Leader Profiles and Their Effectiveness on Employees’ Outcomes

An underlying premise of the transformational–transactional leadership theory is that different forms of leadership can reside simultaneously within the same individual. This fundamental hypothesis has received scarce attention in the empirical literature. The objectives of this study are thus to examine whether leader profiles combining these leadership forms do exist and to evaluate how these profiles are associated with specific employee attitudes and behaviors. Results obtained from two different samples using cluster analyses revealed six different leader profiles (i.e., superleaders, transactors, moderate leaders, distant-visionary, distant-rewarding, and distant-punitive leaders). Our results showed that these types of leaders differ in terms of employees’ perceptions of trust, justice, and commitment, as well as supervisor-rated in-role and contextual performance. Results and implications for research and practice are discussed.     

The effects of age-of-acquisition and frequency-of-occurrence in visual word recognition: Further evidence from the Dutch language

It has been claimed that the frequency effect in visual word naming is an artefact of age-of-acquisition: Words are named faster not because they are encountered more often in texts, but because they have been acquired earlier. In a series of experiments using immediate naming, lexical decision, and masked priming, we found that frequency had a clear effect in lexical tasks when age-of-acquisition is controlled for. At the same time, age-of-acquisition was a significant variable in all tasks, whereas imageability had no effect. These results corroborate findings previously reported in English and Dutch.     

Resilient Children: Individual Differences in Developmental Outcome of Children Born to Drug Abusers

Since 1977, we have been following the neurobehavioral development of two groups of children: a group born to women on methadone maintenance and a drug-free comparison group. This study used the data on the children evaluated at 36 months of age to determine whether distinct patterns of developmental outcome can be identified, and which medical, familial, or environmental characteristics are associated with developmental differences. The children were clustered on four measures at 36 months: head circumference percentile, Merrill-Palmer Scale score, neurological evaluation, and referrals for developmental problems. Three distinct clusters emerged, with methadone children disproportionately frequent in Cluster 3, the group showing the poorest development. Comparisons of the clusters on a wide range of variables revealed consistent differences between Cluster 1 and Cluster 3 children in maternal responsiveness and incidence of neglect and family violence. These findings indicate that distinct developmental patterns do occur within this predominantly lower-class ghetto population; further, that children born to methadone-maintained women are more likely to show poor development. However, when the environment provides nurturance and stability, methadone children can show resilience and develop well.     

Memory for the Functional Characteristics of Climbing Walls: Perceiving Affordances

In 2 experiments, differences in visual perception of climbing routes (route finding) between 7 expert climbers, 4 novices, and 9 inexperienced participants were studied. In both experiments, participants reproduced on a scale model the locations and orientations of 23 holds of a climbing wall. The results showed that the expert climbers recalled more information and recalled clusters of information and that they focused on the functional aspects of a climbing wall, whereas they neglected its structural features. Inexperienced participants did not recall such clustered information, and they reported almost exclusively the structural features of the holds. The perception of nested affordances and the expert climbers' neglect of details are discussed.     

The Attachment and Clinical Issues Questionnaire (ACIQ): Scale Development

In line with dynamic systems and dialectical theories of development, it was theorized that a psychopathology such as an addiction could have several causes (equifinality) and that more specific diagnoses and treatments of the most salient clinical issues for individuals coming from different developmental paths could increase the success rates of most therapies. Further, the issues from a developmental dynamic systems perspective should include not only individual clinical issues, but also relational, familial, peer, and organizational functioning. The Attachment and Clinical Issues Questionnaire (ACIQ) was developed as a research and clinical instrument relevant to these concerns. The 29 scales were based on naturalistic observations of patients in treatment and 12-step groups, attachment theory, and the clinical literature dealing with the addictions. The attachment scales were taken from classic attachment theory but, in line with more recent formulations, included relations to mother, father, and partner. Study 1 found the ACIQ to have good coefficient alphas (.79), and factor analyses revealed that the eight factors loaded on different attachment figures and sets of clinical issues rather than attachment styles per se. Study 2 found test–retest reliability to be, on average, .79. The results were in line with the developmental hypothesis that partner and father attachments are different than attachments to mother, and that family and peer relations as well as clinical issues need to be considered separately.     

Do Boys Fight and Girls Cut? A General Strain Theory Approach to Gender and Deviance

Research finds that males are more likely to engage in delinquency than females. General strain theory (GST) suggests that males and females experience different emotions in response to strain leading to different deviant outcomes. Tests of GST to account for this issue are mixed, perhaps due to the reliance on measures that fail to take into account the gendered nature of responses to strain. The current study examines the mediation of strain by negative affect in the pathway to deviance using both a measure of externalizing deviance more commonly found among males (fighting) and a measure of internalizing deviance that is more commonly found among females (cutting oneself). Results indicate that emotions mediate some of the impact of strain on deviance and, while the path from strain to emotions is similar for boys and girls, emotions have differential effects on externalized and internalized deviance depending on sex.     

