Socialization in an International Context

The globalization of the world economy, the widespread expansion of corporations into overseas markets and the increased use of expatriate and repatriate job assignments have all fundamentally changed the context in which organizational socialization now takes place. This article examines the distinctive socialization issues made salient by this organizational context change. The paper reviews existing theoretical and empirical research, provides hypotheses to guide future socialization research in this area and discusses the implications of an international context for the management of organizational socialization programmes.     

Heterogeneity in the Unemployment Experience: A Cluster Analytic Investigation1

Two hundred forty-seven unemployed individuals completed a battery of scales assessing constructs relevant to the unemployment situation. These constructs included: financial situation, employment commitment, job-seeking confidence, time structure, mental health, cognitive impairment, physical symptoms, and unemployment negativity (how upset an individual is about being unemployed). The results on a subset of these variables were cluster analyzed to assess whether the unemployed individuals in this sample formed meaningful subtypes. The cluster analysis revealed four distinct subtypes of unemployed individuals. The subtypes that were identified can help us to understand the heterogeneity inherent in the unemployment experience. The differences among the subtypes also have implications for designing outplacement and intervention workshops for the unemployed.     

Assessing mental capacity and susceptibility to undue influence

Clinicians are commonly asked to participate in the determination of an individual's mental capacity and susceptibility to undue influence. Vague statutory definitions and lack of operational criteria for both determinations have contributed to inconsistency in the quality and usefulness of expert input to these determinations. Questionnaire responses of 119 probate judges from the U.S. indicate that this input is quite influential despite the problems mentioned above. This paper presents and discusses the judges' views on selected procedural and conceptual aspects of expert evaluation and testimony.     

Exposure-based models of human parsing: Evidence for the use of coarse-grained (nonlexical) statistical records

Several current models of human parsing maintain that initial structural decisions are influenced (or tuned) by the listener's or reader's prior contact with language. The precise workings of these models depend upon the grain, or level of detail, at which previous exposures to language are analyzed and used to influence parsing decisions. Some models are premised upon the use of fine-grained records (such as lexical cooccurrence statistics). Others use coarser measures. The present paper considers the viability of models based exclusively on the use of fine-grained lexical records. The results of several studies are reviewed and the evidence suggests that, if they are to account for the data, experience-based parsers must draw upon records or representations that capture statistical regularities beyond the lexical level. This poses problems for several parsing models in the literature.Aspects of this work were supported by ESRC grant No. R0023 4062 to Don Mitchell, by a Spanish Government grant DGICVT No. PB-92-0656-C04-02 to Fernando Cuetos, and by the Belgian National Fonds voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek, of which Marc Brysbaert is a Research Associate. We are grateful to Chuck Clifton, Barbara Hemforth, Martin Pickering, Matt Traxler, and an anonymous reviewer-all of whom made helpful comments on an earlier draft of the paper.     

Traditional vs. nontraditional women and men's perceptions of the personalities and physiques of ideal women and men

Traditional and nontraditional women and men's perceptions of ideal people, in terms of both traits and physiques, were assessed using 80 male and 80 female Caucasian undergraduates as study participants. The data indicated that traditional women and men perceived the ideal male as mesomorphic and as having more instrumental than expressive traits. Nontraditional women and men also favored a mesomorphic physique for the ideal male, but they differed from traditionals in that they saw this mesomorphic male as being androgynous in regard to traits. Concerning the ideal female, traditional and nontraditional women and men preferred an androgynous physique, but they differed in their perceptions of the ideal personality for a woman. Traditional women and men perceived their ideal women as having more expressive than instrumental traits, whereas nontraditional women and men saw their ideal women as being androgynous in regard to traits. The results are discussed within the framework of Bem's gender schema and enculturated lens theories.     

Antecedents of information-processing skills in infants: Habituation, novelty responsiveness, and cross-modal transfer

Three skills which characterize cognitive functioning in human infants in the middle of the first year of life—habituation, novelty responsiveness, and cross-modal transfer—predict mental ability in later childhood. Antecedents of each skill at 5 months postnatal were examined in a short-term prospective longitudinal study of infant ability and maternal intelligence and interaction style. Infant perceptuocognitive performance at 2 months, maternal intelligence, and maternal responsiveness at 5 months relate to the expression of the three infant cognitive skills, but in different ways. Variation in infant information-processing abilities can be explained by specific child and maternal factors that are evident soon after birth.     

Behavioral estimates of interhemispheric transmission time and the signal detection method: A reappraisal

On the basis of a review of the literature, Bashore (1981) concluded that only simple reaction time experiments with manual responses yielded consistent behavioral estimates of interhemispheric transmission time. A closer look at the data, however, revealed that these experiments were the only ones in which large numbers of observations were invariably obtained from many subjects. To investigate whether the methodological flaw was the origin of Bashore’s conclusion, two experiments were run in which subjects had to react to lateralized light flashes. The first experiment dealt with manual reactions, the second with verbal reactions. Each experiment included a condition without catch trials (i.e., simple reaction time) and two conditions with catch trials. Catch trials were trials in which no stimulus was given and in which the response was to be withheld. Both experiments returned consistent estimates of interhemispheric transmission time in the range of 2–3 msec. No differences were found between the simple reaction time condition and the signal detection conditions with catch trials. Data were analyzed according to the variable criterion theory. This showed that the effect of catch trials, as well as the effect of interhemispheric transmission, was situated at the height of the detection criterion, and not in the rate of the information transmission.     

Natural laws and the problem of provisos

Hempel and Giere contend that the existence of provisos poses grave difficulties for any regularity account of physical law. However, Hempel and Giere rely upon a mistaken conception of the way in which statements acquire their content. By correcting this mistake, I remove the problem Hempel and Giere identify but reveal a different problem that provisos pose for a regularity account — indeed, for any account of physical law according to which the state of affairs described by a law-statement presupposes a Humean regularity. These considerations suggest a normative analysis of law-statements. On this view, law-statements are not distinguished from accidental generalizations by the kind of Humean regularities they describe because a law-statement need not describe any Humean regularity. Rather, a law-statement says that in certain contexts, one ought to regard the assertion of a given type of claim, if made with justification, as a proper way to justify a claim of a certain other kind.     

A Playroom Observation Procedure to Assess Children with Mental Retardation and ADHD

Forty-two children (ages 6 to 12 years old) with moderate mental retardation to borderline intellectual functioning were studied in a laboratory playroom setting to determine whether children identified as ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) or controls differed on activity and attentional measures. Children with ADHD were further divided into ADHD + conduct problems (ADHD + CD) and ADHD-only subgroups (with an ADHD-combined group comprising children of both subgroups). An interval recording system was used to code observations of independent play and a restricted academic task. Results indicated that the ADHD-combined group was significantly more vocal and engaged in a significantly greater number of toy changes than controls during independent play. Significant group differences were also noted during the restricted academic task, with the ADHD-combined and ADHD + CD groups more off-task and engaging in a greater number of toy touches than controls. Discriminant analyses found independent play measures to predict group membership in 70 percent of cases (ADHD-combined vs. controls), but in only 64 percent of cases using measures from the restricted academic task. No significant findings resulted when the ADHD subjects were further divided into two subgroups. Despite some inconsistent findings, such laboratory-based observations may be of value in the diagnosis of ADHD in children with moderate mental retardation to borderline intellectual functioning.