The daily spillover and crossover of emotional labor: Faking emotions at work and at home

This diary study among 75 Spanish dual earner couples investigates whether emotional labor performed by employees at work has implications for themselves and for their partner at home. On the basis of the Spillover-Crossover model, we hypothesized that individuals' surface acting at work would spill over to the home domain, and that surface acting at home, in turn, would reduce individuals' levels of well-being. Moreover, we predicted crossover of experiences lived at home between the members of the couple. Participants filled in a diary booklet during five consecutive working days (N = 150 participants and N = 750 occasions). The results of multilevel analyses show that daily surface acting at work has an indirect relationship with daily well-being through daily surface acting at home. In addition, we found a bi-directional crossover of surface acting at home and well-being between both members of the couple. These findings indicate that emotional labor has implications not only for employees themselves, but also for their partner at home – on a daily basis.     

How category learning affects object representations: not all morphspaces stretch alike

How does learning to categorize objects affect how people visually perceive them? Behavioral, neurophysiological, and neuroimaging studies have tested the degree to which category learning influences object representations, with conflicting results. Some studies have found that objects become more visually discriminable along dimensions relevant to previously learned categories, while others have found no such effect. One critical factor we explore here lies in the structure of the morphspaces used in different studies. Studies finding no increase in discriminability often use blended morphspaces, with morphparents lying at corners of the space. By contrast, studies finding increases in discriminability use factorial morphspaces, defined by separate morphlines forming axes of the space. Using the same 4 morphparents, we created both factorial and blended morphspaces matched in pairwise discriminability. Category learning caused a selective increase in discriminability along the relevant dimension of the factorial space, but not in the blended space, and led to the creation of functional dimensions in the factorial space, but not in the blended space. These findings demonstrate that not all morphspaces stretch alike: Only some morphspaces support enhanced discriminability to relevant object dimensions following category learning. Our results have important implications for interpreting neuroimaging studies reporting little or no effect of category learning on object representations in the visual system: Those studies may have been limited by their use of blended morphspaces.     

Emotional nouns affect attachment decisions in sentence completion tasks

We report three sentence completion experiments in which we manipulate the emotional dimension of the nouns in a complex noun phrase (NP) that precedes a relative clause (RC), as in the classic ambiguity in Someone shot the servant of the actress who was on the balcony. The aim was to see whether nouns such as orgy or genocide affect the well-established preference of Spanish to adjoin the relative clause high in the tree (to servant instead of actress in the example above). We manipulated the valence and arousal of the lexical entities residing in the NP. Our results indicate that (a) the inclusion of either pleasant or unpleasant words induces changes in the usual NP1 preference found in Spanish; (b) the effects of high-arousal words are especially clear, in that they pull RC adjunction towards the NP where they are located, be it the NP1 or the NP2; and (c) in the context of sentence production, these kinds of words seem intense enough to promote changes in (and even reverse) a solid syntactic bias. We discuss these findings in the light of existing theories of syntactic ambiguity resolution.     

Neurological subtle signs and cognitive development: A study in late childhood and adolescence

Introduction and Aim: Neurological subtle signs (NSS) are often observed during the neurological examination of children and tend to disappear with age. Their persistence into late adolescence or young adulthood has been related to psychiatric and neurocognitive disorders. To provide a better understanding of their functional basis, a longitudinal correlational study with neurocognitive measurements was performed.

Method: We conducted multiple regression and correlation analyses of NSS with demographic and cognitive measures on a subset of 341 healthy children (56% males), taking part in a longitudinal dental study. Participants, whose ages ranged between 11–15 years, at first evaluation, undertook yearly, during 5 years, a 6-item NSS exam (producing a total score ranging between 0–18) and a comprehensive battery of neurocognitive tests. Effects of age, gender, IQ, and 7 neurocognitive factors on NSS were analyzed.

Results: Over the years, NSS scores correlated consistently with selective attention (Stroop test), motor speed (finger tapping), and visuomotor speed (pegboard speed).

Discussion: These results suggest that the disappearance of NSS in late childhood and adolescence occurs primarily in parallel with the development of motor and visuomotor functions and secondarily in relation to higher order functions such as selective attention (Stroop) and executive control (B-A Trails difference).     

A novel executive function battery for preschoolers: Sensitivity to age differences

The present study investigated sensitivity to age differences in a novel executive function (EF) battery for children aged 18 months to 5 years, and whether the pattern of associations among the measures was consistent with a hierarchical model of EF development. Participants (n = 261, aged 18–67 months) were administered a battery of novel tasks designed to assess 3 key EF components (working memory, inhibition, and shifting). The results indicate that the EF tasks were sensitive to age differences and provide partial support for the hierarchical model of EF development.     

Memory for emotional words: The role of semantic relatedness,encoding task and affective valence

Emotional stimuli have been repeatedly demonstrated to be better remembered than neutral ones. The aim of the present study was to test whether this advantage in memory is mainly produced by the affective content of the stimuli or it can be rather accounted for by factors such as semantic relatedness or type of encoding task. The valence of the stimuli (positive, negative and neutral words that could be either semantically related or unrelated) as well as the type of encoding task (focused on either familiarity or emotionality) was manipulated. The results revealed an advantage in memory for emotional words (either positive or negative) regardless of semantic relatedness. Importantly, this advantage was modulated by the encoding task, as it was reliable only in the task which focused on emotionality. These findings suggest that congruity with the dimension attended at encoding might contribute to the superiority in memory for emotional words, thus offering us a more complex picture of the underlying mechanisms behind the advantage for emotional information in memory.     

An analysis of letter expertise in a levels-of-categorization framework

While there has been increasing effort in dissociating the neural substrates recruited by perception of different objects, the theoretical and behavioural work needed to understand such dissociation lags behind. In an attempt to compare expertise in letter and face perception, we outline a theoretical framework that characterizes different types of object expertise based on the task demand (level of abstraction) required in object categorization. Face perception requires categorization at a subordinate level, whereas letter perception involves mainly basic-level categorization. Accordingly face and letter perception should represent two different types of expertise and display different neural and behavioural markers. Results from three behavioural experiments supported the predictions of the framework in that letter expertise is characterized by an enhancement of the basic-level advantage, instead of its attenuation as typically found for face perception. We compare this framework with Farah's taxonomy of visual abilities based on cooccurrence of deficits in visual agnosias.     

“Toxin handling” and well-being: The case of the human resources manager

This study uses the job demands–resources model and multiple role theory to gain an understanding of the “toxin handling–well-being” relationship. “Toxin handlers” are empathetic managers willing to try to address pain and suffering in organizations (Frost, 2007). We use data from semistructured, in-depth interviews with HR managers to investigate the impact of the toxin handling role on well-being. The interviews indicate that toxin handling does not necessarily lead to the toxin handler’s ill health, because factors such as organizational and personal resources can influence that relationship. Further, toxin handlers can face very different toxin handling demands. These differences in the toxin handler’s resources and demands can lead to the full spectrum of possible health consequences of toxin handling (from decreased to enhanced health) for different toxin handlers.