Transitioning from recruit to officer: An investigation of how stress appraisal and coping influence work engagement

This study investigated stress, coping, and work engagement among Portuguese police officers while undergoing academy training and then 1 year later, when on duty. It was hypothesized that stress appraisal and coping preferences predicted engagement. Additionally, in order to test a full cross‐lagged prediction model, it was hypothesized that stress, coping, and engagement in recruits predicted these variables later when working as police officers. Structural equation modeling was used to test the research hypotheses. Results suggest that coping and stress appraisals do not seem to be strong predictors of work engagement among recruits and police officers on duty. With the exception of self‐blame, that seems to be a strong predictor of work engagement among police officers on duty. These results highlight the need to investigate other potential variables such as working conditions that may better explain work engagement. Considering the positive influence of engagement on health, wellbeing, and performance of police recruits and officers future applied and theoretical implications are discussed.     

Neural correlates of adaptive decision making for risky gains and losses

Do decisions about potential gains and potential losses require different neural structures for advantageous choices? In a lesion study, we used a new measure of adaptive decision making under risk to examine whether damage to neural structures subserving emotion affects an individual's ability to make adaptive decisions differentially for gains and losses. We found that individuals with lesions to the amygdala, an area responsible for processing emotional responses, displayed impaired decision making when considering potential gains, but not when considering potential losses. In contrast, patients with damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, an area responsible for integrating cognitive and emotional information, showed deficits in both domains. We argue that this dissociation provides evidence that adaptive decision making for risks involving potential losses may be more difficult to disrupt than adaptive decision making for risks involving potential gains. This research further demonstrates the role of emotion in decision competence.     

Stability of choices in a risky decision‐making task: a 3‐year longitudinal study with children and adults

In a 3‐year follow‐up to Levin and Hart's ( 2003 ) study, we observed the same children, now 9–11 years old, and their parents in the same risky decision‐making task. At the aggregate level the same pattern of means was observed across time periods. At the individual level the key variables were significantly correlated across time periods for both children and adults. Taken together with the results from the original study and earlier studies, these results solidify the following conclusions: children utilize both probability and outcome information in risky decision‐making; the tendency to make more risky choices to avoid a loss than to achieve a gain of equal magnitude, which is a major tenet of the leading theories of risky decision‐making, occurs for children as well as adults; children make more risky choices than adults; temperamental predictors of risky choice are valid for children as well as for adults. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Learning of letter names follows similar principles across languages: Evidence from Hebrew

Letter names play an important role in early literacy. Previous studies of letter name learning have examined the Latin alphabet. The current study tested learners of Hebrew, comparing their patterns of performance and types of errors with those of English learners. We analyzed letter-naming data from 645 Israeli children who had not begun formal reading instruction: a younger group (mean age 5 years 2 months) and an older group (mean age 6 years 2 months). Children's errors often involved letters with similar shapes or letters adjacent to one another in the alphabet. Most Hebrew letter names are not very similar to one another phonologically, and there were fewer phonologically based confusions than in English. We found both general frequency effects and frequency effects that reflected the letters in individual children's names. On average, girls knew more letter names than did boys. The results suggest that letter name learning follows similar principles across languages.     

The Double Cohort retention and academic success comparison: are students in the new Ontario secondary school program disadvantaged?

In September 2003, Ontario universities accepted a double cohort of new students resulting from the Ontario government’s decision to eliminate Grade 13. The admission to university of two categories of students distinguished by their age and high school program raised a number of questions, not only in terms of admission infrastructure but mostly in what concerns the sum of student retention, academic success, and graduation. Factors associated with success and with the maintenance of university studies are numerous: stress, socioeconomic status, parents’ education, intellectual capacities, motivation, social abilities, and social support (Olds & Papalia, 2000). Therefore, the objectives of this study were: (1) to test the hypothesis of a double cohort effect on student academic success during the first year of university, (2) to verify the hypothesis that high school academic history, socioeconomic variables related to stress and perceived stress predict academic success and retention at the end of first year university. In September 2003, 300 first year students answered questionnaires inquiring about their high school program and high school GPA, their socioeconomic characteristics, and their perceived stress. These measures were then used to predict drop out, final GPA, number of credits attempted, passed and failed in June 2004. Results showed that school persistence and first year university academic achievement are mostly predicted by gender, high school GPA, type of financial resources, and number of hours worked at a paid job. Although not significant, we have found a higher proportion of Grade 12 students who dropped out during first year at university, suggesting a possible long-term effect of high school program on academic achievement.     

