Relationships of career adaptabilities with explicit and implicit self-concepts

Career adaptability is a psychosocial construct that incorporates a set of essential resources to one's career development. The adaptability resources' relevance is even higher when it comes to former communist countries, such as Romania, where job security and stability were seen as central benefits for workers. The aim of this study was to provide a more comprehensive understanding of the stable underpinnings of career adaptabilities by exploring their relationships with aspects of the self that are driven by automatic processes and that are less affected by self-presentation biases. A sample of 359 participants completed the Career Adapt Abilities Scale (CAAS)-Romanian form, out of which a subsample of 212 participants also completed a set of scales comprising explicit and implicit measures of conscientiousness, extraversion, neuroticism, and self-esteem. Results revealed nonsignificant additive contributions of the implicit self-concept measures over what was already explained by the explicit self-concepts. The most noticeable effect resides in the significant interaction between explicit and implicit self-esteem in relation to control, confidence, and overall adaptability. These results reveal that individuals with high explicit and low implicit self-esteem perceive themselves as being the most adaptable. Notably, these results were obtained using a Romanian version of CAAS that possesses very good psychometric properties (i.e., excellent internal consistencies, the same four-factor multidimensional solution, replicated patterns of associations between CAAS and explicit self-concepts of personality).     

Storifying Samsø’s Renewable Energy Transition

Through a joint community effort Denmark’s Renewable Energy Island Samsø became self-sufficient with renewable energy over a period of 10 years from 1997 to 2007. Today, the story about Samsø’s successful energy transition has become a global export and a widely known model of community building, public participation and shared ownership in renewable energy technologies and transition processes. What has allowed the Samsø narrative to travel so widely has been the effective ‘transition story’ created about the islanders’ efforts. This transition story, however, has become fixed with the years and has assumed an ideal-typical character. Meanwhile, the challenges and costs inherent in the complicated socio-material process of transition are underestimated and largely forgotten. While such transition stories are indeed inspiring, the ideal-typical narrative may stand in the way of the development of further local energy transitions, as challenging elements of the process are downplayed to strengthen the narrative power of the story. Ethnographic stories about Samsø complicate the island’s transition narrative and add nuance to the Samsø story, highlighting its discrepancies and problematizing the effects of such well-crafted transition narratives. This tendency toward the ‘storification’ of transition processes is not restricted to Samsø; it is employed as a tactics by environmental organizations operating globally.     

Age-related differences in sequence learning: Findings from two visuo-motor sequence learning tasks

The Serial Reaction Time Task (SRTT) is thought to assess implicit learning, which seems to be preserved with age. However, the reaction time (RT) measures employed on implicit-like tasks might be too unreliable to detect individual differences. We investigated whether RT-based measures mask age effects by comparing the performance of 43 younger and 35 older adults on SRTT and an explicit-like Predictive Sequence Learning Task (PSLT). RT-based measures (difference scores and a ratio) were collected for both tasks, and accuracy was additionally measured for PSLT. We also measured fluid abilities. The RT-difference scores indicated preserved SRTT and PSLT performance with age and did not correlate with fluid abilities, while ratio RT and the accuracy-based measures indicated age-related decline and correlated with fluid abilities. Therefore, RT-difference scores might mask individual differences, which compromises the interpretation of previous studies using SRTT.     

Correction to: From Teachers’ Work Engagement to Pupils’ Positive Affect: a Weekly Diary Study on the Role of Pupils’ Autonomous Motivation

Applied Research in Quality of Life - A Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11482-021-09935-5     

Links between Family Social Status and Preschoolers' Persistence: The Role of Maternal Values and Quality of Parenting

Children who develop persistence in the preschool years are likely to function more effectively during the transition into school. In this study of 231 3‐year‐old children and their mothers, we examined the relations among family social status, maternal values of self‐direction, quality of parenting, and children's persistence in challenging tasks. Results of structural equation modelling path analysis indicated that family social status was related to maternal values of self‐direction, which in turn were associated with the quality of maternal cognitive stimulation and emotional support and child persistence at preschool age. Family social status and maternal values were indirectly related to child persistence through emotional support. Focusing on parental values of self‐direction and provision of support during challenging tasks may help to reduce the gap in school success between children from lower and higher social status families. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Having Responsive Facebook Friends Affects the Satisfaction of Psychological Needs More Than Having Many Facebook Friends

The use of social networking sites, such as Facebook, provides ample opportunities for the pursuit of interpersonal connection but may also bring to mind one's social isolation. The present research examined the effects of interpersonal neglect (i.e., low number of responding Facebook friends) on the satisfaction of fundamental human needs. Two studies revealed that receiving few responses from one's Facebook friends threatens the needs for belonging, self-esteem, control, and meaningful existence. These effects were observable over and above the impact of general social connection to others (i.e., total number of Facebook friends) and tone of responses.     

A study of the dynamics of sex differences in adulthood

Studies of gender differences using primarily young individuals show that males, on average, perform better than females in physical activities but worse than females on tests of verbal abilities. There is however a controversy about the existence of these sex differences in adulthood. Our study used 1271 participants from four cultural backgrounds (Chinese, multi‐generation Canadians, Indu‐Canadians, and European‐Canadians) divided in five age groups. We measured sex differences in the time required for participants to complete a lexical task experiment, and also assessed their verbal tempo and physical endurance using a validated temperament test (Structure of Temperament Questionnaire). We found a significant female advantage in time on the lexical task and on the temperament scale of social–verbal tempo, and a male advantage on the temperament scale of physical endurance. These sex differences, however, were more pronounced in young age groups (17–24), fading in older groups. This “middle age–middle sex” phenomenon suggests that sex differences in these two types of abilities observed in younger groups might be “a matter of age,” and should not be attributed to gender in general. A one‐dimensional approach to sex differences (common in meta‐analytic studies) therefore overlooks a possible interaction of sex differences with age.