The Effect of Anticipated Service Interruptions on Disaster Preparedness Intentions1

This study examined the effects of anticipated service interruptions on natural disaster preparedness intentions. In a 3 × 2 × 2 factorial experiment, students were exposed to scenarios with varied levels of anticipated basic service interruption (no mention, low, high), and person‐relative‐to event (PrE) factors shown to affect preparedness (low, high), across 2 types of disaster (earthquake, flood). Results indicated no main or interaction effects related to type of natural disasters, significant main effects for levels of PrE and service interruption, and a significant PrE × Service Interruption interaction. Anticipated service interruption affected preparedness, regardless of level of PrE. Bringing service interruption into awareness increases willingness to prepare, suggesting that public‐health efforts should include messages regarding potential interruption of services.     

Why seeking help from teammates is a blessing and a curse: a theory of help seeking and individual creativity in team contexts

Research has not explored the extent to which seeking help from teammates positively relates to a person's own creativity. This question is important to explore as help seeking is commonly enacted in organizations and may come with reciprocation costs that may also diminish creativity. Results based on 291 employees in a single division of a large multinational organization revealed that seeking help predicted creativity and mediated the relationship between intrinsic motivation and creativity. However, help seekers also incurred reciprocation costs in that they tended to give more help to teammates, and giving help to teammates was negatively related to creativity. In general, giving higher levels of help attenuated the positive relationship between help seeking and creativity. We also tested an integrated model to show that help giving moderated the mediated relationship between intrinsic motivation and creativity via help seeking, such that higher levels of help giving attenuated this mediated effect. We discuss theoretical and practical implications recommending additional research regarding the interpersonal creative process in team contexts.     

Does Kantian mental content externalism help metaphysical realists?

Standard interpretations of Kant’s transcendental idealism take it as a commitment to the view that the objects of cognition are structured or made by conditions imposed by the mind, and therefore to what Van Cleve calls “honest-to-God idealism”. Against this view, many more recent investigations of Kant’s theory of representation and cognitive significance have been able to show that Kant is committed to a certain form of Mental Content Externalism, and therefore to the realist view that the objects involved in experience and empirical knowledge are mind-independent particulars. Some of these recent interpreters have taken this result to demonstrate an internal incompatibility between Kant‘s transcendental idealism and his own model of cognitive content and the environmental conditions of empirical knowledge. Against this suggestion, this article argues that, while Kant’s theory of content is indeed best construed as externalist, an adequately adjusted form of transcendental idealism is not only compatible with this externalism, but in fact supports it. More generally, the article develops the position that mental content externalism cannot force the adoption of metaphysical realism.     

Does latent deprivation lead to psychological distress? Investigating Jahoda's model in a four‐wave study

Unemployment has serious negative effects on psychological health, and yet the underlying mechanisms remain unknown. According to the latent deprivation model, it is the lack of latent benefits of work associated with unemployment, which leads to psychological distress. In a four‐wave study among employed persons, unemployed persons, and persons out of the labour force (OLF) (N_T1= 1,026), this assumption was tested cross‐sectionally as well as longitudinally. Multiple mediation analyses show the expected differences in distress between the employed, unemployed, and OLF persons and indicate that part of this difference can be explained by differential access to the latent benefits. Furthermore, cross‐lagged structural equation modelling confirms that a deprivation of latent benefits leads to a decrease in psychological health 6 months later. Findings regarding the different quality of the latent benefits in relation to each other and over time when predicting psychological health are discussed.     

From the Work One Knows the Worker: A Systematic Review of the Challenges,Solutions, and Steps to Creating Synthetic Validity

Synthetic validity has been promised as the future for selection, providing an inexpensive, fast, high‐quality, legally defensible, and easily administered process. Despite 50 years of development, this promise has yet to be realized. However, recent advances in areas such as validity generalization indicate that synthetic validity is technically feasible and practically achievable. Consolidating new and previous work carried out on two synthetic validity strategies, the job‐requirement matrix and job component validity, we review the methodological steps required to build them and provide working examples. Although the resources required for full realization of synthetic validity are large, similar, although larger, projects have been undertaken in the past and in the present, and there is increasing infrastructure to facilitate them in the future.     

