Attitudes toward illegal immigration: a cross-national methodological comparison

This research is an examination of the generalizability of a Likert-type scale originally devised to measure attitudes toward illegal immigrants (IA) in the United States. The current authors administered this scale across 4 national samples using several methodological procedures. Undergraduate students (631) responded to the IA scale (R. Ommundsen & K. S. Larsen, 1997) at the University of Oslo, Oregon State University, the University of Copenhagen, and Vrije University of Amsterdam. The authors' main purpose was to evaluate the adequacy of the 20-item IA scale by examining possible problems with method and translation. A translation study carried out with the Danish, Norwegian, and Dutch samples (N = 299) showed that the various national versions were fairly accurate and contained largely the same meanings. The use of procrustes analysis of the IA scale yielded 3 factors in all 4 national samples. The coefficient of congruence of these 3 orthogonally rotated factor matrices, with the U.S. factor matrix as target, varied from .80 to .95, supporting the cross-national robustness of the scale. In the search for a more economical cumulative scale, a Mokken analysis yielded a 5-item scale that represented the aforementioned 3 factors and was stable across national samples.     

Group belongingness and procedural justice: social inclusion and exclusion by peers affects the psychology of voice

The authors focus on the relation between group membership and procedural justice. They argue that whether people are socially included or excluded by their peers influences their reactions to unrelated experiences of procedural justice. Findings from 2 experiments corroborate the prediction that reactions to voice as opposed to no-voice procedures are affected more strongly when people are included in a group than when they are excluded from a group. These findings are extended with a 3rd experiment that shows that people who generally experience higher levels of inclusion in their lives respond more strongly to voice as opposed to no-voice procedures. It is concluded that people's reactions to procedural justice are moderated by people's level of inclusion in social groups.     

Exploring how people respond to conflicts between self‐interest and fairness: Influence of threats to the self on affective reactions to advantageous inequity

Two studies examined how people deal with conflicts between their self‐interest concerns and their striving for fairness. Specifically, the affective reactions to outcome arrangements in which people receive better outcomes than comparable other persons, were studied. These arrangements of advantageous inequity constitute situations in which fairness and self‐interest concerns are in conflict. Building on the social psychology of the self, it was predicted, and found, in both field and lab experiments that when people experience a self‐threat, they react more positively to arrangements of advantageous inequity than when not experiencing this threat. This supports the view that people's need for positive information about their selves is an important factor in the underlying psychological processes of the way that people deal with conflicts between their fairness and self‐interest concerns.     

PLATT: A flexible platform for experimental research on team performance in complex environments

The present article introduces PLATT, a recently developed task environment for controlled experimental research on team performance in complex environments. PLATT was developed to meet the research demands posed by the complexity that present-day teams face. It consists of a flexible, modular software architecture and research-specific scenarios. The scenarios can target various types of tasks (e.g., planning, problem solving, and decision making) in different operational contexts. Different software configurations can be used to investigate questions pertaining to team structure, team virtuality, and multiteam systems. We describe the software architecture, one of the scenarios, and the broad range of automated and embedded measurement possibilities that PLATT offers. To illustrate PLATT’s possibilities, in the present article, we describe a number of experiments that have used PLATT for a variety of research questions. We conclude that PLATT meets the formulated research demands and provides researchers with a flexible platform to investigate the complex issues that present-day teams face.     

How do people react to negative procedures? On the moderating role of authority’s biased attitudes

The authors focus on the effects an authority’s apparent inconsistency between persons on judgments of relational treatment and procedural justice following negative procedures (i.e., procedures that people commonly regard as unfair). In Experiment 1, participants responded most negatively following a procedure that denied them, but granted another participant, an opportunity to voice an opinion when the intergroup context raised suspicions of bias (i.e., when both the experimenter and another participant were outgroup members). In Experiment 2, participants responded most negatively when the experimenter had expressed biased attitudes in favor of another participant, but this effect occurred only following procedures that denied participants a voice opportunity. We conclude that authority’s biased attitudes help people to make sense of negative procedure information.     

Procedural justice and intragroup status: Knowing where we stand in a group enhances reactions to procedures

The current research investigates the role of relative intragroup status as a moderator of people’s reactions to procedural justice. Based on a review of the procedural justice literature, the authors argue that information about intragroup status influences people’s reactions to variations in procedural justice. In correspondence with predictions, two experiments show that reactions of people who have been informed about their intragroup status position (either low, average, or high) are influenced more strongly by voice as opposed to no-voice procedures than people who are not informed about their intragroup status. It is concluded that knowing where we stand in a group enhances reactions to procedural justice.     

On the benign qualities of behavioral disinhibition: because of the prosocial nature of people, behavioral disinhibition can weaken pleasure with getting more than you deserve

This article focuses on social situations in which people are surprised about what is happening and inhibited about how to respond to the situation at hand. We study these situations by examining a classic topic in social psychology: how people respond to receiving better outcomes than are deserved. In these situations, the actions of an authority or a coworker push in the direction of accepting and enjoying the unfair outcome, whereas personal values for most people push in the direction of rejecting or being displeased with the outcome. This conflict may inhibit people's response to the advantageous but unfair outcomes. If people are indeed inhibited about how to respond to these kinds of outcomes, then lowering behavioral inhibition by reminding people of having acted in the past without inhibitions (in a manner that is unrelated to the outcomes participants subsequently receive) should affect reactions to the outcomes. Specifically, we hypothesize that because many people are prosocial and want to adhere to principles of fairness, reminders of behavioral disinhibition will lead to less pleasure with the unfairly obtained outcomes. The results of 8 experiments (conducted both inside and outside the psychology laboratory) revealed evidence for this benign disinhibition effect on various reactions to outcomes that are better than deserved. In further accordance with our line of reasoning, the effect is particularly pronounced among those who adhere to a prosocial orientation or who have adopted a prosocial mindset and is not observed among those with proself orientations or mindsets.     

Pink Noise in Language Production: A Nonlinear Approach to the Multilingual Lexicon

Most theories of (second) language processing are based on component-dominant models that assume linear relationships between linguistic factors affecting language production and language comprehension. In this contribution we argue that in the wake of current nonlinear approaches to cognition, language processing must be seen in terms of interaction-dominant dynamics manifested in 1/f scaling relations. Our study showed that increased experience in second language use leads to scaling relations that more and more tend toward pink noise. Moreover, our data tentatively show that intensive immersion in a second-language context leads to steeper spectral slopes in response time series of that same language. These findings demonstrate the significant contribution of nonlinear analyses to the study of real-time language processing in multilinguals.     

on the clinical validity of the maslach burnout inventory and the burnout measure

Abstract

Current knowledge about burnout suffers from a healthy worker bias since only working - and thus relatively healthy - employees have been investigated. The main objective of this study is to examine - for the first time among employees who sought psychological treatment - the validity of the two most widely used burnout instruments; the Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI) and the Burnout Measure (BM). Two groups were distinguished: a “burned out” group (n = 71) that suffers from work-related neurasthenia (according to ICD-10 criteria), and a “non-burned out” group (n = 68). Results show that: (1) the validity of the three-factor structure of the MBI and the BM is confirmed; (2) burnout can partly be differentiated from other mental syndromes (e.g., anxiety and depression); and (3) two MBI-scales (Emotional Exhaustion and Depersonalization) and one BM-scale (Exhaustion) are able to discriminate between burned out and non-burned out employees. The practical implications of these results are discussed.