A Dual Process Model of Attitudes towards Immigration: Person × Residential Area Effects in a National Sample

This research took a person × situation approach to predicting prejudice by looking at how social worldviews interact with real‐world environmental factors to predict how people respond to immigrants within their local area. Taking a Dual Process Motivational approach, we hypothesized that a higher proportion of immigrants in the local community would be associated with negative attitudes toward immigration for respondents high in dangerous world beliefs. Conversely, we hypothesized that living in a highly affluent (as opposed to socioeconomically deprived) community would be associated with negative attitudes toward immigration for respondents high in competitive world beliefs. Both hypotheses were supported using regional information derived from national census data combined with representative survey data from a large telephone sample conducted in New Zealand (N = 6,489). These findings support the proposition that individual differences interact with specific features of the environment to predict people's levels of prejudice in distinct ways.     

Model for a flexible motor memory based on a self-active recurrent neural network

Using recent recurrent network architecture based on the reservoir computing approach, we propose and numerically simulate a model that is focused on the aspects of a flexible motor memory for the storage of elementary movement patterns into the synaptic weights of a neural network, so that the patterns can be retrieved at any time by simple static commands. The resulting motor memory is flexible in that it is capable to continuously modulate the stored patterns. The modulation consists in an approximately linear inter- and extrapolation, generating a large space of possible movements that have not been learned before. A recurrent network of thousand neurons is trained in a manner that corresponds to a realistic exercising scenario, with experimentally measured muscular activations and with kinetic data representing proprioceptive feedback. The network is “self-active” in that it maintains recurrent flow of activation even in the absence of input, a feature that resembles the “resting-state activity” found in the human and animal brain. The model involves the concept of “neural outsourcing” which amounts to the permanent shifting of computational load from higher to lower-level neural structures, which might help to explain why humans are able to execute learned skills in a fluent and flexible manner without the need for attention to the details of the movement.     

Impaired visual perception of hurtful actions in patients with chronic low back pain

Visually presented biological motion stimuli activate regions in the brain that are also related to musculo-skeletal pain. We therefore hypothesized that chronic pain impairs the perception of visually presented actions that involve body parts that hurt. In the first experiment, chronic back pain (CLBP) patients and healthy controls judged the lifted weight from point-light biological motion displays. An actor either lifted an invisible container (5, 10, or 15 kg) from the floor, or lifted and manipulated it from the right to the left. The latter involved twisting of the lower back and would be very painful for CLBP patients. All participants recognized the displayed actions, but CLBP patients were impaired in judging the difference in handled weights, especially for the trunk rotation. The second experiment involved discrimination between forward and backward walking. Here the patients were just as good as the controls, showing that the main result of the first experiment was indeed specific to the sensory aspects of the task, and not to general impairments or attentional deficits. The results thus indicate that the judgment of sensorimotor aspects of a visually displayed movement is specifically affected by chronic low back pain.     

Brain activity for visual judgment of lifted weight

It is well established that humans can recognize high-level aspects from point-light biological motion, such as gender and mood. If the task is to judge the manipulated weight we expected that sensorimotor regions should be recruited in the brain. Moreover, we have recently shown that chronic pain in a limb that is involved in the presented movement disturbs the weight judgment. We therefore hypothesized that some cortical regions usually activated during the processing of pain will also be activated while viewing point-light biological motion with the instruction to judge the manipulated weights. We investigated point-light biological motion of two types of movements performed with different weights in a blocked fMRI experiment in healthy subjects. In line with our a priori hypothesis, we found strong activity in the regions known as the neuromatrix of pain, such as the anterior cingulate (ACC), insula, as well as primary and secondary somatosensory regions. We also found activation in the occipital and temporal regions that are typical for biological motion, as well as regions in the cerebellum and prefrontal cortex. The activation of the somatosensory regions probably serves the judgment of the biological motion stimuli. Activation of the anterior cingulate and the insula might be explained by their role in the integration of behaviorally relevant information. Alternatively, these structures are known to be involved in the processing of nociceptive information and pain. So it seems possible that the interference between judgment of weights and perception of pain in chronic pain patients occurs in the somatosensory areas, anterior cingulate and/or insula. This finding provides important information as to the underlying mechanisms used for the weight judgment task, but also why chronic pain interferes with this task.