Developmental changes in automatic rule‐learning mechanisms across early childhood

Infants’ ability to learn complex linguistic regularities from early on has been revealed by electrophysiological studies indicating that 3‐month‐olds, but not adults, can automatically detect non‐adjacent dependencies between syllables. While different ERP responses in adults and infants suggest that both linguistic rule learning and its link to basic auditory processing undergo developmental changes, systematic investigations of the developmental trajectories are scarce. In the present study, we assessed 2‐ and 4‐year‐olds’ ERP indicators of pitch discrimination and linguistic rule learning in a syllable‐based oddball design. To test for the relation between auditory discrimination and rule learning, ERP responses to pitch changes were used as predictor for potential linguistic rule‐learning effects. Results revealed that 2‐year‐olds, but not 4‐year‐olds, showed ERP markers of rule learning. Although, 2‐year‐olds’ rule learning was not dependent on differences in pitch perception, 4‐year‐old children demonstrated a dependency, such that those children who showed more pronounced responses to pitch changes still showed an effect of rule learning. These results narrow down the developmental decline of the ability for automatic linguistic rule learning to the age between 2 and 4 years, and, moreover, point towards a strong modification of this change by auditory processes. At an age when the ability of automatic linguistic rule learning phases out, rule learning can still be observed in children with enhanced auditory responses. The observed interrelations are plausible causes for age‐of‐acquisition effects and inter‐individual differences in language learning.     

Decision noise: An explanation for observed violations of signal detection theory

In signal detection theory (SDT), responses are governed by perceptual noise and a flexible decision criterion. Recent criticisms of SDT (see, e.g., Balakrishnan, 1999) have identified violations of its assumptions, and researchers have suggested that SDT fundamentally misrepresents perceptual and decision processes. We hypothesize that, instead, these violations of SDT stem from decision noise: the inability to use deterministic response criteria. In order to investigate this hypothesis, we present a simple extension of SDT—the decision noise model—with which we demonstrate that shifts in a decision criterion can be masked by decision noise. In addition, we propose a new statistic that can help identify whether the violations of SDT stem from perceptual or from decision processes. The results of a stimulus classification experiment—together with model fits to past experiments—show that decision noise substantially affects performance. These findings suggest that decision noise is important across a wide range of tasks and needs to be better understood in order to accurately measure perceptual processes.     

The Effects of Adult Suggestion and Child Consistency on Young Children's Reports1

The purpose of the present study was to contrast the effects of children's response consistency and adult leading questions in a structured memory interview. Children (N = 70) who viewed a 2‐min video clip were asked 3 questions (leading, misleading, and neutral) related to the video. Children's responses (assent vs. deny) were predicted by the type of question asked by the adult (neutral, leading, and misleading), but not by the previous response given by the child or the child's age in months. Specifically, children assented the least often to misleading questions. Accuracy was predicted by both question type and in the last question–answer pair, children's previous response accuracy. These findings are discussed with relation to interview dynamics.     

The effects of different intensity levels of background noise on dichotic listening to consonant-vowel syllables

It has previously been shown that the right ear advantage in dichotic listening to consonant-vowel syllables is affected if a background noise is presented at the same time as the dichotic stimuli. What is not known is, however, if there is also an effect of varying the intensity level of the background noise. We therefore presented conversation or traffic noise background noise simultaneously with the dichotic syllable stimuli to healthy adult subjects. The intensity of the background noises varied between 50-65 dB in steps of 5 dB. The results showed that the right ear correct reports decreased, while left ear correct reports increased as a consequence of increasing background noise intensity. The effects were also stronger for the right ear, and for the traffic background noise condition, particularly at the two highest intensity levels. The results are discussed in terms of alertness and attentional mechanisms.     

Nature and Nationhood: Danish Perspectives

In this paper, I shall discuss Danish perspectives on nature, showing the interdependence of conceptions of ‘nature’ and ‘nationhood’ in the formations of a particular cultural community. Nature, thus construed, is never innocent of culture and cannot therefore simply be ‘restored’ to some pristine, pre-lapsarian state. On the other hand, invocations of nature are effectively calls to action, often of a sort that involves a degree of (limited) restoration and conservation.