Intending to Leave But No Place to Go: An Examination of the Behaviors of Reluctant Stayers

We extend recent conceptual work on withdrawal states and develop a framework to examine behavioral tendencies of reluctant stayers (i.e., employees who desire to leave but cannot). Although principles of self-interest suggest that these employees ought to behave appropriately to maintain employment, reactance theory suggests that the combination of high turnover intentions and low job alternatives may result in lower performance and greater deviance. Contrary to conventional wisdom but consistent with reactance theory, low perceived job alternatives strengthened the positive relationship between turnover intentions and deviance, as well as the negative relation between intentions to quit and task performance. Moderated-mediation analyses revealed that the indirect effect of work frustration (via turnover intentions) was stronger on task performance and deviance when perceived job alternatives were low rather than high.     

Remembering specific features of emotional events across time: The role of REM sleep and prefrontal theta oscillations

When an episode of emotional significance is encountered, it often results in the formation of a highly resistant memory representation that is easily retrieved for many succeeding years. Recent research shows that beyond generic consolidation processes, rapid eye movement (REM) sleep importantly contributes to this effect. However, the boundary conditions of consolidation processes during REM sleep, specifically whether these extend to source memory, have not been examined extensively. The current study tested the effects of putative consolidation processes emerging during REM sleep and slow wave sleep (SWS) on item and source memory of negative and neutral images, respectively. Results demonstrate superior emotional relative to neutral item memory retention after both late night REM sleep and early night SWS. Emotional source memory, on the other hand, exhibited an attenuated decline following late night REM sleep, whereas neutral source memory was selectively preserved across early night SWS. This pattern of results suggests a selective preservation of emotional source memory during REM sleep that is functionally dissociable from SWS-dependent reprocessing of neutral source memory. This was further substantiated by a neurophysiological dissociation: Postsleep emotional source memory was selectively correlated with frontal theta lateralization (REM sleep), whereas postsleep neutral item memory was correlated with SWS spindle power. As such, the present results contribute to a more comprehensive characterization of sleep-related consolidation mechanisms underlying emotional and neutral memory retention. Subsidiary analysis of emotional reactivity to previously encoded material revealed an enhancing rather than attenuating effect of late night REM sleep on emotional responses.     

Polysynaptic potentiation at different levels of rat olfactory pathways following learning

This study was aimed at investigating the consequences of learning on late polysynaptic components of evoked field potential signals recorded in parallel at different levels of the olfactory pathways. For this, evoked field potentials induced by electrical stimulation of the olfactory bulb were recorded simultaneously in the anterior piriform cortex, the posterior piriform cortex, the lateral entorhinal cortex, and the dentate gyrus. The different parameters of late components were measured in each site before and after completion of associative learning in anesthetized rats. In the learning task, rats were trained to associate electrical stimulation of one olfactory bulb electrode with the delivery of sucrose (positive reward) and stimulation of a second olfactory bulb electrode with the delivery of quinine (negative reward). In this way, stimulation of the same olfactory bulb electrodes used for inducing field potentials served as a discriminative cue in the learning paradigm. The data confirmed previous observation that learning was associated with a lowering in late-component-1 intensity of induction in the posterior piriform cortex. The use of simultaneous recording allowed us to further specify the consequences of learning on late-component distribution in the studied network. Indeed the data showed that whereas before learning, late component 1 was rather uniformly distributed among the recorded sites; following learning, its expression was facilitated preferentially in the posterior piriform cortex and lateral entorhinal cortex. Furthermore, learning was accompanied by the emergence of a new late component (late component 2), which occurred simultaneously in the four recording sites. The possible involvement of potentiation of polysynaptic components in recognition and/or consolidation processes will be discussed.     

Competency,and other constructs,in right to die cases

Subjects had to make a “remove” or “do not remove” life-sustaining measures decision in three right to die cases where the patients differed in competence; for half the subjects, a living will was present in all the cases, whereas, for the other half, it was not. Subjects also gave their determinative reasons for their decisions. Support for the right to die varied by case, but not by competency, or by the presence of a living will. The subjects' reasons were highly predictive of their decisions, and related to the way case-specific facts were construed, revealing a number of disparities between the way courts and citizens construe whether the patient's condition is “terminal,” “irreversible,” and “painful,” or not. Beyond construing facts differently, the results also revealed a disparity between evolving case law and the community's “common sense justice” over a fundamental belief: whether dying is seen as private matter, outside the bounds of State intervention, or not.     

Characteristics of residential retarded clients as predictors of staff expectations and frustrations

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship of four client characteristics—functioning level, aggressive behavior, self-injurious behavior, and attractiveness—with staff expectations of and frustration with clients. Forty staff members who worked with severely and profoundly retarded individuals served as participants. Staff members rated each client with whom they worked on the extent to which the client could behave better and learn faster as well as the level of frustration experienced in working with the client. A client's functioning level was related to staff perceptions such that the higher the functioning level, the more the client was seen as having the potential to behave better or learn faster than (s)he was presently demonstrating. Staff frustration was related to client aggression indicating that as aggression increased so did staff frustration in working with that client. Implications of the results are discussed.     

Offender Characteristics: A Study of 23 Violent Offenders in Sweden

Twenty-three offenders convicted of homicide or attempted murder/manslaughter, and their respective crimes, were examined to identify any common characteristics. Court documents were assessed, and the most prominent information of the offenders was that they were often single, most of them had no psychiatric diagnoses, the most frequent modus operandi was a knife or sharp weapon (although firearms resulted in more homicides), and the most common homicide typology was domestic disputes, and disputes between friends or acquaintances. Based on a cluster analysis, two profiles emerged: one with so-called traditional criminals and another profile over-represented with offenders who commit domestic crimes.     

Reducing a Male Bias in Language? Establishing the Efficiency of Three Different Gender-Fair Language Strategies

Sex Roles - Different strategies of gender-fair language have been applied to reduce a male bias, which means the implicit belief that a word describing an undefined person describes a man. This...