Psychological Flexibility at Work and Employees' Proactive Work Behaviour: Cross‐Level Moderating Role of Leader Need for Structure

How to promote employees to be proactive behaviourally is a significant issue in the literature because it would benefit organisations in several ways. Drawing on the acceptance and commitment model, we proposed a new antecedent, psychological flexibility that might contribute to employees' proactive work behaviour. Furthermore, we investigated how the contextual role of supervisor need for structure exhibits a cross‐level moderating effect on the relationship between employee psychological flexibility at work and proactive work behaviour based on interactionism. Data from 241 full‐time employees and their corresponding 45 managers indicated that employee psychological flexibility was positively associated with proactive work behaviour. More importantly, the supervisor need for structure played a moderating role, suggesting that employees would demonstrate greater proactive work behaviour especially when the supervisors have a high need for structure. Implications for psychological flexibility, proactivity, and person‐situation interactional research are discussed.     

Nymphea: from psychic breakdown to the emergence of subjectivity

In the first part of the paper the author presents an account of the analysis of a woman who is psychically extremely disturbed. This clinical presentation focuses on the unfolding of the transference process, and on the countertransference difficulties encountered during the course of the treatment which lasted more than ten years. In the second part of the paper the author proposes a theoretical approach to the breakdown experienced by the patient, and puts forward the hypothesis that there was insufficient differentiation between her internal objects and the archetypes, and that this prevented the development of symbolization. The author proposes the idea of a collapse between internal and external objects, which destroys the space necessary for representation and symbolization that normally arise between the two poles of the object. The account of this transference process between the analyst and the patient is thus seen as the account of the (re)construction of true internal objects, and of the resumption of a symbolic process to make possible the development of subjectivity.     

Classical Non-Associative Lambek Calculus

We introduce non-associative linear logic, which may be seen as the classical version of the non-associative Lambek calculus. We define its sequent calculus, its theory of proof-nets, for which we give a correctness criterion and a sequentialization theorem, and we show proof search in it is polynomial.     

Immediate serial recall of words and nonwords: Tests of the retrieval-based hypothesis

In two experiments, the immediate serial recall of lists of words or nonwords was investigated under quiet and articulatory suppression conditions. The results showed better item recall for words but better order recall for nonwords, as measured with proportion of order errors per item recalled. Articulatory suppression hindered the recall of item information for both types of lists and of order information for words. These results are interpreted in light of a retrieval account in which degraded phonological traces must undergo a reconstruction process calling on long-term knowledge of the tobe-remembered items. The minimal long-term representations for nonwords are thought to be responsible for their lower item recall and their better order recall. Under suppression, phonological representations are thought to be minimal, producing trace interpretation problems responsible for the greater number of item and order errors, relative to quiet conditions. The very low performance for nonwords under suppression is attributed to the combination of degraded phonological information and minimal long-term knowledge.     

The effect of familial sinistrality on the relation between schizophrenialike thinking and pseudoneglect

We have recently reported a correlation between schizophrenialike symptoms and the degree of pseudoneglect in healthy right-handers. We aimed to investigate the effect of familial sinistrality (FS) on this relation. Seventy-six healthy right-handers were divided into four groups on the basis of gender and FS. A computerized version of Corsi's task was used as the visuospatial task. Subjects filled in the Magical Ideation Scale (MI), which asked for delusionlike beliefs, and performed the Corsi's task using each hand. Performance of both hemispaces was separately evaluated. In all groups, performance of the left hemispace was better than that of the right hemispace and FS+ subjects performed better than FS- subjects. When the right hand was used, performance was correlated to MI scores only for FS- groups. Findings suggest that the correlation between right-sided neglect and proneness to schizotypy in normal right-handers is affected by FS.     

Gesture is at the cutting edge of early language development

Children who produce one word at a time often use gesture to supplement their speech, turning a single word into an utterance that conveys a sentence-like meaning ('eat'+point at cookie). Interestingly, the age at which children first produce supplementary gesture-speech combinations of this sort reliably predicts the age at which they first produce two-word utterances. Gesture thus serves as a signal that a child will soon be ready to begin producing multi-word sentences. The question is what happens next. Gesture could continue to expand a child's communicative repertoire over development, combining with words to convey increasingly complex ideas. Alternatively, after serving as an opening wedge into language, gesture could cease its role as a forerunner of linguistic change. We addressed this question in a sample of 40 typically developing children, each observed at 14, 18, and 22 months. The number of supplementary gesture-speech combinations the children produced increased significantly from 14 to 22 months. More importantly, the types of supplementary combinations the children produced changed over time and presaged changes in their speech. Children produced three distinct constructions across the two modalities several months before these same constructions appeared entirely within speech. Gesture thus continues to be at the cutting edge of early language development, providing stepping-stones to increasingly complex linguistic constructions.     

Neural mechanisms of affective interference in schizotypy

Negatively valenced stimuli foster cognitive impairment in schizotypy and schizophrenia. To identify relevant brain mechanisms, the authors had 16 positive-schizotypy and 16 control participants perform an emotional Stroop task, judging the ink color of negative and neutral words during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of regional brain activity. Schizotypy individuals showed increased right and decreased left activity in dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, indicating a deficit in maintenance of attentional set in the presence of negative emotional distractors. They also showed abnormal activity in ventral limbic areas, including decreased activity in nucleus accumbens and increased activity in hippocampus and amygdala, a circuit involved in the integration of cognitive and affective processes. These results indicate that aspects of emotion-cognition processes and the brain mechanisms that implement them are similar in schizotypy and schizophrenia.     

Silent reading rate and memory span

This paper reports two experiments concerned with the form of the linear function relating memory span to pronunciation rate. Experiment 1 asked whether the intercept of the equation is attributable to an interaction between modality, word-length, and serial position. The results lead us to reject this possibility. Experiment 2 examined the shape of the span function for visual presentation of lists read aloud or silently. The results show that the intercept of the span function disappears for silent presentation but not for aloud presentation. The results are discussed in terms of a balance between two opposing effects of word-length.     

Changes in the neuropsychological correlates of clinical dimensions between the acute and stable phase of schizophrenia

This study was designed to investigate whether the neuropsychological correlates of the symptom dimensions of schizophrenia vary with the clinical state in patients followed from the acute to stable the phase of the illness. Fifteen patients were assessed for symptoms (SAPS-SANS) and undergone a complete neuropsychological assessment at two sessions. The first session (S1) was carried out within six days after admission, i.e., acute phase and the second (S2) at least two month after hospitalization, i.e., stable phase. The data were analyzed using stepwise regression models in which neuropsychological scores were in entered to predict each dimensional score. This analysis was applied on the S1 and S2 data as well as on the S2-S1 difference to assess the neuropsychological predictors of clinical changes. Generally, the results replicate the previous associations between neuropsychological and dimensional measures found in stable patients. In addition, this study shows if each dimension appears to rely on a key structure, symptom variations seems to involve changes in the spread of the dysfunction and/or changes in the connectivity between the key and other regions. The results also suggest that functional changes related to some symptoms dimensions occur to compensate for the dysfunction associated with other symptoms.