Discriminability of brightness change for infants

Four-month-old human infants who were habituated to a 490-nm stimulus of 3.5 cd · m^?2 luminance did not show recovery when the stimulus was increased or decreased in luminance by a factor of 2 but not changed in hue. A fourfold luminance increase produced a recovery in looking time. When compared with earlier results on simultaneous discrimination of brightness change, the results imply that infants differ from adults more in ability to code or retrieve than in ability to detect intensive differences. The implication is further supported by the differentiating response of infants to changes in hue.     

Focus of Attention and Employee Reactions to Job Change1

Two hundred and five telecommunications field-service technicians underwent a job change and responded to our questionnaire. The amount of time since experiencing the job change was measured for each technician. We found support for the hypothesis that the more an employee focuses on his or her job, the stronger that employee will react to a job change. Technicians who focused highly on their jobs reported fewer excused absences and were more job involved as time passed after the change, compared to technicians who focused little on their jobs. Moreover, high off-job focused technicians became less committed, less job involved, less satisfied, and more likely to leave over time. Focus also was related to perceptions of job complexity, and moderated the relationship between complexity and employee responses. These findings provide further support for hypotheses posited by Gardner, Dunham, Cummings, and Pierce (1987a, 1989) regarding employee focus of attention.     

A nonhuman primate's expectations about object motion and destination: The importance of self-propelled movement and animacy

Human infants have considerable understanding of why objects move and what causes them to take one trajectory over another. Here, we explore the possibility that this capacity is shared with other nonhumans and present results from preferential looking time tests with a New World monkey, the cotton-top tamarin. Experiments examined whether individuals form different expectations about an object's potential capacity to change locations. Test objects were: 1) self-propelled, moving, animate; 2) self-propelled, moving, inanimate; 3) non-self-propelled, moving due to an external agent, inanimate; 4) non-self-propelled, motionless, inanimate. When category 1 objects, either a live mouse or frog, emerged from behind an occluder in a novel location, this did not affect looking time; subjects appeared to expect such changes. In contrast, when the other objects emerged in a novel location following occlusion from view, subjects looked longer than when the object emerged in the location seen prior to occlusion; such locational changes were apparently not expected. Some feature other than self-propelled motion accounts for the tamarins’ looking time responses and at least one candidate feature is whether the object is animate or inanimate.     

Study of the energy correlates in the learning of a complex self-paced cyclical skill

This study examines changes in movement parameters and energy expense during the learning of a cyclical task performed on a “ski simulator”. Five subjects performed five training sessions (each of four 4-minute learning periods separated by a 4-minute rest) and then took a post-test one week later. The instructions were to make movements which were “as wide and frequent as possible”. The subjects were filmed on videotape and their oxygen intake was measured. Movement amplitude, movement frequency, oxygen intake, and a “movement cost” index were calculated. The results indicated a significant increase in movement amplitude and oxygen intake and a decrease in movement cost. The movement frequency of all subjects tended towards the same final value. Two simultaneous changes could occur, with large individual differences: an increase in energy expense due to the increase in the amount of work done, a decrease in energy expense due to the increase in movement economy.     

An examination of automatic vs. controlled information processing in the employment interview: The case of minority applicants

Sex Roles - Based on the automatic vs. controlled attention argument, this paper tested the contention that the amount of job-relevant information given to decision makers prior to the employment...     

Supervisor Emotionally Intelligent Behavior and Employee Creativity

In a national study of employees across industries (N = 14,645), we examined the role of supervisor emotionally intelligent behavior for employee opportunity to grow, their affect at work, and creativity/innovation at work. Employees reported on their supervisors' emotionally intelligent behavior (perceiving, using, understanding, and managing emotions), and self‐reported about their job experiences and creativity/innovation at work. Supervisor emotionally intelligent behavior was related to employee affect at work assessed using both open‐ended questions and emotion rating scales. Furthermore, supervisor emotionally intelligent behavior was linked to employee creativity/innovation through its effect on employee opportunity to grow and higher experience of positive affect (supporting a serial mediation model). We discuss the implications of the results for creativity/innovation research and innovation management.     

Are criminals better lie detectors? Investigating offenders' abilities in the context of deception detection

The present research examined lie detection abilities of a rarely investigated group, namely offenders. Results of the studies conducted thus far indicated a better performance of offenders compared to non‐offenders when discriminating between true and false messages. With two new studies, we aimed at replicating offenders' superior abilities in the context of deception detection. Results of Study 1 (N = 76 males), in contrast, revealed that offenders were significantly worse at accurately classifying true and false messages compared to non‐offenders (students). Results of Study 2 (N = 175 males) revealed that offenders' discrimination performance was not significantly different compared to non‐offenders (clinic staff). An internal meta‐analysis yielded no significant difference between offenders and non‐offenders, questioning the generalizability of previous findings.