Rule-breaking,crime, and entrepreneurship: A replication and extension study with 37-year longitudinal data

Is there an intimate biographical relationship between entrepreneurship and antisocial tendencies? Drawing from Zhang and Arvey's retrospective study [Zhang, Z. & Arvey, R.D. (2009). Rule breaking in adolescence and entrepreneurial status: An empirical investigation. Journal of Business Venturing, 24(5), 436–447], which found a link between entrepreneurship status of male adults and their recalled early antisocial rule-breaking behavior in adolescence, the present study utilized prospective longitudinal data from a Swedish cohort study to clarify the connection between antisocial rule-breaking, crime, and entrepreneurship by applying a developmental perspective. Regression results, which controlled for early socioeconomic background and intellectual competencies, indeed identified early antisocial rule-breaking behavior in adolescence as a valid positive predictor of a subsequent entrepreneurial career in adulthood in men (but not in women). In contrast, registered crime (teenage crime, adult crime, and prototypical trajectories of criminal behavior) as well as rule-breaking attitude in adolescence, as a more latent form of early antisocial tendencies, were relatively unimportant in the prediction of entrepreneurship in both genders. The results are discussed with a focus on rule-breaking and agency theories of entrepreneurship, youth theories, and the importance of looking at gender differences in entrepreneurial development.     

Job insecurity and well-being: The moderating role of job dependence

Job insecurity has become more relevant during the last decades as more flexibility from the workforce and organizations is demanded in the labour market. It has frequently been suggested that job insecurity is a more severe stressor for those who are more dependent on their job. The present study investigates the association between job insecurity and employee well-being by focusing on how employees’ dependence on the job moderates this relationship. Two types of financial dependence (subjective financial dependence and relative contribution to the household income) were studied, along with an indicator of a more psychological dependence on work in general (work involvement). In addition to this, both quantitative and qualitative job insecurity were included. The proposed relations were tested in a sample of Swedish accountancy firm employees. The results of moderated hierarchical regression analyses showed that subjective financial dependence, household contribution, and work involvement moderated the relation between both job insecurity dimensions and job satisfaction. No moderations were found with mental well-being as an outcome. This implies that the extent to which someone depends on their job is important for how job insecurity relates to job satisfaction.     

Mindfulness reduces habitual responding based on implicit knowledge: Evidence from artificial grammar learning

Participants were unknowingly exposed to complex regularities in a working memory task. The existence of implicit knowledge was subsequently inferred from a preference for stimuli with similar grammatical regularities. Several affective traits have been shown to influence AGL performance positively, many of which are related to a tendency for automatic responding. We therefore tested whether the mindfulness trait predicted a reduction of grammatically congruent preferences, and used emotional primes to explore the influence of affect. Mindfulness was shown to correlate negatively with grammatically congruent responses. Negative primes were shown to result in faster and more negative evaluations. We conclude that grammatically congruent preference ratings rely on habitual responses, and that our findings provide empirical evidence for the non-reactive disposition of the mindfulness trait.     

Knowledge and Attitudes Regarding Non-Invasive Prenatal Testing (NIPT) and Preferences for Risk Information among High School Students in Sweden

Non-invasive prenatal testing (NIPT) was recently introduced for prenatal testing of genetic disorders. Cell-free fetal DNA is present in maternal blood during pregnancy and enables detection of fetal chromosome aberrations in a maternal blood sample. The public perspective to this new, simple method has not been illuminated. The views of young people (i.e. future parents) are important to develop suitable counseling strategies regarding prenatal testing. The aim was to explore Swedish high school students’ attitudes, knowledge and preferences regarding NIPT. A questionnaire was completed by 305 students recruited from one high school in Stockholm, November and December 2014. Most students (80 %) considered prenatal testing as good. The majority (65 %) was positive or very positive towards NIPT and 62 % stated that they potentially would like to undergo the test if they or their partner was pregnant. The vast majority (94 %) requested further information about NIPT. Most students (61 %) preferred verbal information, whereas 20 % preferred information via the Internet. The majority of the high school students was positive towards prenatal testing and most was positive towards NIPT. Further, information was requested by the vast majority before making a decision about NIPT. Most of the students preferred verbal information and to a lesser extent information via the Internet. The attitudes, knowledge and preferences for risk information concerning NIPT in young adults are important, in order to increase knowledge on how to educate and inform future parents.     

The importance of importance in the physical self: support for the theoretically appealing but empirically elusive model of James

This study tested James's theoretical assumption that the importance people attribute to different physical self-domains, in combination with perceived competence in those domains, influences higher order self-concepts. Data from four large samples (total N=1,831) from Sweden, Great Britain, Portugal, and Turkey were analyzed. A new version of an instrument, the Physical Self-Perception Profile-Revised (PSPP-R), was used to measure perceived competence and importance of physical self-domains, along with global self-esteem. Competence-importance interactions contributed significantly to higher order self-concepts in 3 of 4 PSPP subdomains. The same result was found in the structural equation modeling analyses and latent interaction analyses. Idiographic analyses showed that domains rated as intraindividually more important explained more global self-esteem variance compared with less important domains. In general, support for James's hypothesis was found across the different analyses. Differences between the methodology and results in the present study compared with previous studies are discussed.     

Oh, it's you again: memory interference from irrelevant emotional and neutral faces

In two experiments, repeated runs of a continuous recognition task were employed to assess healthy participants' ability to handle interference from irrelevant emotional and neutral memories. Presumably, such interference can be due to salience from either emotional or mnemonic processing. In both experiments, participants made more false alarms to emotional faces that were familiar from preceding runs (i.e., emotion-induced temporal-context confusion). Participants performed well for neutral faces in the first experiment including only two runs. However, increasing the number of runs to four in the second experiment induced temporal context confusion also for neutral faces. The findings suggest that memory interference can be induced when the salience of irrelevant information is erroneously considered diagnostic for memory judgements.     

Hypnotic Psychotherapy With Sex Offenders

The authors review the literature on the prevalence of sex offenders; multiple treatment modalities; and implications of the use of hypnotic psychotherapy, coupled with cognitive behavioral treatment programs, for treating sex offenders.     

What’s New about the New Induction?

The problem of underdetermination is thought to hold important lessons for philosophy of science. Yet, as Kyle Stanford has recently argued, typical treatments of it offer only restatements of familiar philosophical problems. Following suggestions in Duhem and Sklar, Stanford calls for a New Induction from the history of science. It will provide proof, he thinks, of “the kind of underdetermination that the history of science reveals to be a distinctive and genuine threat to even our best scientific theories” (Stanford 2001, p. S12). This paper examines Stanford’s New Induction and argues that it – like the other forms of underdetermination that he criticizes – merely recapitulates familiar philosophical conundra.     

The interaction between baseline trait anxiety and trauma exposure as predictor of post-trauma symptoms of anxiety and insomnia

In this study a prospective design was used to investigate the interaction between baseline trait anxiety and exposure to traumatic situations on post-trauma symptoms of anxiety and insomnia in a sample of Swedish peacekeeping soldiers serving in Kosovo. The result showed that pre-trauma trait anxiety interacted with exposure to traumatic situations predicting a higher post-trauma distress. Further, baseline trait anxiety and baseline symptoms of anxiety and insomnia predicted post-trauma symptoms of anxiety and insomnia. The results support a diathesis stress model in which high trait anxiety interacts with trauma exposure in the elicitation of anxiety-related distress but the study needs to be replicated before further conclusions can be drawn.