Adolescents in conflict: Intercultural contact attitudes of immigrant mothers and adolescents as predictors of family conflicts

Recent research demonstrates that intergenerational differences in immigrant families' adaptation can be detrimental for family functioning. However, most of the findings originate from immigrant groups in North America who face different situations compared with European Diaspora returnees. This comparative study investigated whether ethnic German Diaspora immigrant adolescents' and mothers' disagreement about the desirability of adolescents' intercultural contact with native peers relates to more conflict in the family domain. In addition, we accounted for general developmental factors predicting family conflict by considering adolescents' background in terms of prosocial behaviour and hyperactivity. Participants comprised 185 Diaspora immigrant mother–adolescent dyads from the former Soviet Union living in Germany (adolescents: mean age 15.7 years, 60% female) and 197 native German mother–adolescent dyads (adolescents: mean age 14.7 years, 53% female). Results indicated a similar level of family conflict in immigrant and native families. However, conflict was elevated in those immigrant families disagreeing on intercultural contact attitudes, independent of the significant effects of adolescents' background of prosocial behaviour or hyperactivity. Our study highlights potential side effects in the family domain, if immigrant adolescents and parents disagree in their attitude regarding adaptation to the host culture's life domains, such as contact with native peers.     

Self-directedness and the susceptibility to distraction by saliency

People with low Self-directedness (SD) tend to explain their behaviour as being significantly influenced by events in the external environment. One important dimension of external cues is their level of salience: highly salient external stimuli are more likely to capture attention, even when such stimuli are not relevant to goals. We examined whether adults reporting low SD would exhibit greater susceptibility to distraction by highly salient external stimuli. Fifty-four (42 males) subjects completed the Attention Modulation by Salience Task (AMST) measuring reaction times to early- or late-onset auditory stimuli in the presence of high- or low-salience visual distractors. SD was assessed via self-report, and analyses tested the relationship between SD and performance on the AMST. Results showed a slowed early response to auditory cues during high salience compared to low salience. Indeed, individuals reporting low SD showed stronger salience interference, suggesting that external causality attribution is accompanied by a subconscious perceptual deficit.     

The consequences of job crafting: a three-wave study

This longitudinal study examined the consequences of job crafting on two important employee outcomes: psychological capital (PsyCap) as a work-related personal resource and work engagement as an indicator of employee well-being. The study also tested the reverse causation effects of PsyCap and work engagement on job crafting. It used a three-wave, three-month panel design to survey 940 employees from three European countries working in a broad range of economic sectors and occupations. The results of the cross-lagged longitudinal structural equation modelling demonstrated that job crafting predicted PsyCap and work engagement over time. No reverse causation effects were found. Overall, this study shows that when individuals proactively build a resourceful and challenging work environment for themselves, it can lead to diverse positive outcomes that are crucial to employee health and well-being. Employees should therefore be encouraged and be given the opportunity to craft their own jobs.     

Impression‐formation advantage in memory for faces: When eyewitnesses are interested in targets' likeability,rather than their identity

The advantage in person memory of impression formation over memory task instructions is shown to extend to the eyewitness identification paradigm. Instructions to form an impression of target persons led to more accurate identifications in subsequent photo line‐ups than explicit instructions to memorize the targets (Experiment 1). Prior knowledge that a crime was going on did not affect performance. Two confounded components of the successful instruction condition were decomposed in Experiment 2, showing that the enhanced performance is due to the impression task proper, rather than the absence of explicit memory instructions. Analyses of hits and false alarms revealed that the positive influence of impression formation on discrimination performance was due to a genuine enhancement in discrimination ability rather than merely a shift toward a stricter response criterion. Experiment 3 provided some evidence to suggest that eyewitness performance can even be influenced by recontextualization efforts and impression judgments at the time of retrieval. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Evaluating Models of Gesture and Speech Production for People With Aphasia

