Why Be an Anti‐Individualist?

Anti-individualists claim that concepts are individuated with an eye to purely external facts about a subject's environment about which she may be ignorant or mistaken. This paper offers a novel reason for thinking that anti-individualistic concepts are an ineliminable part of commonsense psychology. Our commitment to anti-individualism, I argue, is ultimately grounded in a rational epistemic agent's commitment to refining her own representational practices in the light of new and surprising information about her environment. Since anti-individualism is an implicit part of responsible epistemic practices, we cannot abandon it without compromising our own epistemic agency. The story I tell about the regulation of one's own representational practices yields a new account of the identity conditions for anti-individualistic concepts.     

Sad Songs Say So Much: The Paradoxical Pleasures of Sad Music

In this article I revisit the question of why people like to listen to sad music. If music can induce genuine sadness in listeners, why would we deliberately seek out such negative experiences? Drawing from work in both the philosophy and psychology of music, as well as work in the philosophy and science of affect, I argue to shift the focus of the question to music‐induced moods, not emotions. This reframes the debate but does not dissolve the puzzle. To understand what is appealing about the affective experience of listening to sad music, I suggest we take into account the unique features of music‐induced sad mood. I argue that sad mood and a certain sort of focused music listening are mutually reinforcing in ways that differ from other mood/music interactions. Sad mood and sad music are, in a sense, made for each other.     

PAY SATISFACTION AND ORGANIZATIONAL OUTCOMES

Using multi level and multi method data, we investigated the relationship between pay satisfaction and outcomes at the organizational level of analysis. Individual-level survey data on pay satisfaction (including satisfaction with pay level, satisfaction with pay structure, satisfaction with pay raises, and benefits) were collected from 6,394 public school teachers. Organizational-level outcome data, both survey and archival, were collected from the 117 public school districts employing these teachers. With respect to its influence on organizational outcomes, pay satisfaction was positively related to school district-level academic performance and negatively related to average teacher intention to quit. We also explored the relationship between district-level union satisfaction and pay satisfaction, which was found to be positive. We discuss implications of our findings for for-profit companies that are knowledge based and human capital intensive (e.g., the service sector) and address possible future directions for research on pay satisfaction.     

SELF-MONITORING AS A MODERATOR OF THE RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN PERSONALITY TRAITS AND PERFORMANCE

This study examined the hypothesis that self-monitoring moderates the relationship between Big Five personality traits and interpersonal performance. The findings from a sample of 102 employed Executive MBA students reveal that when self-monitoring was high the relationships between 3 of the Big Five personality traits (Extraversion, Emotional Stability, and Openness to Experience) and supervisory ratings of interpersonal performance were attenuated. These effects were replicated using peer ratings of interpersonal performance for Extraversion and Emotional Stability but not for Openness to Experience. Further, as expected, self-monitoring did not moderate the relationships between personality traits and supervisory or peer ratings of task performance. Implications for future research in the area of personality and other motivational theories are discussed.     

Maternal Input to Twin and Singleton Children Implications for Language Acquisition

Differences in the conversational characteristics of mothers of two-year-old twins and mothers of two-year-old singletons with older siblings were investigated. Three maternal conversational characteristics were examined: discourse features, illocutionary force features, and style parameters. The twins' and singletons' language skills were also compared and the relationship between the maternal conversational characteristics and language development scores was explored. The mothers of twins were found to differ significantly from the mothers of singleton children in their conversational behavior. The twin children were found to score significantly lower than the singleton children on measures of language expression and comprehension. Significant correlations were found between the maternal input features and the children's language scores. It is proposed that twins receive less responsive and less conversation-eliciting maternal speech. The possibility is offered that this style of speech may play a role in their slower rate of language development.     

Relationship quality promotes the desire for closeness among distressed avoidantly attached individuals

Individuals who experience attachment avoidance tend to desire less closeness in their romantic relationships than others, especially when experiencing distress. However, emerging research suggests that avoidant individuals value social closeness and are more comfortable with it when they perceive that seeking closeness is welcomed. Thus, this research examined the relationship characteristics that might predict avoidant individuals seeking more closeness than they would otherwise. We investigated whether perceiving their relationship to be high quality would predict avoidant individuals desiring more closeness when distressed. We hypothesized that avoidant individuals who perceived their relationship to be high quality would desire greater closeness with their partners when distressed—counteracting their tendency to eschew relational closeness. A study of dating couples supported this hypothesis.