Controlling anger in self-reported sober and alcohol intoxicated states: moderating effects of trait anger and alcohol consumption

Controlling anger in self-reported sober and alcohol intoxicated states: Moderating effects of trait anger and alcohol consumption. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology 52, 382-388. Retrospective self-reports about prior sober and alcohol intoxicated states were explored to reveal moderating effects of trait anger and alcohol consumption on anger control. The analyses were based on self-reports of trait anger and alcohol consumption as well as self-reports of the participants' typical levels of anger control in sober and alcohol intoxicated states in a population based sample of Finnish twins and their siblings (N = 4,852). The reported levels of anger control were lower regarding prior alcohol intoxicated states than sober states. A three-way interaction between alcohol consumption, trait anger and anger control was found. Whereas no interaction between alcohol consumption and trait anger was found in the self-reported sober state, there was an interactive effect of trait anger and alcohol consumption on anger control in the intoxicated state, indicating that the difference in anger control between those with high levels of alcohol consumption and those with low levels, was greater at higher levels of trait anger. Women had lower levels of anger control than men, but the relationship between trait anger, alcohol consumption and anger control was similar for both genders. In conclusion, the results showed that those with high levels of trait anger and alcohol consumption showed the lowest levels of anger control in self-reported alcohol intoxicated states, and indicate the importance of separating between anger control when sober and intoxicated since anger control seems to be differently related to at least trait anger and alcohol consumption in these states.     

Early development of visual attention in infants in rural Malawi

Eye tracking research has shown that infants develop a repertoire of attentional capacities during the first year. The majority of studies examining the early development of attention comes from Western, high‐resource countries. We examined visual attention in a heterogeneous sample of infants in rural Malawi (N = 312–376, depending on analysis). Infants were assessed with eye‐tracking‐based tests that targeted visual orienting, anticipatory looking, and attention to faces at 7 and 9 months. Consistent with prior research, infants exhibited active visual search for salient visual targets, anticipatory saccades to predictable events, and a robust attentional bias for happy and fearful faces. Individual variations in these processes had low to moderate odd‐even split‐half and test‐retest reliability. There were no consistent associations between attention measures and gestational age, nutritional status, or characteristics of the rearing environment (i.e., maternal cognition, psychosocial well‐being, socioeconomic status, and care practices). The results replicate infants’ early attentional biases in a large, unique sample, and suggest that some of these biases (e.g., bias for faces) are pronounced in low‐resource settings. The results provided no evidence that the initial manifestation of infants’ attentional capacities is associated with risk factors that are common in low‐resource environments.     

The interaction between values and organizational identification in predicting suggestion‐making at work

The present study proposed and found that personal values and organizational identification interact in predicting making suggestions for organizational improvements at work. One hundred and forty‐eight employees of children's day‐care centres rated their values, their identification with the organization and their suggestion‐making behaviour. Their behaviour was also rated by their supervisors. As expected, the value dimension of openness to change vs. conservation predicted suggestion‐making more strongly amongst individuals highly identified with the organization than amongst individuals weakly identified with the organization. This was found using self‐ratings of behaviour as well as supervisor's rating of behaviour. The study points to the importance of values and identification in understanding suggestion‐making and innovative behaviour at work, and it opens new avenues for examining this interaction in predicting other kinds of organizational behaviours.     

What Eye Movements Tell About Identifying Compound Words in Reading and Top-Down Effects in Reading Long Texts

InthisarticleIsummarizetwolinesofeyemovementresearchthatwehaveconductedoverthepastseveralyearsinFinland.Onelineofre鄄searchdealswithhowcompetentadultreadersi鄄dentifycompoundwordsduringreading.Theotherlineofresearchdealswithhowaspecificreadinggoal(wecallitthereadingperspective)influencesthewayalongexpositorytextisreadandwhatisrememberedofthetext*.Inbothlinesofresearchwehaveappliedtheeyemovementtechniquebyregisteringreaders'eyemovementswhentheyreadsilentlysinglesentencesorlongertextsforcom鄄pr…     

Buying cars online: the adoption of the web for high‐involvement,high‐cost purchases

This research explores the adoption of the Web throughout the buying process within high‐value, high‐involvement product categories (the car sector). Diffusion of innovations (Rogers, 1983) and innovation resistance Ram and Sheth (1989) theories are utilised and found to be useful. The research is exploratory, based on eight qualitative, semi‐structured individual interviews with potential car buyers. Findings indicate that there is resistance to adopting online car purchase overall, but relative advantage is recognised at the early, information seeking stages. Consumers use the Web to improve the balance of power between themselves and car salespeople. Innovation resistance during later stages, result from the need for personal experience of the product prior to purchase, ie test driving, as well as the uncertainty regarding after‐sales support. Further resistance comes from a reluctance to give up the social aspects of car buying and a perceived inability to negotiate with websites. It is suggested that organisations operating in these markets should focus Web activities on information provision, or opt for a hybrid strategy using both online and offline channels. Copyright © 2002 Henry Stewart Publications.     