The role of representational volatility in recognizing pre- and postchange objects

Theories relating attention to change blindness (CB) imply that representations of objects in the focus of attention are stable and coherent. However, CB occurs for objects in the focus of attention. Here, we explore this apparent contradiction and the possibility that changes can be detected without having a complete and stable representation of the prechange object. The first experiment required observers to recognize a prechange object and a postchange object after viewing arrays of various sizes in which the prechange object was replaced by the postchange object after a brief delay. Results indicated that the representation of the prechange object was strong enough to cue a change but not strong enough to support accurate recognition. The remaining experiments demonstrated that the representation of the prechange object is volatile in that a shift in the display or the presence of a postchange object can disrupt the representation. These findings add to current theories of attention and representations by showing that attention may result in volatile representations that can support change detection without supporting accurate recognition.     

Nonselective maternal bonding but pup recognition in the subterranean rodent Ctenomys pearsoni

This study characterizes the maternal behavior in the subterranean rodent Ctenomys pearsoni and determines whether lactating females develop a selective bonding to their own pups in addition to maternal responsiveness. Mother-litter interactions were observed daily for 2 months; during the 1st postpartum week, selectivity and preference tests for own or alien pups were performed. Lactating females exhibited all patterns of maternal behavior observed in other rodent species and equally responded with care-taking behaviors to their own and alien pups, although they were able to discriminate between them, showing preference for their own pups. Results are discussed, taking into account the possible role of this behavior in shaping different aspects of life underground in ctenomyid species.     

Endogenous BDNF is required for long-term memory formation in the rat parietal cortex

Information storage in the brain is a temporally graded process involving different memory phases as well as different structures in the mammalian brain. Cortical plasticity seems to be essential to store stable long-term memories, although little information is available at the moment regarding molecular and cellular events supporting memory consolidation in the neocortex. Brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) modulates both short-term synaptic function and activity-dependent synaptic plasticity in hippocampal and cortical neurons. We have recently demonstrated that endogenous BDNF in the hippocampus is involved in memory formation. Here we examined the role of BDNF in the parietal cortex (PCx) in short-term (STM) and long-term memory (LTM) formation of a one-trial fear-motivated learning task in rats. Bilateral infusions of function-blocking anti-BDNF antibody into the PCx impaired both STM and LTM retention scores and decreased the phosphorylation state of cAMP response element-binding protein (CREB). In contrast, intracortical administration of recombinant human BDNF facilitated LTM and increased CREB activation. Moreover, inhibitory avoidance training is associated with a rapid and transient increase in phospho-CREB/total CREB ratio in the PCx. Thus, our results indicate that endogenous BDNF is required for both STM and LTM formation of inhibitory avoidance learning, possibly involving CREB activation-dependent mechanisms. The present data support the idea that early sensory areas constitute important components of the networks subserving memory formation and that information processing in neocortex plays an important role in memory formation.     

Categorical perception of race

Traditionally, research demonstrating categorical perception (CP) has assumed that CP occurs only in cases where natural continua are divided categorically by long-term learning or innate perceptual programming. More recent research suggests that this may not be true, and that even novel continua between novel stimuli such as unfamiliar faces can show CP effects as well. Given this, we ask whether CP is dependent solely on the representation of individual stimuli, or whether stimulus categories themselves can also cause CP. Here, we test the hypothesis that continua between individual faces that cross the categorical boundary between races show an enhanced CP effect. We find that continua running from a black face to a white face do, indeed, show stronger CP effects than continua between two black faces or two white faces. This suggests that CP effects are enhanced when continua run between two distinctly represented individual stimuli, and are further enhanced when those individuals are, in turn, members of different stimulus categories.