Workplace ostracism And workplace behaviors: A moderated mediation model of perceived stress and psychological empowerment

Background and objectives: Workplace ostracism research has examined numerous underlying mechanisms to understand the link between workplace ostracism and behavioral outcomes. Ostracism has been suggested to be an interpersonal stressor; however, research has not investigated workplace ostracism from a stress perspective. Therefore, the study investigated the mediating effect of perceived stress for the relationships between workplace ostracism and helping behavior, voicing behavior, and task performance. The study also investigated the moderating effect of psychological empowerment for the relationships between perceived stress and behavioral outcomes.

Design: The study design was a three-wave self-reported questionnaire.

Method: The study sampled 225 full-time employees in South Korea and regression analyses with bootstrapping were conducted to test the moderated mediation models.

Results: The bootstrapped 95% CI around the indirect effects did not contain zero; therefore, perceived stress mediated the relationship between workplace ostracism and helping behavior (–.06), voicing behavior (–.07), and task performance (–.07). Further, the moderated mediation analyses found perceived stress mediated the relationships between workplace ostracism and behavioral outcomes only when individuals perceived low levels of psychological empowerment.

Conclusion: The findings suggest that workplace ostracism is a stressor and psychological empowerment can mitigate the negative effects of ostracism on behavioral outcomes.     

Xenophobic and racially motivated crime in Belgium: exploratory spatial data analysis and spatial regressions of structural covariates

This study employs exploratory spatial data analysis and spatial count regression models to examine xenophobic and racially motivated crimes in Belgium between 2000 and 2012. Drawing upon recent work, we conceptualize and operationalize hate crime in multiple ways, reflecting “spaces of hate,” victimization risks, and risks adjusted for random interactions. The results reveal that hate crimes exhibit a distinct spatial imprint, which corresponds to Belgium’s geographic regions. The findings also reaffirm previous research, indicating that the choice of the offset in the computation of hate crime rates is highly consequential for assessing the impact of relative group size.     

Grammatical Aspect in Early Child Mandarin: Evidence from a Preferential Looking Experiment

The study assessed 30-month-old Mandarin-speaking children’s awareness of aspectual distinctions involving the perfective marker le and the imperfective marker zhe in a preferential looking experiment. In the experiment, we presented our child subjects with a choice between two video clips (one depicting a closed event and the other depicting an on-going event), in the presence of an auditory stimulus (either the le sentence, the zhe sentence or the control sentence without any aspect marker). Children’s looking behavior in the task was recorded and analyzed. The results revealed 30-month-old children’s emerging sensitivity to the aspectual contrast between le and zhe. This was manifest by an increase in looking to the closed event when hearing the le sentence and an increase in looking to the on-going event when hearing the zhe sentence. The absence of le or zhe in the control sentence did not result in any increase or decrease in looking to either event. We also found that the effect of le on children’s looking behavior was immediate whereas the effect of zhe was late. We attributed this difference to the facilitative role of le in children’s sentence processing as well as their preference for the event boundary. The results lend support to the continuity view that functional morphemes like aspect markers are available to children early in language development.     

Multiple attentional control settings at distinct locations without the confounding of repetition priming

An attentional control setting (ACS), which is based on the task goal, induces involuntary attentional capture by a stimulus possessing a target-defining feature. It is unclear whether ACSs are maintained for multiple targets defined as conjunctions of a color and location. In the present study we examined the possibility of local ACSs for dual targets defined as combinations of color and location, using different paradigms: visual search in Experiment 1, and spatial cueing in Experiment 2. In Experiment 1, a distractor captured attention only when its features matched the ACSs. Likewise, in Experiment 2, a significant attentional capture effect was found only with a matching cue, whose color and location were in line with the conjunction of the target definition. Importantly, the identical pattern of attentional capture was also obtained for a neutral-color target, which was unlikely to be primed by any color of the cue. Thus, these findings imply that the attentional bias depending on the match between the cue and target did not result from cue–target repetition priming. The present study highlights that top-down attentional control can be set flexibly to accomplish a complex task goal efficiently.     

Visual statistical learning at basic and subordinate category levels in real-world images

Visual statistical learning (VSL) has been proposed as a powerful mechanism underlying the striking ability of human observers to handle complex visual environments. Previous studies have shown that VSL can occur when statistical information is embedded at multiple levels of abstraction, such as at semantically different category levels. In the present study, we further examined whether statistical regularities at a basic category level (e.g., a regular sequence of a bird, then a car, and then a dog) could influence the ability to extract statistical regularities at the subordinate level (e.g., a regular sequence of a parrot, then a sports car, and then an Eskimo dog). In the familiarization phase, participants were exposed to a stream of real-world images whose semantic categories had temporal regularities. Importantly, the temporal regularities existed at both the basic and subordinate levels, or the regularities existed at only the subordinate level, depending on the experimental condition. After completing the familiarization, participants performed a surprise two-alternative forced choice (2AFC) task for a familiarity judgment between two triplets in which the temporal regularities were either preserved or not preserved. Our results showed that the existence of statistical regularities at the basic level did not influence VSL at the subordinate level. The subsequent experiments showed these results consistently even when the basic-level categories had to be explicitly recognized and when the stimuli were not easily categorized at their subordinate level. Our results suggest that VSL is constrained to learn a particular level of patterns when patterns are presented across multiple levels.     

