Core self-evaluations as causes of satisfaction: The mediating role of seeking task complexity

This study examined the mediating role of task complexity in the relationship between core self-evaluations (CSE) and satisfaction. In Study 1, eighty three undergraduate business students worked on a strategic decision-making simulation. The simulated environment enabled us to verify the temporal sequence of variables, use an objective measure of task complexity, and control confounding factors. In Study 2, we surveyed 108 full-time employees. In addition to verifying the temporal sequencing of variables in Study 1, both studies demonstrate that people with higher CSE actually choose/seek higher levels of complexity on their tasks, which directly or indirectly increases their task/work satisfaction.     

Relationship between cynicism and job satisfaction: exploration of mechanisms

To apply a Mokken Scale Procedure in developing a hierarchical cross-national scale to measure xenophobia, a pool of 30 xenophobia-related items was collected from several sources and modified using established unidimensional criteria. The survey was administered to 608 undergraduate students in the USA, 193 undergraduate students in The Netherlands, and 303 undergraduate students in Norway. 14 items measuring perceived threat or fear and meeting the criteria of the Stereotype Content Model were selected for further analysis. A separate item analysis and, subsequently, Mokken Scale Procedure yielded a cumulative scale with the same five items for each of the three samples. The items and the total scale met criteria for homogeneity in all samples with H > .40.     

Second-Order Probability Matching Priors for the Person Parameter in Unidimensional IRT Models

Psychometrika - In applications of item response theory (IRT), it is often of interest to compute confidence intervals (CIs) for person parameters with prescribed frequentist coverage. The...     

Rights vis-à-vis Duties and Contemporary Human Rights Debate

Journal of Indian Council of Philosophical Research - Most of the theories of rights propounded by philosophers, right from the beginning till the twentieth century, conceive rights either as a...     

Emotional speech processing: Disentangling the effects of prosody and semantic cues

To inform how emotions in speech are implicitly processed and registered in memory, we compared how emotional prosody, emotional semantics, and both cues in tandem prime decisions about conjoined emotional faces. Fifty-two participants rendered facial affect decisions (Pell, 2005a), indicating whether a target face represented an emotion (happiness or sadness) or not (a facial grimace), after passively listening to happy, sad, or neutral prime utterances. Emotional information from primes was conveyed by: (1) prosody only; (2) semantic cues only; or (3) combined prosody and semantic cues. Results indicated that prosody, semantics, and combined prosody–semantic cues facilitate emotional decisions about target faces in an emotion-congruent manner. However, the magnitude of priming did not vary across tasks. Our findings highlight that emotional meanings of prosody and semantic cues are systematically registered during speech processing, but with similar effects on associative knowledge about emotions, which is presumably shared by prosody, semantics, and faces.