Impact of situational legitimacy and assertiveness-related anxiety/discomfort on motivation and ability to generate effective criticism responses

This study compares the motivation and the quality of criticism responses of 697 undergraduates who were divided into three levels of situation legitimacy (high, moderate, and low) and two levels (top versus bottom 40 percent) of anxiety related to previous generalized assertiveness behaviours. The impact of gender was also studied. The results showed the legitimacy of the situation for a critical response (preassessed with peer hold-out groups) significantly affected participants' motivation to criticize as well as the quality of their critical responses, notwithstanding the poor quality of all criticism responses. Anxiety related to previous global assertiveness was related to high motivation but not to quality of criticism responses. There were no gender effects. Results are interpreted within an avoidance learning paradigm wherein the connotative meaning of criticism is incongruent with harmonious long-term relationships so that it is suppressed until virtually forced by the specifics of highly legitimate situations.     

Occupational Stress in Workers and Managers in Steelworks in China

Occupational stressors and strains of 121 Chinese steelwork employees and 122 managers were measured using the Chinese version of the Occupational Stress Indicator (OSI). It was found that factors intrinsic to the job, Type A behavior, logic, and organizational structure and climate were the main predictors of mental ill-health and physical ill-health in managers. Organizational structure and climate and relationships with other people were important predictors for workers. Management processes and organizational forces were the strongest predicting factors of job satisfaction in both samples. On certain OSI scales and subscales, managers scored statistically higher than workers. It is proposed that these results reflect the enormous economic and social changes currently taking place in China, together with certain features inherent in Chinese organizational and managerial processes.     

Context effects in sentence comprehension: A study of the subjective lexicon

These studies explore the role of context in determining what information about the meanings of words is activated in memory at the time a word is encountered in a sentence. Using a color-naming paradigm, it was shown that both meanings of a word that has two distinct meanings are activated in memory at the time the word is heard in a sentence. This activation occurs even when there is sufficient contextual information to indicate which meaning was intended by the speaker. These results support the hypothesis that there exists in memory an isolable subjective lexicon. They suggest that context which is effective in disambiguating lexical ambiguities in the language has its effect only at a relatively late stage in the cognitive processing involved in language comprehension.     

Parental Involvement in Elite Junior Slalom Canoeing

This study's aim was to examine elite youth athletes’ views on parental involvement in training, competition, and at home. Eight canoeists were interviewed up to 4 times and completed written diaries over a 6-week period. Results indicated that parents were generally deemed to have a positive influence through domain specific and cross-domain behaviors. Positive behaviors included parents focusing on their children's holistic development at home, motivational and constructive evaluation at training, and limiting demands on athletes through the provision of practical support, reading and understanding the situation and their child, and supporting the development of growth mind-set across all domains.     

An Attentional Goldilocks Effect: An Optimal Amount of Social Interactivity Promotes Word Learning From Video

Television can be a powerful education tool; however, content makers must understand the factors that engage attention and promote learning from screen media. Prior research has suggested that social engagement is critical for learning and that interactivity may enhance the educational quality of children’s media. The present study examined the effects of increasing the social interactivity of television on children’s visual attention and word learning. Three- to 5-year-old (M_age = 4;5, SD = 9 months) children completed a task in which they viewed videos of an actress teaching them the Swahili label for an on-screen image. Each child viewed these video clips in 4 conditions that parametrically manipulated social engagement and interactivity. We then tested whether each child had successfully learned the Swahili labels. Though 5-year-old children were able to learn words in all conditions, we found that there was an optimal level of social engagement that best supported learning for all participants, defined by engaging the child but not distracting from word labeling. Our eye-tracking data indicated that children in this condition spent more time looking at the target image and less time looking at the actress’s face as compared with the most interactive condition. These findings suggest that social interactivity is critical to engaging attention and promoting learning from screen media up until a certain point, after which social stimuli may draw attention away from target images and impair children’s word learning.     

On Silencing and Systematicity: The Challenge of the Drowning Case

Silencing is a speech‐related harm. We here focus on one particular account of silencing offered by Jennifer Hornsby and Rae Langton. According to this account, silencing is systematically generated, illocutionary‐communicative failure (of a very specific sort). We here raise an apparent challenge to that account. In particular, we offer an example—the drowning case—that meets these conditions of silencing but does not intuitively seem to be an instance of it. First, we explore several conditions one might add to the Hornsby‐Langton account, but we argue that none are satisfactory. Then, we further explore the systematicity condition, which is insufficiently characterized in the current literature. Although we explore several promising ways to further characterize this condition, we ultimately conclude that more work needs to be done. Consequently, because this systematicity condition is under‐specified, the Hornsby‐Langton account of silencing is incomplete.