Work-related stress and well-being: the roles of direct action coping and palliative coping

The purpose of the present study is to analyze the roles of direct action coping and palliative coping in the relationship between work stressors and psychological well-being, as well as their possible interactions, in a sample of 464 bank employees. Hierarchical regression analyses showed main effects of direct action coping on well-being. Palliative coping predicts higher levels of psychological distress. Contrary to what was expected, the interactions between work stressors and direct action coping were not significant. Palliative coping interacted with work stressors when predicting psychosomatic complaints. The interaction between the two types of coping was significant on psychosomatic complaints and psychological distress, but not on job satisfaction. The paper discusses theoretical and practical implications of these results, in order to design intervention strategies to prevent and manage job stress.     

French norms of imagery for pictures, for concrete and abstract words]

This paper deals with French norms for mental image versus picture agreement for 138 pictures and the imagery value for 138 concrete words and 69 abstract words. The pictures were selected from Snodgrass et Vanderwart's norms (1980). The concrete words correspond to the dominant naming response to the pictorial stimuli. The abstract words were taken from verbal associative norms published by Ferrand (2001). The norms were established according to two variables: 1) mental image vs. picture agreement, and 2) imagery value of words. Three other variables were controlled: 1) picture naming agreement; 2) familiarity of objects referred to in the pictures and the concrete words, and 3) subjective verbal frequency of words. The originality of this work is to provide French imagery norms for the three kinds of stimuli usually compared in research on dual coding. Moreover, these studies focus on figurative and verbal stimuli variations in visual imagery processes.     

Social context,student's motivation,and academic achievement: Toward a process model

The purpose of the present research was to propose and test a motivational process model of academic achievement. The model posits that parental, teachers, and school administration support for students' autonomy positively influences students' perceived school competence and autonomy. In turn, perceived school competence and autonomy affect positively self-determined school motivation which in turn influences academic achievement. Two studies using a prospective design tested the adequacy of the model. In Study I, participants were 1,623 ninth-grade students. Results from structural equation modeling supported the motivational model. Participants in Study 2 were 1,098 tenth-grade students. Results from this study corroborated those of Study 1 controlling for students' prior achievement in the ninth grade. The role of self-determinod school motivation in academic achievement is discussed and avenues for future research are considered. This research is part of a larger project that is being funded by grants from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation; the San Francisco Foundation; the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation; the Danforth Foundation; the Smart Foundations; the Pew Charitable Trusts; the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation; the Annenberg Foundation; Spunk Fund, Inc.; the DeWitt Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund, Inc.; Louise and Claude Rosenberg; and the Center for Substance Abuse Prevention, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The views expressed in the paper are those of the authors and not necessarily of the funders. We are grateful to the many educators, students, and colleagues who cooperated with us on this project and to several anonymous reviewers who provided helpful suggestions.     

Factor structure in groups selected on observed scores

A new method is proposed for estimating factor means and factor covariances in a group of individuals selected on their observed scores. The selection variable is, for example, the total score on an admissions test. Given a factor model for the test items based on the group of test takers, we may be interested in the factor structure for those in the top quartile. The differences in factor means and covariances between this selected group and the full group gives useful information both on successful test performance and on test validity. The new method draws on the classic Pearson-Lawley selection formulas. It avoids the fallacy of factor analysis on the selected group, which would lead to incorrect estimates. The new method is applied to a simple factor structure model for the GMAT test. Although the majority of the GMAT items test verbal skills, it is found that a quantitative factor shows the greatest change in moving from average to top quartile test takers.     

Reading long words embedded in sentences: informativeness of word halves affects eye movements

The possibility was explored that the informativeness of a specific region within a word can influence eye movements during reading. In Experiment 1, words containing identifying information either toward the beginning or toward the end were displayed asymmetrically around the point of fixation so that the reader was initially presented with either the informative or noninformative zone. Words were read with shorter summed initial fixation time when the reading was started from the informative zone. In Experiments 2 and 3, the target words were presented in sentences that were to be comprehended. More attention was given to the informative endings of words than to redundant endings. The latter were also skipped more often. The duration of the first fixation was not affected by information distribution within the word, whereas the second fixation duration was. The results of these experiments lend good support to the hypothesis of immediate lexical control over fixation behavior and to the notion of a convenient viewing position.     

Bird on Dispositions and Antidotes

In The Philosophical Quarterly , 48 (1998), Alexander Bird raises an objection against the conditional analysis of dispositions: where an 'antidote' is present all the supposed conditions for manifestation of a disposition are fulfilled but the manifestation does not occur. But Bird's argument suffers from equivocation. If we spell out properly whether the disposition's conditions are to include the presence of the antidote or not, the apparent counter-examples disappear. So his examples do not undermine the conditional analysis of dispositions; they show merely that we need to be careful about describing the examples consistently.     

Subjective Situations and Logical Omniscience

The beliefs of the agents in a multi-agent system have been formally modelled in the last decades using doxastic logics. The possible worlds model and its associated Kripke semantics provide an intuitive semantics for these logics, but they commit us to model agents that are logically omniscient. We propose a way of avoiding this problem, using a new kind of entities called subjective situations. We define a new doxastic logic based on these entities and we show how the belief operators have some desirable properties, while avoiding logical omniscience. A comparison with two well-known proposals (Levesque's logic of explicit and implicit beliefs and Thijsse's hybrid sieve systems) is also provided.     

Associations between burnout and personal and professional characteristics: a study of Portuguese teachers

Social Psychology of Education - Recent research has suggested that teachers’ burnout is growing and, consequently, affecting their overall satisfaction with life and professional...     

The effect of competitive and cooperative contexts on comparative optimism

Several common characteristics are shared by competition and comparative optimism; and comparative optimism has often been observed in competitive environments like entrepreneurial fields or areas that require skills. Competitive context could be an explanatory factor for comparative optimism neglected to date. The aim of this article is to test the links between competition (vs. cooperation) and comparative optimism. In Study 1, participants in different academic majors with a more or less competitive nature (respectively, medical studies and human sciences studies) answered questions about their future and that of others. In Study 2, for the participants in the less competitive course of study (human sciences studies), we presented their studies as being either competitive or cooperative. The impact of this context was tested as a function of the closeness or distance between the participants and the comparison targets. The results of both studies showed that competition increased the expression of comparative optimism. In Study 2, this effect emerged more when the comparison target was distant than when it was close, with proximity hindering the competitive relationship between the self and others. The feeling of competition with others contributed to a better understanding of comparative optimism and initiated new explanations for its emergence.