Soldiers Lead Themselves to More Success: A Self-Leadership Intervention Study

Neck and Manz (1999) Neck, C. P., & Manz, C. C. (1999). In search of the self-led soldier: Army leadership in the twenty-first century. In J. G. Hunt, G. E. Dodge, & L. Wong (Eds.), Out of the box leadership: Transforming the twenty-first army and other top organizations (pp. 153–176). Stamford, CT: JAI Press. [Google Scholar] elaborated in their article “In Search of the Self-Lead Soldier” on the need for continuous improvement of personnel qualities such as increase in self-efficacy, increase of performance, and decrease of perceived strain. Self-leadership is a tool that fosters exactly these personal resources. This study examines self-leadership training effects on soldiers participating in a military training course over 14 weeks. It is the first self-leadership training study to evaluate performance improvement using objective criteria (examination marks, physical tests) in intervention and control group consisting of soldiers of the Austrian army. Its design features a large sample (N = 130), duration of self-leadership training over 10 weeks, and evaluation over 4 time points. The intervention group accomplished significantly higher educational achievements in examinations and physical tests. Also levels of self-efficacy were significantly higher and levels of strain were marginally to significantly lower.     

Development of Indirect Measures of Conscientiousness: Combining a Facets Approach and Network Analysis

Because indirect measures of personality self‐concepts such as the Implicit Association Test (IAT) allow tapping into automatic processes, they can offer advantages over self‐report measures. However, prior investigations have led to mixed results regarding the validity of indirect measures of conscientiousness. We suggest that these results might be due to a failure to consider the different facets of conscientiousness. These facets are of crucial importance because they are associated differentially with other psychobiological constructs and they are also characterized by different mechanisms. Therefore, focusing on facets while developing indirect measures of conscientiousness may improve the validity of such measures. In Study 1, we conducted a psycholexical investigation to develop one IAT for each conscientiousness facet. In Study 2, we examined the convergent and discriminant validities of each facet IAT in relation to self‐report measures, peer‐report measures and self‐report behavioural indicators, and we investigated differential associations of the conscientiousness facets with working memory capacity and self‐control. We employed network analysis as a novel approach to elucidate differential relationships involving personality facets. The results corroborated the convergent and discriminant validity of the conscientiousness facet IATs with self‐reports and showed that the conscientiousness facets were differentially associated with working memory capacity and with self‐control. Copyright © 2015 European Association of Personality Psychology     

Recurrence plot analyses suggest a novel reference system involved in newborn spontaneous movements

The movements of newborns have been thoroughly studied in terms of reflexes, muscle synergies, leg coordination, and target-directed arm/hand movements. Since these approaches have concentrated mainly on separate accomplishments, there has remained a clear need for more integrated investigations. Here, we report an inquiry in which we explicitly concentrated on taking such a perspective and, additionally, were guided by the methodological concept of home base behavior, which Ilan Golani developed for studies of exploratory behavior in animals. Methods from nonlinear dynamics, such as symbolic dynamics and recurrence plot analyses of kinematic data received from audiovisual newborn recordings, yielded new insights into the spatial and temporal organization of limb movements. In the framework of home base behavior, our approach uncovered a novel reference system of spontaneous newborn movements.     

Errors in judging information about reflections in mirrors

We investigated people's perception and knowledge of planar mirror reflections. People were accurate at deciding when they could first see their reflection as they approached a mirror from the side, but only if their reflection was visible. Most people stopped too early if the mirror was covered up. People also overestimated the size of the reflection of their face on the surface of a mirror if they were shown a covered mirror. Their accuracy improved somewhat if their reflection was visible but, unlike the first task, they still made striking errors. Perceptual feedback thus improved performance at predicting the behaviour of mirror reflections in both tasks but failed to eliminate errors in the second task. The overestimation of reflection size was not face-specific as it generalised to novel stimuli (paper ellipses) and it was found with both a matching response and for verbal size estimations. The early error in the first task appears to be due to an inaccurate belief that can be overridden by perceptual feedback. The overestimation in the second task is primarily caused by a powerful size-constancy effect.     

Amodal completion and visual holes (static and moving)

Occlusion is a frequent occurrence in a cluttered world of opaque objects. Often information about the shape of partly occluded objects can be gathered from the visible portion of the object and in particular its contours. Here we address the case where a region of a surface is visible exclusively through an aperture (visual hole). We make several observations about the grouping of surface regions visible through holes, and the appearance of moving objects and holes. These observations support the view that holes are shape properties of the object-with-hole.     

Social learning in pig-tailed macaques (Macaca nemestrina) and adult humans (Homo sapiens) on a two-action artificial fruit

An artificial fruit (AF) was used to test for social learning in pig-tailed macaques (Macaca nemestrina) and adult humans (Homo sapiens). A monkey demonstrator opened the AF, showing alternative methods to 2 groups of cage mates. Video films of the monkey demonstrations were presented to adult humans. Compared with chimpanzees and children, the macaques watched the demonstrations significantly less and in a much more sporadic manner. They also produced only very weak and transitory evidence of social learning. In contrast, the adult humans performed as one might expect of optimum imitators, even producing evidence of components of a "ratchet effect."     

Six-year follow-up of three treatment programs to personality disorder

Previous studies of long-term outcome for personality disorder (PD) were either retrospective in design or did not include a control condition. In this paper we report results for three PD cohorts (N = 111) treated in two different specialist psychosocial programs (step-down and long-term inpatient) and in general psychiatric treatment as usual (TAU), which were prospectively followed up for 72-months after intake. The three PD samples were compared on symptom severity, social adjustment, global functioning and other clinical indicators (self-mutilation, parasuicide and readmission rates) at intake, 6, 12, 24, and 72 months. Results indicated that a specialist step-down model showed significantly greater change than a purely inpatient model and TAU in most key dimensions of functioning, a difference maintained at 72-months follow-up. Improvement in the samples was not associated with amount of intercurrent treatment received in the year prior to the follow-up assessment. This study confirms that a step-down program retains significant improvement associated with a specialist psychosocial approach for PD. However, this conclusion should be qualified by design limitations. The samples were not randomly allocated to the three conditions and the naturalistic geographical allocation used in the study created a potential for a number of confounds. Whilst we used extensive statistical controls, the possibility that the differences found between the groups may be due to population differences cannot be discounted.