An event history analysis of union joining and leaving

This article examines parallel models of union joining and leaving using individual-level longitudinal panel data collected over a 5-year period. The authors utilized objective measures of joining and leaving collected from union and organizational records and took into account time by using event history analysis. The results indicated that union joining was negatively related to procedural justice and higher performance appraisals and positively related to partner socialization and extrinsic union instrumentality. Conversely, members were most likely to leave the union when they perceived lower procedural justice, where there was no union representative present in the workplace, and where they had individualistic orientations. The authors discuss the implications of these findings for theory and practice for trade unions.     

Word comprehension mediates the link between gesture and word production: Examining language development in infant siblings of children with autism spectrum disorder

Children's gesture production precedes and predicts language development, but the pathways linking these domains are unclear. It is possible that gesture production assists in children's developing word comprehension, which in turn supports expressive vocabulary acquisition. The present study examines this mediation pathway in a population with variability in early communicative abilities—the younger siblings of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD; high‐risk infants, HR). Participants included 92 HR infants and 28 infants at low risk (LR) for ASD. A primary caregiver completed the MacArthur‐Bates Communicative Development Inventory (Fenson, et al., 1993) at 12, 14, and 18 months, and HR infants received a diagnostic evaluation for ASD at 36 months. Word comprehension at 14 months mediated the relationship between 12‐month gesture and 18‐month word production in LR and HR infants (ab = 0.263; p < 0.01). For LR infants and HR infants with no diagnosis or language delay, gesture was strongly associated with word comprehension (as = 0.666; 0.646; 0.561; ps < 0.01). However, this relationship did not hold for infants later diagnosed with ASD (a = 0.073; p = 0.840). This finding adds to a growing literature suggesting that children with ASD learn language differently. Furthermore, this study provides an initial step toward testing the developmental pathways by which infants transition from early actions and gestures to expressive language.     

Forgetting and the mirror effect in recognition memory: concentering of underlying distributions

The mirror effect is a strong regularity in recognition memory: If there are two conditions, A and B, with A giving higher recognition accuracy, then old items in A are recognized as old better than old items in B, and also new items in A are recognized as new better than new items in B. The mirror effect is explained by attention/likelihood theory, which also makes several new, counterintuitive predictions. One is that any variable, such as forgetting, that affects recognition changes the responses to new as well as old stimuli. In terms of underlying distributions, forgetting produces concentering, the bilateral movement of distributions, both new (noise) and old (signal), toward a midpoint. Data from two forced-choice experiments are reported that support the prediction of concentering and other predictions drawn from the theory. It is argued that current theories of memory, which are strength theories, cannot handle these regularities.     

Women with low activity are at increased risk for depression

This study assessed if there are sex differences in the relationship between amount of physical activity and depression in primary care outpatients. Participants (N= 111), referred by their family physicians, wore a heart-rate monitor for 24 hr. The two-lead monitor collected the number of beats per minute and minute-averaged horizontal movement data, e.g., from walking or moving about. All participants underwent structured clinical interviewing using the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-IV and completed the Beck Depression Inventory-II and the Symptom Checklist-90-Revised. For the total sample, patients with low activity were more likely to be depressed (p<.006). Adults under the age of 45 (n=85) with low activity were 7.4 times more likely to be depressed than young adults who showed normal activity. However, in adults 45 or older, there was no relationship between activity and depression. In a subsample of women under the age of 55 (n=70), 91% of the low activity group and 39% of the normal activity group were diagnosed with depression (p<.003). Women in the low activity group were 15.7 times more likely to be depressed than women in the normal activity group. In contrast, there was no relationship between activity and depression in men. Additional research is needed to assess whether low activity is a potent predictor of depression in women.     

High-performance work systems and occupational safety

Two studies were conducted investigating the relationship between high-performance work systems (HPWS) and occupational safety. In Study 1, data were obtained from company human resource and safety directors across 138 organizations. LISREL VIII results showed that an HPWS was positively related to occupational safety at the organizational level. Study 2 used data from 189 front-line employees in 2 organizations. Trust in management and perceived safety climate were found to mediate the relationship between an HPWS and safety performance measured in terms of personal-safety orientation (i.e., safety knowledge, safety motivation, safety compliance, and safety initiative) and safety incidents (i.e., injuries requiring first aid and near misses). These 2 studies provide confirmation of the important role organizational factors play in ensuring worker safety.     

Measuring the perceptual magnet effect in the perception of /i/ by German listeners

In a study of the internal category structure of the vowel /i/, Kuhl found a “perceptual magnet effect”: Discrimination sensitivity was poorer for category instances that were acoustically similar to the category prototype than it was for category instances that were not. The typicality of category exemplars was determined by goodness judgments and was found to correlate with the acoustics of average production. Analysis and interpretation of discrimination performance relied on two important assumptions: that listeners perceived all stimuli presented as exemplars of the same vowel category and that, apart from the influence of phonetic coding, discrimination sensitivity was the same across the investigated part of the vowel space. In the present study, it is shown that production and perception estimates of the category prototype may diverge, possibly because listeners seem to prefer hyperarticulated variants of vowel categories. An approach towards measurement of intra-category discrimination minima is put forward and tested that protects against intercategory confounds and avoids the isosensitivity assumption. Received: 26 November 1997 / Accepted: 25 May 1998     

Name that tune: Identifying popular recordings from brief excerpts

We tested listeners’ ability to identify brief excerpts from popular recordings. Listeners were required to match 200- or 100-msec excerpts with the song titles and artists. Performance was well above chance levels for 200-msec excerpts and poorer but still better than chance for 100-msec excerpts. Performance fell to chance levels when dynamic (time-varying) information was disrupted by playing the 100-msec excerpts backward and when high-frequency information was omitted from the 100-msec excerpts; performance was unaffected by the removal of low-frequency information. In sum, successful identification required the presence of dynamic, high-frequency spectral information.