People with aphasia use gestures not only to communicate relevant content but also to compensate for their verbal limitations. The Sketch Model (De Ruiter, 2000) assumes a flexible relationship between gesture and speech with the possibility of a compensatory use of the two modalities. In the successor of the Sketch Model, the AR-Sketch Model (De Ruiter, 2017), the relationship between iconic gestures and speech is no longer assumed to be flexible and compensatory, but instead iconic gestures are assumed to express information that is redundant to speech. In this study, we evaluated the contradictory predictions of the Sketch Model and the AR-Sketch Model using data collected from people with aphasia as well as a group of people without language impairment. We only found compensatory use of gesture in the people with aphasia, whereas the people without language impairments made very little compensatory use of gestures. Hence, the people with aphasia gestured according to the prediction of the Sketch Model, whereas the people without language impairment did not. We conclude that aphasia fundamentally changes the relationship of gesture and speech.     

AMICAI: A Method Based on Risk Analysis to Integrate Responsible Research and Innovation into the Work of Research and Innovation Practitioners

Science and Engineering Ethics - The integration of ethics into the day-to-day work of research and innovation (R&I) is an important but difficult challenge. However, with the Aachen method...     

Only the right noise? Effects of phonetic and visual input variability on 14‐month‐olds' minimal pair word learning

Seminal work by Werker and colleagues (Stager & Werker [1997] Nature, 388, 381–382) has found that 14‐month‐old infants do not show evidence for learning minimal pairs in the habituation‐switch paradigm. However, when multiple speakers produce the minimal pair in acoustically variable ways, infants' performance improves in comparison to a single speaker condition (Rost & McMurray [2009] Developmental Science, 12, 339–349). The current study further extends these results and assesses how different kinds of input variability affect 14‐month‐olds' minimal pair learning in the habituation‐switch paradigm testing German learning infants. The first two experiments investigated word learning when the labels were spoken by a single speaker versus when the labels were spoken by multiple speakers. In the third experiment we studied whether non‐acoustic variability, implemented by visual variability of the objects presented together with the labels, would also affect minimal pair learning. We found enhanced learning in the multiple speakers compared to the single speaker condition, confirming previous findings with English‐learning infants. In contrast, visual variability of the presented objects did not support learning. These findings both confirm and better delimit the beneficial role of speech‐specific variability in minimal pair learning. Finally, we review different proposals on the mechanisms via which variability confers benefits to learning and outline what may be likely principles that underlie this benefit. We highlight among these the multiplicity of acoustic cues signalling phonemic contrasts and the presence of relations among these cues. It is in these relations where we trace part of the source for the apparent paradoxical benefit of variability in learning.     

Where to seat the applicant? How spatial distance influences the effect of self‐promotion on interviewer evaluations

In high‐stakes contexts such as job interviews, people seek to be evaluated favorably by others and they attempt to accomplish such favorable judgments particularly through self‐promotional behaviors. We sought to examine the persuasiveness of job candidates’ self‐promotion by examining job applicants’ subjective hireability from the perspective of construal‐level theory. Construal‐level theory states that perceptions occur from different levels of psychological distance (i.e., distal vs. proximal). This distance is created by other dimensions of distance (e.g., spatial or social distance) and affects how individuals construe incoming information. From a large distance, people more readily process abstract information, whereas from a close distance, people more readily process concrete information. Specifically, construal compatibility occurs when abstract versus concrete features of a stimulus match the psychological distance experienced by message‐recipients. Construal compatibility (vs. incompatibility) makes evaluations (e.g., of messages) more favorable. To apply this principle to self‐promotion, we created self‐promotional videos of a job interview, in which the applicant sat either far away from or close to the hiring manager (manipulating psychological distance); the applicant, then, used either direct or indirect self‐promotion (manipulating message construal level). The results showed participants reported stronger intention to hire the applicant when distance matched (vs. did not match) the type of self‐promotion the applicant used.