Personality as a moderator in the relations between perceptions of organizational justice and sickness absence

This longitudinal study examined whether hostility and neuroticism moderated the effect of organizational justice perceptions on short-term sickness absence among 506 male and 3570 female hospital employees. Organizational justice perceptions were assessed using a questionnaire on procedural and relational justice. Self-certified sickness absence records at baseline and during the two-year follow-up were derived from employers’ registers. Hierarchical moderated Poisson regression models suggest that low procedural justice perceptions related to increased sickness absence more in hostile men than in other male employees. Low relational justice perceptions were a greater risk for sickness absence for male employees with higher neuroticism than for their colleagues with lower neuroticism.     

Impulsivity as a predictor of smoking and alcohol consumption

This prospective study examined the relationships between impulsivity, smoking and alcohol use in a large non-clinical sample of 601 men and 4832 women working in 12 Finnish hospitals. Data on impulsivity, smoking and alcohol consumption were collected by two questionnaires with a two-year interval. At baseline, impulsivity was associated with smoking and alcohol use. After controlling for baseline smoking, impulsivity predicted increased number of cigarettes smoked per day in women (p=0.08), but not in men. After controlling for alcohol use at baseline, impulsivity predicted increased alcohol consumption similarly in both genders (p<0.01). Higher impulsivity was also associated with increased likelihood of taking up smoking or becoming a heavy drinker (p<0.05). This evidence suggests that impulsivity contributes to increasing health risk behaviours.     

Cognitive Mechanisms Underlying Recovered-Memory Experiences of Childhood Sexual Abuse

ABSTRACT— People sometimes report recovering long-forgotten memories of childhood sexual abuse. The memory mechanisms that lead to such reports are not well understood, and the authenticity of recovered memories has often been challenged. We identified two subgroups of people reporting recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse. These subgroups differed dramatically in their cognitive profiles: People who recovered memories of abuse through suggestive therapy exhibited a heightened susceptibility to the construction of false memories, but showed no tendency to underestimate their prior remembering. Conversely, people who recovered memories of abuse spontaneously showed a heightened proneness to forget prior incidences of remembering, but exhibited no increased susceptibility to false memories. This double dissociation points to mechanisms that underlie recovered-memory experiences and indicates that recovered memories may at times be fictitious and may at other times be authentic.     

Combined functional and causal connectivity analyses of language networks in children: a feasibility study

Instead of assessing activation in distinct brain regions, approaches to investigating the networks underlying distinct brain functions have come into the focus of neuroscience research. Here, we provide a completely data-driven framework for assessing functional and causal connectivity in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data, employing Granger's causality. We investigate the networks underlying story processing in 17 healthy children (8f, 9m, 10.4+/-2.8 years, 6.5-15.4 years). Extensive functional connectivity exists between brain regions, including some not detected in standard random effects analyses. Causal connectivity analyses demonstrate a clear dominance of left-sided language regions for both forward and backward interactions with other network nodes. We believe our approach to be useful in helping to assess language networks in the normal or pathological setting; it may also aid in providing better starting estimates for the more hypothesis-driven approaches like structural equation or dynamic causal modeling.     

Moral psychology of nursing robots: Exploring the role of robots in dilemmas of patient autonomy

Artificial intelligences (AIs) are widely used in tasks ranging from transportation to healthcare and military, but it is not yet known how people prefer them to act in ethically difficult situations. In five studies (an anthropological field study, n = 30, and four experiments, total n = 2150), we presented people with vignettes where a human or an advanced robot nurse is ordered by a doctor to forcefully medicate an unwilling patient. Participants were more accepting of a human nurse's than a robot nurse's forceful medication of the patient, and more accepting of (human or robot) nurses who respected patient autonomy rather than those that followed the orders to forcefully medicate (Study 2). The findings were robust against the perceived competence of the robot (Study 3), moral luck (whether the patient lived or died afterwards; Study 4), and command chain effects (Study 5; fully automated supervision or not). Thus, people prefer robots capable of disobeying orders in favour of abstract moral principles like valuing personal autonomy. Our studies fit in a new era in research, where moral psychological phenomena no longer reflect only interactions between people, but between people and autonomous AIs.     

I Don't Like You Because You're Hard to Understand: The Role of Processing Fluency in the Language Attitudes Process

Two experiments examined the effects of processing fluency—that is, the ease with which speech is processed—on language attitudes toward native‐ and foreign‐accented speech. Participants listened to an audio recording of a story read in either a Standard American English (SAE) or Punjabi English (PE) accent. They heard the recording either free of noise or mixed with background white noise of various intensity levels. Listeners attributed more solidarity (but equal status) to the SAE than the PE accent. Compared to quieter listening conditions, noisier conditions reduced processing fluency, elicited a more negative affective reaction, and resulted in more negative language attitudes. Processing fluency and affect mediated the effects of noise on language attitudes. Theoretical, methodological, and practical implications are discussed.     

Cognitive control and socially desirable behavior: The role of interpersonal impact

The current research reconciles two contradicting sets of findings on the role of cognitive control in socially desirable behaviors. One set of findings suggests that people are tempted by self-serving impulses and have to rely on cognitive control overriding such impulses to act in socially desirable ways. Another set of findings suggests people are guided by other-regarding impulses and cognitive control is not necessary to motivate socially desirable behaviors. We theorize that the dominant impulse is to behave in a socially desirable manner when the interpersonal impact of an action is salient, and that the dominant impulse is to behave in a self-serving manner when the interpersonal impact of an action is not salient. Studies 1–3 found that impairing participants’ cognitive control led to less socially desirable behavior when interpersonal impact was not salient, but more socially desirable behavior when interpersonal impact was salient. Study 4 demonstrates that behaving in a socially desirable manner causes cognitive control impairment when interpersonal impact is not salient. But, when interpersonal impact is salient, behaving in a self-serving manner impairs cognitive control. We discuss the implications of our findings for understanding and managing socially desirable behaviors.