Critical reflection and critical reflexivity as core processes for critical WOP: Precarious employment as an example

This work suggests that researchers in work and organizational psychology (WOP) and WOP as a discipline would benefit from a critical perspective on their own research and practice. We highlight the value of critical reflection and critical reflexivity on contexts of research and practice in order to increase the practical impact of WOP for everyone. First, we outline how WOP currently fails to address pressing global issues, such as precarious employment, by focusing on work-related phenomena in affluent societies and neglecting issues relevant to the majority of the world's working population. Second, we present a heuristic framework of four fundamental contextual components that are important to consider when engaging in a continuous process of critical reflection and critical reflexivity: history; economy and politics; society and culture; and personal background. Third, we illustrate why these contexts are important for WOP with the example of precarious employment. Considering context more explicitly is important for future WOP research because context not only co-determines the experiences of the working people under investigation but also the subjectivity of researchers themselves. We hope to encourage WOP researchers to engage in critical reflection and critical reflexivity to promote a more critical WOP.     

Mentally retarded persons as parents: Prevalence and the situation of their children

This paper describes a research program on mentally retarded parents and their children. For this nation-wide study, two structured questionnaires were sent to all municipalities in Norway. Both questionnaires were sent to public health nurses and were followed-up by a structured telephone interview based on the questionnaires. The primary aim of the study was to survey the number of children born to mentally retarded parents. In addition, the children's needs and functional abilities were to be assessed. Twenty-three mentally retarded persons had given birth in the course of the past twelve months. A total of 126 children with mentally retarded parents were identified, with an incidence of 27 children per year, and a prevalence of approximately 430 children under 16 years of age in a population of 4 mill. People with a mean of 1.05 child per family. About 43% of the children of mentally retarded parents appeared to have learning difficulties. Forty percent of the children suffered from failures of care. Between 25% and 68% of the children with learning problems had poorly developed motor or language abilities, sense modalities or psycho-social status.     

The value of possessions in compulsive hoarding: Patterns of use and attachment

Hoarding behavior, patterns of use of possessions, and emotional attachment to possessions were examined among a sample of female undergraduates and a sample of community volunteers. Hoarding behavior was associated with a decreased frequency of use of possessions and excessive concern about maintaining control over possessions. Furthermore, high scores on the hoarding scale were associated with higher levels of perceived responsibility for: (1) being prepared; and (2) the well-being of the possession. Hoarding was also associated with greater emotional attachment to possessions and to the reliance on possessions for emotional comfort. The implications of these findings for the definition of hoarding are discussed.     

THE VISUAL SYSTEM'S MEASUREMENT OF INVARIANTS NEED NOT ITSELF BE INVARIANT

Abstract— When two shapes that differ in orientation or size have to be compared or objects have to be recognized from different viewpoints, the response time and error rate art systematically affected by the size of the geometric difference. In this report, we argue that these effects are not necessarily solid evidence for the use of mental transformations and against the use of invariants by the visual system. We report an experiment in which observers were asked to give affine-invariant coordinates of a point located in an affine frame defined by three other points. The angle subtended by the coordinate axes and the ratio of the lengths of their unit vectors systematically affected the measurement errors. This finding demonstrates that the visual system's measurement of invariants need not itself be invariant.     

Letter familiarity does not aid feature extraction

Summary Familiarity effects in visual letter processing were examined by means of a mutilation detection task. The uppercase E was used as the non-mutilated letter. One or two horizontal bars of the E were delected, to produce an upright or inverted F or L. These four mutilations of the E were assigned to the same response. In Experiment 1, brief exposure of the stimuli was followed by a backward mask. Experiment 2 was identical to Experiment 1, except that the display duration of the stimulus was increased and the backward mask was omitted. In Experiment 3, the overall luminance of the stimuli (luminance per point times length of the constituent line segments) was held constant. In Experiment 4, the upright and inverted non-E letter occurred in different blocks to encourage a normal (upright) letter processing strategy in the upright letter blocks. Accuracy (Experiment 1) and mean correct response times (all experiments) were not different for the upright and inverted F or for the upright and inverted L. These findings and converging results from other studies indicate that the higher familiarity of the upright letters did not aid feature extraction.     

Poisson signal-detection theory: Link between threshold models and the Gaussian assumption

The Gaussian model of signal detection cannot fit asymmetric data as long as the variances of the distributions are kept equal. It is therefore common practice to assume unequal variances in order to fit these data. But this assumption leads to the well-known crossover problem. The present paper provides new arguments for the abandonment of the Gaussian model with unequal variances. In its stead, this paper reevaluates multiple-parallel-threshold models. In particular, the Poisson model turns out to be very useful: it can handle data with any degree of asymmetry, giving a reasonable interpretation of the two parameters of the receiver-operating characteristic. The three-state-threshold model (Krantz, 1969) is given a new interpretation in light of the Poisson model. The slope of Poisson double-probability plots turns out to be much closer to unity than is predicted by the Gaussian approximation.