The use of the occupational stress indicator (OSI) in factory workers in China

The purpose of the study was to investigate occupational stress among Chinese factory workers (N=342), from three cities of South East China, using the shortened version of the Occupational Stress Indicator (OSI)-2. The results showed that the reliabilities and predictive validity of the OSI-2 subscales and other subscales used for the study were reasonably high. Quite a high percentage of workers perceived high work pressure. The main sources of stress were intrinsic to the job; and the coping strategies that were most frequently used to tackle stress were “control” methods. In addition, “satisfaction on environmental condition” seemed to be a common predictor for job satisfaction, and mental and physical well-being. The logical relationships between job satisfaction, mental well-being and physical well-being in Chinese workers have provided support to the findings obtained in Western countries.     

Adult Attachment Styles, the Desire to Have Children, and Working Models of Parenthood

ABSTRACT College students who had yet to marry and begin a family were asked about their desire to have children and their beliefs and expectations about themselves as parents (Study 1) and the characteristics of their prospective children (Study 2). Persons with more avoidant and anxious-ambivalent models of close adult relationships harbored more negative models of parent-hood and parent-child relationships. These findings indicate that working models of parenting and parent-child relationships form well before marriage and the birth of children and that these models are systematically associated with attachment styles in adult relationships. The findings also suggest ways in which insecure attachments between child and parent may be influenced by the caregiver's models of parenting and parent-child relationships.     

Referenzsemantik in der Partnermodellierung

How can we explain that an assertion on something perceived can be understood in the same manner by somebody who cannot perceive that scene? This problem bases the interest in computational linguistics in how listener modeling could possibly be harmonized with reference semantics. Mental images substituting real perception appear as a way out. The architecture of the listener model has to be adapted to the creation and use of such pictorial data structures. Furthermore, the relation between the latter and a verbal (i. e., propositional) representation must be understood. The resulting architecture of a listener model with reference semantics can be employed to solve communicational problems from three general classes in a better way, as is demonstrated by an example implementation.     

Responsibility Attributions for Drunken Behavior: The Role of Expectancy Violation1

Research on attributions about drunken aggression has suggested that intoxication serves to excuse the aggressor while increasing blame to the victim. In this study, we examined subjects' responses to a scenario depicting a violent interaction in which intoxication of aggressor and victim, victim's behavior, and aggressor's previous violent background were varied. We predicted that to the extent that the violent act violated the expectations of the observer, alcohol intoxication would serve to decrease dispositional and responsibility attributions to the aggressor. Instead, the findings showed that alcohol use led to increased attributions of causality, blame, and responsibility for both aggressor and victim. The results are discussed in terms of both attribution theory and societal factors influencing the acceptability of excuses involving alcohol.     

Stimulus-independent thought depends on central executive resources

Stimulus-independent thoughts (SITs) are streams of thoughts and images unrelated to immediate sensory input. Four experiments examined the contribution of aspects of working memory to production of SITs. In Experiments 1 and 2, interventions that were targeted on, respectively, phonological and visuospatial components of working memory both interfered with production of SITs, but there was evidence that these tasks also made demands on central executive resources. Experiments 3 and 4 specifically examined the hypothesis that production of SITs and control of nonproceduralized tasks both depend on central executive resources, and so should show mutual interference. In Experiment 3, prior practice on pursuit rotor and memory tasks reduced the interference with SITs from concurrent task performance. In Experiment 4, randomness within a task involving random-number generation was less when SITs were being produced concurrently than it was when they were not. The results suggest that production of SITs depends on central executive resources.