The moderating effect of teamwork perceptions on the organizational politics--job satisfaction relationship

By using regression analyses on data from 355 full-time employees of a customer-service organization in the eastern United States, the authors tested the hypothesis that perceptions of organizational politics are more strongly related to job dissatisfaction among individuals who perceive low levels of teamwork importance than among those who perceive high levels of teamwork importance. Hierarchical moderated regression analysis of the data revealed that the moderating effect of teamwork importance was most relevant at average-to-high levels of perceived politics. That finding supports the assertion that one way to address the negative impact of organizational politics is to try to ensure that employees value teamwork.     

On fatalism, pessimism, and depressive symptoms among Mexican-American and other adolescents attending an obstetrics-gynecology clinic

There is growing evidence that Mexican-American adolescents may be at increased risk for depressive symptoms. We sought to replicate and explain this result in a study of adolescent girls attending an obstetric-gynecologic clinic. Three hundred and four girls of diverse ethnic backgrounds completed measures of depressive symptoms, negative attributional style, and locus of control. Consistent with predictions, we found that Mexican-American adolescent girls reported more depressive symptoms than adolescent girls from other ethnic backgrounds, and that Mexican-American adolescent girls displayed more negative cognitive styles than girls from other ethnic backgrounds. Depression differences appeared to be partly explained by differences in negative cognitive style. Implications of the results for a theory of increased Mexican-American adolescent depression, and for applied work, were discussed.     

The mind and brain scholar as a hitchhiker in the post-Gutenberg galaxy: publishing at 2000 and beyond

Electronic journal (e-journal) publishing has started to change the ways we think about publishing. However, many scholars and scientists in the mind and brain sciences are still ignorant of the new possibilities and ongoing debates. This paper will provide a summary of the issues involved, give an update of the current discussion, and supply practical information on issues related to e-journal publishing and self-archiving relevant for the mind and brain sciences. Issues such as differences between traditional and e-journal publishing, open archive initiatives, worldwide conventions, quality control, costs involved in e-journal publishing, and copyright questions will be addressed. Practical hints on how to self-archive, how to submit to the e-journal Psycoloquy, how to create an open research archive, and where to find information relevant to e-publishing will be supplied.     

Global cognitive decline in schizophrenia with remission of symptoms?

The relation of symptoms to cognitive dysfunction in schizophrenia is still controversial. This study was aimed (i) at verifying if a homogeneous sample of 10 young treated outpatients in remission from psychotic symptoms displays a characteristic pattern of cognitive dysfunction and (ii) at testing the issue of a general cognitive impairment. The neuropsychological performance of the patients was confronted with a large control group by means of Equivalent Scores, a normative method widely used in Italy, which allows direct, reliable comparison between tests and between patients. We found that our patients, as a group, were affected by a basic activation deficit in attention and by a semantic impairment. These deficits in symptom-free patients could indicate that their brains are in some ways working differently from those of normal controls and that this pattern is not necessarily linked to psychotic symptoms: their neuropsychological impairment might reflect a basic difference in the way of processing information that is always present and is independent of general intellectual decay.     

A dissociation between object manipulation spatial ability and spatial orientation ability

We developed psychometric tests of spatial orientation ability, in which people are shown a two-dimensional array of objects, imagine taking a perspective within the array, and indicate the direction to a target object from this perspective. Patterns of errors on these tests were consistent with experimental studies of perspective taking. Characteristic errors and verbal protocols supported the validity of the perspective-taking tests, suggesting that people encoded the objects in the display with respect to a body-centered coordinate system when the imagined perspective was more than 90 degrees different from the orientation of the display. By comparing alternative models in a confirmatory factor analysis, we found that the ability to mentally rotate and manipulate an imagined object (as measured by tests of spatial visualization and spatial relations) and the ability to reorient the imagined self (as measured by the perspective-taking tests) are separable spatial abilities.     

Mental rotation of objects retrieved from memory: a functional MRI study of spatial processing

This functional MRI study examined how people mentally rotate a 3-dimensional object (an alarm clock) that is retrieved from memory and rotated according to a sequence of auditory instructions. We manipulated the geometric properties of the rotation, such as having successive rotation steps around a single axis versus alternating between 2 axes. The latter condition produced much more activation in several areas. Also, the activation in several areas increased with the number of rotation steps. During successive rotations around a single axis, the activation was similar for rotations in the picture plane and rotations in depth. The parietal (but not extrastriate) activation was similar to mental rotation of a visually presented object. The findings indicate that a large-scale cortical network computes different types of spatial information by dynamically drawing on each of its components to a differential, situation-specific degree.     

Time is on my side: optimism in intertemporal choice

The present research examines the role of optimism on time preferences for both losses and gains. It is argued that optimism has asymmetric effects on time preferences for gains versus losses: one reason why decision makers prefer immediate gains is because they are optimistic that these gains will be followed by additional gains in future. In contrast, decision makers prefer to delay losses because they are optimistic that losses are avoidable in the future. Optimism about outcomes affects time preferences for both gains and losses, such that low optimism reduces the discount rates while increased optimism is associated with higher discount rates. This prediction was supported in two different domains: monetary outcomes (Study 1), and health (Study 2). Implications of these results for both research practice and time preferences in the real world are discussed.     

What's in a shape? Children represent shape variability differently than adults when naming objects

Children and adults often generalize a word to objects of the same shape. However, the shape properties on which generalization is based are unknown. We investigated the degree to which two shape dimensions were represented categorically by children and adults when learning names for objects. Multidimensional scaling techniques were used to establish the perceptual similarity of two sets of objects in Experiment 1. In Experiments 2 and 3, children (from 2;8 to 4;5 years of age) and adults participated in two tasks in which they learned a novel name for an exemplar. We then examined how often the novel name was generalized to different objects and to line drawings of the objects. In one task, participants generalized the names from memory; in a second task the exemplar was in front of the participant during generalization. Adults accepted names more often to objects that fell "within" the proposed shape boundaries than to objects that fell "across" the boundaries. Children, however, were just as likely to generalize names to novel objects that fell within as to objects that crossed the boundaries.