Effect of task length on remembered and predicted duration

Vierordt’s (1868) law states that when estimating the duration of a previous task, people overestimate short durations and underestimate long ones. We examine whether this same pattern holds for remembered and predicted duration for tasks lasting between 1 and 15 min. In support of Vierordt’s law and its extension to future duration estimates, task duration tended to be overestimated for short tasks (less than 2 min) and underestimated for long tasks for both remembered and predicted duration.     

On Using Ethical Theories to Teach Engineering Ethics

Many engineering ethics classes and textbooks introduce theories such as utilitarianism and Kantianism (and most others draw from these theories without mentioning them explicitly). Yet using ethical theories to teach engineering ethics is not devoid of difficulty. First, their status is unclear (should one pick a single theory or use them all? does it make a difference?) Also, textbooks generally assume or fallaciously ‘prove’ that egoism (or even simply accounting for one’s interests) is wrong. Further, the drawbacks of ethical theories are underestimated and the theories are also otherwise misrepresented to make them more suitable for engineering ethics as the authors construe it, viz. the ‘moral reasoning’ process. Stating in what various theories disagree would allow the students to frame the problem more productively in terms of motive–consequence or society–individual dichotomies rather than in terms of Kant–utilitarian.     

Principals' transformational leadership and teachers' collective efficacy

The study was designed to test the relationship of principals' transformational, transactional, and laissez-faire leadership with teachers' collective efficacy. Bandura's theory of efficacy applied to the group and Bass's transformational leadership theory were used as the theoretical framework. Participants included 487 French Canadian teachers from 40 public high schools. As expected, there were positive and significant correlations between principals' transformational and transactional leadership and teachers' collective efficacy. Also, there was a negative and significant correlation between laissez-faire leadership and teachers' collective efficacy. Moreover, regression analysis showed transformational leadership significantly enhanced the predictive capabilities of transactional leadership on teachers' collective efficacy. These results confirm the importance of leadership to predict collective efficacy and, by doing so, strengthen Bass's theory of leadership.     

Ego depletion and aggressive behavior: Is the inhibition of aggression a limited resource?

If self‐regulation is a limited resource, the capacity to inhibit aggressive behavior should be lower among people who have already exercised self‐regulation. In Experiment 1, participants who had to resist the urge to eat tempting food later reacted more aggressively to an insult than other participants who were allowed to eat as much as they wanted. In Experiments 2 and 3, some participants had to self‐regulate by making themselves concentrate on a boring film and stifling their physical and facial movements, and afterward they, too, responded more aggressively than controls. Experiment 3 also showed that the results were not due to differential moods and that one act of self‐regulation (unrelated to aggression) was sufficient to enhance subsequent aggressive responses toward the experimenter. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Recognition of facial expressions of different emotional intensities in patients with frontotemporal lobar degeneration

Behavioural problems are a key feature of frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD). Also, FTLD patients show impairments in emotion processing. Specifically, the perception of negative emotional facial expressions is affected. Generally, however, negative emotional expressions are regarded as more difficult to recognize than positive ones, which thus may have been a confounding factor in previous studies. Also, ceiling effects are often present on emotion recognition tasks using full-blown emotional facial expressions. In the present study with FTLD patients, we examined the perception of sadness, anger, fear, happiness, surprise and disgust at different emotional intensities on morphed facial expressions to take task difficulty into account. Results showed that our FTLD patients were specifically impaired at the recognition of the emotion anger. Also, the patients performed worse than the controls on recognition of surprise, but performed at control levels on disgust, happiness, sadness and fear. These findings corroborate and extend previous results showing deficits in emotion perception in FTLD.     

A longitudinal cross-level model of leader and salesperson influences on sales force technology use and performance

The authors examined the influence of the introduction of a new suite of technology tools on the performance of 592 salespersons. They hypothesized that the salespersons' work experience would have a negative effect on their technology self-efficacy, which in turn would relate positively to their use of technology. Sales performance was hypothesized to be positively related to both past performance and the use of new technology tools. Further, the authors hypothesized that leaders' commitment to sales technology would enhance salespersons' technology self-efficacy and usage, and leaders' empowering behaviors would influence salespersons' technology self-efficacy and moderate the individual-level relationships. Hierarchical linear modeling analyses confirmed all of the hypothesized individual-level relationships and most of the cross-level relationships stemming from average leader behaviors. In particular, empowering leadership exhibited multiple cross-level interactions, as anticipated. Results are discussed in terms of the importance of social-psychological factors related to the success of sales force technology interventions.     

Does social exclusion motivate interpersonal reconnection? Resolving the "porcupine problem"

Evidence from 6 experiments supports the social reconnection hypothesis, which posits that the experience of social exclusion increases the motivation to forge social bonds with new sources of potential affiliation. Threat of social exclusion led participants to express greater interest in making new friends, to increase their desire to work with others, to form more positive impressions of novel social targets, and to assign greater rewards to new interaction partners. Findings also suggest potential boundary conditions to the social reconnection hypothesis. Excluded individuals did not seem to seek reconnection with the specific perpetrators of exclusion or with novel partners with whom no face-to-face interaction was anticipated. Furthermore, fear of negative evaluation moderated responses to exclusion such that participants low in fear of negative evaluation responded to new interaction partners in an affiliative fashion, whereas participants high in fear of negative evaluation did not.