Different Strokes for Different Folks: The Impact of Sex Dissimilarity in the Empowerment–Performance Relationship

Organizations often utilize empowerment as a way to bolster performance. It is largely assumed, however, that its impact in this capacity is equivalent across organizational members. We tested this notion within a sample of 420 employees belonging to 75 teams in a Chinese organization and found that team empowerment related positively to supervisor‐rated in‐role and self‐rated extra‐role performance through its effect on individual psychological empowerment. More important, employee–coworker demographic dissimilarity moderated both stages of this indirect relationship. Specifically, when employee–coworker sex dissimilarity was higher, the following relationships were attenuated: (a) team empowerment–individual empowerment, (b) individual empowerment–in‐role performance, and (c) individual empowerment–extra–role performance. Collectively, the results illustrate that the impact of empowerment is contingent upon demographic dissimilarity.     

Time-dependence between upper arm muscles activity during rapid movements: Observation of the proportional effects predicted by the kinematic theory

Rapid human movements can be assimilated to the output of a neuromuscular system with an impulse response modeled by a Delta-Lognormal equation. In such a model, the main assumption concerns the cumulative time delays of the response as it propagates toward the effector following a command. To verify the validity of this assumption, delays between bursts in electromyographic (EMG) signals of agonist and antagonist muscles activated during a rapid hand movement were investigated. Delays were measured between the surface EMG signals of six muscles of the upper limb during single rapid handwriting strokes. From EMG envelopes, regressions were obtained between the timing of the burst of activity produced by each monitored muscle. High correlation coefficients were obtained supporting the proportionality of the cumulative time delays, the basic hypothesis of the Delta-Lognormal model. A paradigm governing the sequence of muscle activities in a rapid movement could, in the long run, be useful for applications dealing with the analysis and synthesis of human movements.     

Personalidad,diferencias individuales y decisión con riesgo

Resumen

Esta investigación trata de comprobar si existen diferencias individuales en las estrategias usadas en las tareas de decisión con riesgo que puedan ser explicadas en términos de rasgos polares de personalidad (neuroticismo y extroversión). Al mismo tiempo se trata de encontrar evidencia de las causas (no explicadas) que podrían justificar la clasificación de estrategias propuesta desde la teoría de la integración de la información. Este artículo consta de dos partes bien diferenciadas, en la primera se lleva a cabo un experimento donde los datos no apoyan que los rasgos de personalidad usados expliquen las diferencias individuales; se encontró apoyo para tres de las estrategias descritas en integración de la información. En la segunda parte, con el propósito de analizar las diferencias individuales en el tiempo, se muestra que la estructura lógica del sujeto, como procesador/decisor, es relativamente invariante en el tiempo. Finalmente se discute si la naturaleza de la tarea experimental obliga a los sujetos a desarrollar estrategias ad hoc con poco claro valor de generalización.     

Pleasant emotional induction broadens the visual world of young children

These experiments aimed at studying the influence of emotional context on global/local visual processing in children. Children 5 years old, known to present an immature global visual bias, and 8 years old, known to pay attention predominantly to global information, were placed in either a neutral or pleasant emotional context and subsequently presented with a global/local visual judgement task. As with previous findings for adults, both age groups presented a pronounced perceptual bias toward global information following exposure to emotionally pleasant pictures. Interestingly, younger children, who do not present a global bias during the neutral exposure, presented the same preference for global information as older children when exposed to the pleasant context. These findings indicate that emotion may strongly affect visual perception in children, with important implications for educational practice and models of cognition.     

Psychological Predictors of Career Planning among Active Elite Athletes: An Application of the Social Cognitive Career Theory

The present study examines mechanisms underlying career planning among athletes in the context of sport career termination. The contribution of conscientiousness to athletes' career planning was investigated among 180 active athletes (88 females, 92 males; M_age = 20.36) by applying the social cognitive career theory (SCCT). Bootstrap analyses, performed at both broad and facet-level, revealed that conscientious individuals are more likely to plan for their future career because they set higher goals and are more confident in their capacity to plan their future career. Implications for practice are discussed in relation to intervention that could induce career planning among athletes.     

Stress Management for Police Special Forces

This article reports on the implementation of a stress management program for French police Special Forces units. A stressor analysis was conducted to identify stress sources and understand how mental skills could help the Special Forces to cope and function more effectively. An initial difficulty had to be overcome to allow this population to talk about stress and emotions without being afraid of losing their "virility." The program was then organized around three levels (organizational, group, and individual) and around three periods of time (an initial four-day meeting, a two-day follow-up meeting one month later, and a final one-day meeting held after six months). One hundred and fifty male police officers were involved in the program. Results revealed that the psychological training was very well received and led the police management to consider factors and manifestations of stress in a more extensive way. Stress management training soon will be initiated for all the police forces working on the street. Moreover, other groups asked for the training to be adapted to their specific work characteristics, such as the intelligence service and bodyguard detachments.     

Methods for comparing scanpaths and saliency maps: strengths and weaknesses

In this article, we are interested in the computational modeling of visual attention. We report methods commonly used to assess the performance of these kinds of models. We survey the strengths and weaknesses of common assessment methods based on diachronic eye-tracking data. We then illustrate the use of some methods to benchmark computational models of visual attention.     

The composite face effect in six-year-old children: Evidence of adult-like holistic face processing

Holistic processing (i.e., gluing facial features together into a gestalt) is a hallmark of adults’ expert face recognition. Children make more errors than adults on a variety of face processing tasks even during adolescence. To determine whether this slow development can be attributed to immature holistic processing of unfamiliar faces, we tested 6-year-old children (n=24) with a classic measure of adults’ holistic processing, the composite face effect: They made same/different judgements about the top halves of face pairs when each top half was combined with a different bottom half, with which it was aligned (so that holistic processing creates the impression of a different face) or misaligned (a manipulation that disrupts holistic processing). Six-year-olds showed an adult-like composite face effect: Like adults, they made 26% more errors on aligned trials than on misaligned trials. These results suggest that the improvements after age 6 in the recognition of the facial identity are not caused by the onset or increasing strength of holistic face processing.     

Simultaneous completions of modal and amodal figures: Visual evoked potentials reveal asymmetrical interference effects

Modal and amodal completion processes are thought to affect the emergence and the potency of each other. To see whether one dominates over the other, we measured the Npd, that is, the negativity of visual-evoked potentials whose amplitude increases with perceptual difficulty. In the first experiment, the Npds to illusory (modal) squares and diamonds placed over amodal diamonds and squares, respectively, were found to be greater when targets were the amodal figures than when targets were the modal figures, thus suggesting that modal figures created more interference. A second experiment showed that greater Npds were specific to interference and not to the greater difficulty at focusing on amodal figures rather than on modal figures. A third experiment showed that the interference also occurs with real figures in replacement of modal ones. Overall, the results suggest a certain dominance of modal completion over amodal completion when both occur in the same display.     

The role of uncertainty in attentional and choice exploration

Psychonomic Bulletin & Review - The exploitation-exploration (EE) trade-off describes how, when making a decision, an organism must often choose between a safe alternative with a known pay-off,...