Reducing Implicit Stigmatizing Beliefs and Attitudes Toward Depression by Promoting Counterstereotypic Exemplars

Stigma prevents people with depression from seeking professional help, and effective strategies to reduce implicit stigmatizing beliefs and attitudes toward depression are needed. We developed stepwise strategies to promote counterstereotypic exemplars of people with depression and conducted an experiment (N?=?105) with a pretest–posttest control group design to examine effects of these strategies. Our results showed that implicit stigmatizing beliefs and attitudes were reduced more in the experimental group, in which the counterstereotypic strategies were implemented in addition to the provision of education regarding basic knowledge of depression, than in the control group, which received only education.     

Are Decisions Made by Group Representatives More Risk Averse? The Effect of Sense of Responsibility

We tested the hypothesis that a sense of responsibility drives group representatives' decisions to be more risk averse compared with decisions made by individuals. The hypothesis was supported when the monetary considerations (i.e., payoff inequality and the magnitude effect) were controlled for in the potential gain domain as well as in the potential loss domain. Evidence showed that this is because the group representatives were concerned about how they would view themselves (e.g., guilt and self‐blame) and also how they would be viewed by others (i.e., to avoid being blamed and looked down upon by others). This study provided new insights into understanding group representatives' decision making under risk. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

大学生的冲动性特质与自杀意念的关系:一个有调节的中介模型

以应激-易感模型为依据考察冲动性特质与自杀意念的关系,并在此基础上提出一个有调节的中介模型,探讨负性生活事件影响的中介作用以及家庭环境的调节作用。采用巴瑞特冲动性量表、青少年生活事件量表、家庭环境量表、贝克自杀意念量表对902名大学生进行集体施测,旨在考察负性生活事件的影响对大学生冲动性特质与自杀意念的中介作用以及家庭环境的调节作用,结果表明:(1)冲动性特质和负性生活事件的影响能正向预测大学生的自杀意念;(2)负性生活事件的影响在冲动性特质和自杀意念之间起中介作用;(3)负性生活事件影响的中介作用和冲动性特质的直接作用受家庭环境的调节。这些结果对于综合解释环境与个体因素对自杀意念的作用与机制具有重要意义。     

No evidence for unethical amnesia for imagined actions: A failed replication and extension

In a recent study, Kouchaki and Gino (2016) suggest that memory for unethical actions is impaired, regardless of whether such actions are real or imagined. However, as we argue in the current study, their claim that people develop “unethical amnesia” confuses two distinct and dissociable memory deficits: one affecting the phenomenology of remembering and another affecting memory accuracy. To further investigate whether unethical amnesia affects memory accuracy, we conducted three studies exploring unethical amnesia for imagined ethical violations. The first study (N = 228) attempts to directly replicate the only study from Kouchaki and Gino (2016) that includes a measure of memory accuracy. The second study (N = 232) attempts again to replicate these accuracy effects from Kouchaki and Gino (2016), while including several additional variables meant to potentially help in finding the effect. The third study (N = 228) is an attempted conceptual replication using the same paradigm as Kouchaki and Gino (2016), but with a new vignette describing a different moral violation. We did not find an unethical amnesia effect involving memory accuracy in any of our three studies. These results cast doubt upon the claim that memory accuracy is impaired for imagined unethical actions. Suggestions for further ways to study memory for moral and immoral actions are discussed.     

Dynamic Creative Interaction Networks and Team Creativity Evolution: A Longitudinal Study

To assess the dynamical effects of creative interaction networks on team creativity evolution, this paper elaborates a theoretical framework that links the key elements of creative interaction networks, including node, edge and network structure, to creativity in teams. The process of team creativity evolution is divided into four phases, including formation, growth, maturity and decline/restart. The importance of domain‐relevant knowledge, creativity‐relevant skill, interaction frequency, interaction length, network density and closeness centrality are emphasized in specific phases of team creativity evolution in a complex creative context. To test our assumptions, a longitudinal study of creative teams in a “Challenge Cup” Creative Business Plan Competition for university students is performed and the full networks of 17 creative entrepreneur teams are mapped. Both static comparison and dynamic analysis are conducted to analyze the relationship between creative interaction networks and team creativity evolution. For specific phases of team creativity evolution, we find confirmation of our predictions. The implications of dynamic creative interaction networks for all the phases of creative teams from formation to decline/restart are discussed.