Workplace mistreatment and emotional labor: A latent profile analysis

Motivation and Emotion - By adopting a person-centered approach, this research explored emotional labor latent profiles based on employees’ levels of surface acting and deep acting. Further,...     

Evolutionary autonomous agents and the naturalization of phenomenology

The phenomenological goal of grounding the content of conceptual thought in the background understanding of everyday, skillful coping was approached using evolutionary autonomous agent (EAA) methodology. The behavior of an EAA evolved to perform a specified motor task was identified with skillful coping. Changes in the dynamics of the EAA controller occurred when the EAA encountered an unexpected obstacle with loss of longer time scale components in its hierarchical temporal organization. These temporal changes are consistent with the phenomenological changes which we experience with breakdown during equipment use with our adoption of a more immediate, determinate stance. Since this latter experience is the basis of conceptual thought, the EAA paradigm goes some way in providing a naturalized explanation for the grounding of the content of conceptual thought in everyday, skillful coping in a manner that is physiologically plausible and phenomenologically accurate.     

The effect of number of options on choices involving delayed causation

A video game was adapted to investigate the effect of the number of alternatives on causal judgment in a complex environment involving targets with delayed outcomes. Participants were presented with groups of potential targets. Each target (the candidate cause) fired at random relative to the others, with one target in each group causing a delayed explosion (the effect).The participants were tasked with discriminating which of the potential targets was producing the effect. Experiment 1 revealed a main effect of delay on discriminability but no effect of the number of alternatives. However, latencies did increase as the number of alternatives increased, suggesting that discriminability was maintained by compensating with longer observation times. But, a similar increase in latency for longer delays did not offset the detrimental impact of an increase in cause-effect delay. Experiment 2 replicated the outcome under conditions in which participants were always required to observe for 16 s before making a decision; under the most difficult conditions, however, the limited viewing time started to reveal an effect of the number of alternatives on the participants' ability to discriminate a true cause from foils. Evidence suggests that participants' decisions were determined primarily by differences in the number of cause-effect contiguities experienced for the true cause versus the foils.     

Bystander Responses to Risk for Rape Perpetrated by a Friend,Acquaintance, or Stranger

This study explored bystander responses to risk for an alcohol-facilitated rape perpetrated by a friend, acquaintance, or stranger. Undergraduates (N = 331) were randomly assigned to read 1 of 3 scenarios in which an apparently sober male friend, acquaintance, or stranger leads an intoxicated woman into a bedroom. Participants completed self-report measures of intent to directly intervene and barriers to intervention. Compared to men, women reported greater intent to help the potential victim and fewer barriers to intervention. Participant gender moderated the effect of the bystander’s relationship with the potential perpetrator on intent to confront and responsibility to intervene. Men reported more confrontation and more responsibility to intervene when perpetrators were identified as either friends or acquaintances than strangers. In contrast, women reported more confrontation when perpetrators were identified as friends than either strangers or acquaintances. Bystander education programs that address specific barriers to intervening with strangers and acquaintances could promote more frequent bystander behavior.     

Interactive effects of subjective memory complaints and hypertension on learning and memory performance in the elderly

This study evaluated whether the relation between subjective memory complaints and cognitive performance is influenced by the presence of hypertension in the elderly. One hundred and five healthy older adults, 70–89 years of age, with and without hypertension treatment or diagnosis, completed a scale of subjective memory complaints. Participants were divided into those with mild memory concerns and those with minimal or no complaints. All participants completed a battery of neuropsychological tests including measures of verbal and nonverbal memory. After controlling for differences in age, gender, education, and overall intellectual ability, there were significant main effects for memory concerns and significant interactions for memory complaints and hypertension on several measures of memory performance. There were no main effects for hypertension on memory performance. Simple effects analyses of the interactions showed that the hypertensive complainers demonstrated poorer performance on measures of long-term memory and greater reliance on short-term recall than the hypertensive non-complainers. There were no differences in memory performance for the non-hypertensive groups. Among healthy elderly community-dwelling adults, those with mild subjective memory complaints in the context of hypertension demonstrated greater objective cognitive difficulties than those without hypertension as well as a greater reliance on a less efficient learning strategy. These findings suggest that memory concerns in the presence of hypertension may be important when evaluating treatment efficacy in these individuals and for identifying differences in cognitive aging.     

Impact of material vs. experiential purchase types on happiness: The moderating role of self‐discrepancy

Most literature suggests that consumers are happier when they spend their money on experience, rather than material purchases, on the premise that consumers may evaluate material possessions largely on the basis of their functional utility and ability to fulfill basic human needs; experiential consumption reportedly fulfills mainly psychological needs. The present research addresses material purchases that fulfill not only functional but also psychological needs (e.g., status purchase). The results reveal that consumers with high self‐discrepancy are more apt to derive happiness from material status purchases than those with low self‐discrepancy (Experiments 1 and 2); this effect is mediated by the motives for goal pursuit (Experiment 3), as triggered by the desire to narrow the gap between the actual self and an ideal self. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Does Social Capital Affect Immigrant Political Participation? Lessons from a Small-N Study of Migrant Political Participation in Rome

Social capital captures the idea that relationships hold value. While this idea has intuitive appeal, there is significant debate regarding its utility to political science research. This article employs original data collected in Rome, Italy, to test a new model that recognizes the distinction between levels of social capital and introduces the idea of conflict between these levels into the field’s current theorizing on immigrant political participation. The findings presented here lend further support for the proposed relationship between migration-related factors, such as language proficiency and length of stay and participation. The article’s main finding is that the interactions between group-level and individual-level social capital plays an important role in shaping participation. Specifically, because it reinforces group-level social capital, bonding social capital favors participation in the formal, institutionally sanctioned activity of voting, while bridging social capital—which mitigates the effect of group-level social capital—favors participation in the informal political activity, protest.     

Attitudes Toward Affirmative Action: Correlations With Demographic Variables and With Beliefs About Targets,Actions, and Economic Effects1

Two studies assessed beliefs and attitudes toward affirmative action in the workplace. Opposition to affirmative action was most strongly associated with respondent race (White) and political conservatism, the belief that it involves strong actions (preferential hiring and setting aside jobs), and the expectation that it will hurt company performance. Attitudes were also positively associated with perceived frequency of employment discrimination experienced by the target group and negatively associated with their resulting employment opportunities. Regression results revealed that economic consequences for the company overwhelmed beliefs about target group employment opportunities in predicting affirmative action attitudes. Respondents associated aftirmative action most strongly with Black and Hispanic targets, and White respondents whose affirmative action schemas featured these 2 targets had the most negative attitudes.