A meta-analysis of the validity of the employee attitude inventory theft scales

This article summarizes the criterion-related and construct validity evidence for theEmployee Attitude Inventory (EAI) theft scales. These paper-and-pencil measures were designed to help employers gain information about theft among current employees. It is argued that the validity of the theft scales is dependent on the proportion of dishonest employees in the group being screened. Using meta-analysis techniques, the theft scales were shown to have useful levels of validity regardless of the proportion of dishonest employees in the population being screened. Also, the validity coefficients were relatively invariant across organizations and occupations. Thus the available evidence supports the use of the EAI as an effective tool for identifying dishonest employees. However, given that the present analyses are based on a relatively small set of data, the authors' conclusions should be regarded as preliminary. These analyses should be repeated as additional validity data becomes available.The opinions expressed in the report are those of the authors, and do not necessarily represent those of any organizations with which the authors are associated.     

Adolescent smoking intentions: gender differences in peer context.

Despite widespread interest in adolescent smoking behavior, little research has been directed to the social dynamics of adolescent smoking. In this paper, smoking intentions and peer group influences among a sample of 1,689 Grade 8 students from southern Ontario were analyzed to ascertain possible gender-specific correlates in adolescent smoking intentions. The peer environment was found to be a crucial factor in adolescent smoking behavior. Particularly striking for adolescent girls was the firmness of their expressed intentions to continue to smoke quite early in their smoking lives.     

Domestic violence in primary care: The psychologist's role

This paper highlights the difficulties facing medical and mental health professionals in helping families in which there is violence. Emphasis is placed on how domestic violence presents in primary care medical settings. Physician and patient characteristics that interfere with domestic violence detection are reviewed. A role is outlined for psychologists in primary care settings to facilitate detection and treatment. Facilitative efforts include educating physicians through collaboration and serving as an on-site resource for information and consultation.     

The use of decision analysis for organizational design: reorganizing a community hospital.

Organizational design is presented as a decision process, with specific structures seen as providing alternative choices. To illustrate this, the authors present the case of a major metropolitan hospital that used the process to coordinate service delivery (nursing care versus patient care) and service focus (product oriented versus function oriented). Through interviews with more than 40 hospital administrators and staff, the authors created a list of 20 attributes, and used simple multi-attribute utility analysis to generate six design alternatives. The decision makers unanimously chose one alternative, even though potential for significant conflict existed because of differing values and objectives. The authors find decision analytic techniques useful for both the problem formulation and for generating and evaluating structural alternatives, and conclude that in this case consensus was facilitated by the decision process used.     

False physiological feedback and emotion: Experimenter demand and salience effects

Four experiments examined the hypothesis that the Valins (1966) false physiological feedback effect with attractiveness ratings of slides is due to experimenter demand. Experiments 1 and 2 showed significant feedback effects with 5-sec feedback periods, previously reported by Barefoot and Straub (1971) to be too brief a time to search the slides for a cause of the apparent physiological arousal. Experiments 3 and 4 had 17 variations of instructions (emotional, nonemotional), stimuli (slides of people, scenic tourist slides), and type of feedback information (heart rate, eyeblink, or none). The typical false feedback effect was found under many conditions that did not seem to meet the presumptive attributional requirements for the effect. In Experiment 4, only subjects who said they were supposed to rate feedback slides higher showed the effect, regardless of instructions, stimuli, or type of feedback. The overall results are interpreted in terms of experimenter demand and stimulus salience effects.     

Bizarre imagery, interference, and distinctiveness

Previous studies have shown that bizarre and common images produce equivalent levels of recall in unmixed-list designs. Using unmixed lists, we tested the view that bizarre images would be less susceptible than common images to common sources of interference. In all experiments, subjects imaged a list of either bizarre or common sentences and then performed some kind of interfering task before recalling the initial list of sentences. Experiment 1 showed that bizarre images were better accessed than common images after imaging an intervening list of common sentences. Also, components of common images tended to be better recalled than those of bizarre images after imaging an intervening list of bizarre sentences. Experiments 2a and 2b showed that interfering tasks consisting of studying lists of common concrete nouns did not differentially affect memory for bizarre and common images. In Experiment 3, labeling and imaging an interfering list of common pictures produced higher recall of bizarre images. Generally, bizarre images appeared to be less susceptible than common images to interference from certain types of common encodings. Importantly, the superior recall of bizarre images was always due to greater image (sentence) access, whereas higher recall of common images was associated with greater recovery of the image (sentence) constituents. Explanation of the precise pattern of results requires consideration of the distinctive properties of bizarre images.     

Habitual Prospective Memory and Aging: Remembering Intentions and Forgetting Actions

Routine or habitual prospective memory tasks (e.g., taking medication) have the potential for creating confusions regarding whether or not an action has already been performed. We developed a laboratory paradigm for examining the kinds of processes thought to be operating in these kinds of tasks. Younger and older participants were asked to perform an action once and only once on each of 11 trials. The results showed that age and divided attention contributed to both omission and repetition errors. This new paradigm reveals memory failures in a habitual prospective memory task, and the results demonstrate that older adults are particularly susceptible to these memory problems.     

Within-family reproductive technologies as a solution to childlessness due to infertility: Psychological issues and interventions

Patients choosing new reproductive technologies benefit from psychological consultation as they face unforeseen emotional and interpersonal sequalae from these procedures. This paper focuses on those patients who choose family members or close friends (i.e., known donors) to donate sperm or eggs or uteri in order to conceive and produce their babies. Medical family therapy offers these patients and families a framework from which to examine the biological, psychological, and interpersonal issues involved in these within-family solutions to childlessness due to infertility.This paper is a revision of a talk, Medical Family Therapy, Infertility, and the New Reproductive Technologies, given at the 1994 annual meeting of the American Psychological Association on August 4 in Los Angeles, CA, as part of the Mini-convention on Families panel on Clinical Issues in Families and Health.     

Syntactic complexity and elaborative processing

Memory for sentences as a function of the syntactic complexity of the sentences was examined. Sentence complexity was varied through a manipulation that involved presenting sentences in either self-embedded forms or more standard forms. Subjects performed an incidental semantic orienting task on a set of sentences varying in complexity and were subsequently tested for their recognition memory of the sentences. In Experiment 1, subjects were tested for their memory of both surface characteristics and meaning of the sentences. There were no differences caused by sentence complexity for memory for meaning. Memory for surface structure, however, was a function of sentence complexity such that there was better memory for the more complex sentences. Experiment 2 replicated the finding that the more complex sentences produced better recognition memory for surface structure. The results are interpreted within a framework that suggests that increased syntactic complexity produces more elaboration, which in turn produces better memory.