Intergroup Contact,Prejudicial Attitudes,and Policy Preferences: The Case of the U.S. Military’s “Don’t Ask,Don’t Tell” Policy

Data from 115,052 active United States military personnel were analyzed to explore links between contact with gay people and attitudes about repealing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” Results showed that prejudice against homosexuals significantly mediated the association between contact and supporting repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”; quality of contact in the military was a stronger predictor than other measures of contact. Quality and quantity of contact interacted: more contact quantity had opposing statistical effects on policy attitudes for people experiencing high versus low quality contact. Findings are discussed in terms of contact theory, the association between intergroup attitudes and policy preferences, and practical implications for situations in which groups’ access to new positions or roles is limited, and hence contact opportunities are rare.     

Stressful work, psychological job strain, and turnover: a 2-year prospective cohort study of truck drivers

Based on a model that combines existing organizational stress theory and job transition theory, this 2-year longitudinal study examined antecedents and consequences of turnover among Dutch truck drivers. For this purpose, self-reported data on stressful work (job demands and control), psychological strain (need for recovery after work and fatigue), and turnover were obtained from 820 drivers in 1998 and 2000. In agreement with the model, the results showed that strain mediates the influence of stressful work on voluntary turnover. Also in conformity with the model, job movement to any job outside the trucking industry (i.e., interoccupational turnover) resulted in a larger strain reduction as compared to job movement within the trucking industry (intraoccupational turnover). Finally, strain was found to stimulate interoccupational turnover more strongly than it stimulated intraoccupational turnover. These findings provide a thorough validation of existing turnover theory and give new insights into the turnover (decision) process.     

Story understanding and counterfactual reasoning

D. Kahneman and A. Tversky (1982), in a seminal study on counterfactual reasoning, claimed empirical support for a simulation heuristic wherein ease of converting unusual conditions determines their selection as causes over normal conditions. Discourse analysis of their stories revealed a confounding of explanation and normality. A connectionist simulation of online comprehension and memory access of alternative conditions without conversion accounted for their data. Normality and explanation were varied independently in 2 experiments. Explanation but not normality affected the rank ordering of counterfactual conditions after reading. Access of alternative conditions in simulation was again the best predictor of empirical findings. Comprehension and memory operate where stories communicate information for decision making such as counterfactual reasoning and hindsight bias.     

Relational Security Moderates the Effect of Serotonin Transporter Gene Polymorphism (5-HTTLPR) on Stress Generation and Depression among Adolescents

Previous research demonstrates that carriers of the short allele of the serotonin transporter gene (5-HTTLPR) show both greater susceptibility to depression in response to stressful life events and higher rates of generation of stressful events in response to depression. The current study examines relational security (i.e., self-reported beliefs about attachment security) as a moderator of these effects, building on emerging research suggesting that the short allele acts as a marker of sensitivity to the social environment. Participants were 354 Caucasian adolescents oversampled for maternal depression (137 male, 217 female), assessed at ages 15 and 20. Results indicated that the short allele predicted increased stress generation at age 20 among those with low age 15 security but decreased stress generation among those with high security, and revealed a three-way interaction between age 15 depression, age 15 security, and genotype, where depression predicted stress generation only among short allele carriers with low security. Further, among boys only, security interacted with genotype to predict longitudinal changes in depression diagnosis, with the s-allele predicting relative increases in probability of depression among boys with low security but decreases among boys with high security. Results support the notion of the short allele as a marker of social reactivity, and suggest that attachment security may buffer against the genetic vulnerability introduced by the short allele, in line with predictions of the differential susceptibility theory.