Components of Teamwork: Impact on Evaluations of Contributions to Work Team Effectiveness1

This study examined the relationship between Dickinson's (1993) components of teamwork and ratings of team members' contributions to team success. Undergraduate students (n= 179) each viewed 1 of 8 videotapes depicting a team interacting to solve the Winter Survival Problem. Participants then completed a 52-item questionnaire assessing the connection between teamwork components and perceptions of contributions to team productivity, team viability, teamwork, and overall team performance. With 1 exception, all of the teamwork components manipulated in the study significantly affected appraisals of several aspects of worker effectiveness. Furthermore, raters considered teamwork behaviors that provided direct assistance or direction to team members as being especially critical.     

Effects of rape victim resistance, assault outcome, and sex of observer on attributions about rape

Perceptions of sexual assault were investigated as a function of sex of observer, nature of victim resistance, and assault outcome. Two hundred twenty-nine subjects were randomly assigned by sex to six resistance x outcome conditions. Hypotheses that women and men apply sex-role stereotypes in evaluating the rape situation were supported: (a) subjects were more certain that rape had occurred as the victim resisted more; (b) subjects attributed greater responsibility to the victim for completed that for attempted rape, while the reverse pattern was found for the assailant; (c) women attributed more responsibility to the assailant than did men; and (d) men attributed less fault and more intelligence, and women attributed more fault and less intelligence to the rape victim as she resisted more forcefully. Attributional terms; fault, blame, and responsibility were found not to be interchangeable. Rape attributions are discussed within the contexts of identification with victim's situation and perceptions of victim's control. Implications for choice of self-defense strategy and treatment of rape victims are also considered.     

Infants' ability to match dynamic phonetic and gender information in the face and voice.

Six experiments tested young infants' sensitivity to vowel and gender information in dynamic faces and voices. Infants were presented with side-by-side displays of two faces articulating the vowels /a/ or /i/ in synchrony. The heard voice matched the gender of one face in some studies and the vowel of one face in other studies and, in some studies, vowel and gender were placed in conflict. Infants of age 4.5 months showed no evidence of matching face and voice on the basis of gender, but were able to ignore irrelevant gender information and match on the basis of the vowel. Robust evidence of the ability to match on the basis of gender was not evident until 8 months of age. This set of findings suggests that, when identical stimuli are used, gender matching does not emerge until a later age than does phonetic matching. Results are discussed in relation to key theories of intermodal development.     

Behavioral predictors of changes in social relatedness and liking school in elementary school

Normative trends and behavioral predictors for three dimensions of social relatedness were examined in a 6-month longitudinal study of 383 students in Grades 3, 4 and 5. Student reports of social relatedness (teacher supportiveness, school supportiveness, loneliness) and liking school indicated that students in each of the grades felt less positive about the school environment and liked school less in the Spring compared to the Fall. Girls reported higher levels of teacher supportiveness and school supportiveness. Reports of school supportiveness were lower among students at higher grade levels. Teacher-rated aggression predicted declines in students' perceptions of teacher supportiveness, increases in their sense of loneliness, and decreases in reports of liking school across the school year. Teacher-rated closeness predicted the maintenance of student perceptions of high levels of relatedness. Peer social preference predicted increases in loneliness. A path model indicated that the association between aggressive behavior and liking school was mediated by the association between aggressive behavior and perceptions of teacher supportiveness.     

Infant sensitivity to distributional information can affect phonetic discrimination.

For nearly two decades it has been known that infants' perception of speech sounds is affected by native language input during the first year of life. However, definitive evidence of a mechanism to explain these developmental changes in speech perception has remained elusive. The present study provides the first evidence for such a mechanism, showing that the statistical distribution of phonetic variation in the speech signal influences whether 6- and 8-month-old infants discriminate a pair of speech sounds. We familiarized infants with speech sounds from a phonetic continuum, exhibiting either a bimodal or unimodal frequency distribution. During the test phase, only infants in the bimodal condition discriminated tokens from the endpoints of the continuum. These results demonstrate that infants are sensitive to the statistical distribution of speech sounds in the input language, and that this sensitivity influences speech perception.     

Sentence context modulates visual word recognition and translation in bilinguals

The influence of sentence context constraint on subsequent processing of concrete and abstract cognates and noncognates was tested in three experiments. Target words were preceded by a predictive, high constraint sentence context, by a congruent, low constraint sentence context, or were presented in isolation. Dutch-English bilinguals performed lexical decision in their second language (L2), or translated target words in forward (from L1 to L2) or in backward (from L2 to L1) direction. After reading a high constraint sentence context, cognate and concreteness effects disappeared in lexical decision and strongly decreased in both translation tasks. In contrast, low constraint sentences did not influence cognate and concreteness effects. These results suggest that semantically rich sentences modulate cross-language interaction during word recognition and word translation.     

The ABCs of depression: integrating affective, biological, and cognitive models to explain the emergence of the gender difference in depression

In adulthood, twice as many women as men are depressed, a pattern that holds in most nations. In childhood, girls are no more depressed than boys, but more girls than boys are depressed by ages 13 to 15. Although many influences on this emergent gender difference in depression have been proposed, a truly integrated, developmental model is lacking. The authors propose a model that integrates affective (emotional reactivity), biological (genetic vulnerability, pubertal hormones, pubertal timing and development) and cognitive (cognitive style, objectified body consciousness, rumination) factors as vulnerabilities to depression that, in interaction with negative life events, heighten girls' rates of depression beginning in adolescence and account for the gender difference in depression.     

Research and Action for Bridging Science and Practice in Prevention

There is a well-known gap between science and practice. To address this gap in the areas of Child Maltreatment (CM) and Youth Violence (Y/V), the Division of Violence Prevention (DVP) at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) embarked on a Dissemination/Implementation (D/I) planning project. The project was aimed at identifying better ways to connect research and practice through reviews of the literature as well as through discussions with experts on violence prevention and research utilization. This introductory article sets the stage for the rest of the special issue by defining terms, providing a rationale for the planning project, describing the planning process, and summarizing what is to come in the rest of the issue. The findings and conclusions in this report are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.     

Psychological Consequences of Failing to Attribute Negative Outcomes to Discrimination

The present research examines the psychological consequences of not making attributions to discrimination in response to negative feedback. In two studies, 100 and 80, respectively, female undergraduates at large US research universities were exposed to conditions that simulated three distinct reasons for not making an attribution to discrimination which parallel three theoretical information processing stages. The psychological consequences examined included changes in activation of and explicit thoughts about sexism, affective state, excuses for poor performances, and negative attitudes toward the perpetrator. Results illustrated that there are psychological consequences of failing to make an attribution to discrimination, and that the three ways to fail to make an attribution to discrimination are distinct in that each resulted in unique consequences.     

Bilingualism in infancy: first steps in perception and comprehension

Many children grow up in bilingual families and acquire two first languages. Emerging research is advancing the view that the capacity to acquire language can be applied equally to two languages as to one but that bilingual and monolingual acquisition nonetheless differ in some nontrivial ways. To probe the first steps toward acquisition, researchers recently have begun to use experimental methods to study preverbal bilingual infants. We review the literature in this growing field, focusing on how infants growing up bilingual use surface acoustic information to separate, categorize and begin to learn their two languages. These new data invite the expansion of standard linguistic theories to account for how a single architecture can support the acquisition of two languages simultaneously.