Eye movement assessment of selective attentional capture by emotional pictures

The eye-tracking method was used to assess attentional orienting to and engagement on emotional visual scenes. In Experiment 1, unpleasant, neutral, or pleasant target pictures were presented simultaneously with neutral control pictures in peripheral vision under instruction to compare pleasantness of the pictures. The probability of first fixating an emotional picture, and the frequency of subsequent fixations, were greater than those for neutral pictures. In Experiment 2, participants were instructed to avoid looking at the emotional pictures, but these were still more likely to be fixated first and gazed longer during the first-pass viewing than neutral pictures. Low-level visual features cannot explain the results. It is concluded that overt visual attention is captured by both unpleasant and pleasant emotional content.     

Is emotional content obtained from parafoveal words during reading? An eye movement analysis

An eye-movement-contingent display change technique was employed to study whether adult readers extract semantic information from parafoveal words during reading. Three types of parafoveal preview conditions were contrasted: an emotional word, a neutral word, and an identical word condition. To have a maximally effective parafoveal manipulation, high-arousal emotional words (sex- and threat-related and curse words) were used as parafoveal previews. Readers' eye fixation patterns around the target word revealed no evidence for parafoveal semantic processing. Furthermore, the pupil size showed no signs for an emotional response triggered by an emotional word previewed parafoveally. These results are consistent with the view that, as a rule, only the fixated word is processed to a semantic level during reading.     

Ambiguous pronoun resolution: contrasting the first-mention and subject-preference accounts

A visual-world eye-tracking experiment investigated the influence of order of mention and grammatical role on resolution of ambiguous pronouns in Finnish. According to the first-mention account, general cognitive structure-building processes make the first-mentioned noun phrase the preferred antecedent of an ambiguous pronoun. According to the subject-preference account, the preferred antecedent is the grammatical subject of the preceding clause or sentence. Participants listened to sentences in either subject-verb-object or object-verb-subject order; each was followed by a sentence containing an ambiguous pronoun that referred to either the subject or the object. Participants' eye movements were monitored while they looked at pictures representing the two possible antecedents of each pronoun. Analyses of the fixations on the pictures showed that listeners used both order-of-mention and grammatical-role information to resolve ambiguous pronouns.     

Innovation across cultures: Connecting leadership,identification, and creative behavior in organizations

Innovation is considered essential for today's organizations to survive and thrive. Researchers have also stressed the importance of leadership as a driver of followers' innovative work behavior (FIB). Yet, despite a large amount of research, three areas remain understudied: (a) The relative importance of different forms of leadership for FIB; (b) the mechanisms through which leadership impacts FIB; and (c) the degree to which relationships between leadership and FIB are generalizable across cultures. To address these lacunae, we propose an integrated model connecting four types of positive leadership behaviors, two types of identification (as mediating variables), and FIB. We tested our model in a global data set comprising responses of N = 7,225 participants from 23 countries, grouped into nine cultural clusters. Our results indicate that perceived LMX quality was the strongest relative predictor of FIB. Furthermore, the relationships between both perceived LMX quality and identity leadership with FIB were mediated by social identification. The indirect effect of LMX on FIB via social identification was stable across clusters, whereas the indirect effects of the other forms of leadership on FIB via social identification were stronger in countries high versus low on collectivism. Power distance did not influence the relations.     

Moral psychology of nursing robots: Exploring the role of robots in dilemmas of patient autonomy

Artificial intelligences (AIs) are widely used in tasks ranging from transportation to healthcare and military, but it is not yet known how people prefer them to act in ethically difficult situations. In five studies (an anthropological field study, n = 30, and four experiments, total n = 2150), we presented people with vignettes where a human or an advanced robot nurse is ordered by a doctor to forcefully medicate an unwilling patient. Participants were more accepting of a human nurse's than a robot nurse's forceful medication of the patient, and more accepting of (human or robot) nurses who respected patient autonomy rather than those that followed the orders to forcefully medicate (Study 2). The findings were robust against the perceived competence of the robot (Study 3), moral luck (whether the patient lived or died afterwards; Study 4), and command chain effects (Study 5; fully automated supervision or not). Thus, people prefer robots capable of disobeying orders in favour of abstract moral principles like valuing personal autonomy. Our studies fit in a new era in research, where moral psychological phenomena no longer reflect only interactions between people, but between people and autonomous AIs.