasters: Immune and Neuroendocrine correlates

The influence of repression on peripheral blood lymphocyte surface markers and diurnal decline in salivary cortisol following multiple disasters was examined. Participants were sampled at 2 to 8 weeks after a severe fire and flood, and again 1 year later. High distress, low distress, and repression groups were formed utilizing self-reported distress and systolic blood pressure during a disaster recall interview. A main effect for group was identified for CD56⁺ cells (NK cells), with repressors and high distress participants demonstrating lower percentage of NK cells than low distress participants. At Time 1 repressors demonstrated significantly higher percentage of CD56⁺CD69⁺ cells (activated NK cells) than high and low distress participants. From Time 1 to Time 2, repressor participants showed a significant decline in the percentage of activated NK cells. Repressors demonstrated attenuated decline in salivary cortisol compared to low distress participants. Health implications for disaster recovery are discussed.     

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.     

The electrophysiological correlates of integrated face and body-part perception

Previous studies have suggested that the human visual system processes faces and bodies holistically—that is, the different body parts are integrated into a unified representation. However, the time course of this integrative process is less known. In the present study, we investigated this issue by recording event-related potentials evoked by a face and two hands presented simultaneously and in different configurations. When the hands were rotated to obtain a biologically implausible configuration, a reduction of the P2 amplitude was observed relative to the condition in which the face and hands were retained in their veridical configuration and were supplemented with visual cues to highlight further the overall body posture. Our results show that the P2 component is sensitive to manipulations affecting the configuration of face and hand stimuli and suggest that the P2 reflects the operation of perceptual mechanisms responsible for the integrated processing of visually presented body parts.     

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.