The effect on endurance of a verbal commitment versus exhortation,task information,and monetary incentives

Fifty-six male students worked to better their initial endurance scores on a second trial. Those who had formed a verbal commitment to do so performed significantly better than those offered a monetary incentive, exhortations to try hard, or information on how to deal with fatigue cues. The power of the “contract” in this study appears to be due not to additional specificity of information or to experimenter demands but more directly to the reinforcement value of having made a commitment in the presence of another.     

Imagery ability and the identification of hands: A chronometric analysis

In a replication of Cooper and Shepard's (1975) study of hand recognition, it was found that individual differences in imagery ability had a significant influence on reaction times to such stimuli (Experiment 1). However, it was found (Experiment 2) that individual difference effects were only seen if prior instructions to use imagery were given to the subjects.     

The acquisition of abstract letter codes

A modification of Posner's letter-matching paradigm proposed by Beller (1971) was employed to study the development of abstract visual and name codes for letters. Second-, fourth-, and sixth-grade students (ages 8, 10, and 12 years, respectively) were presented in advance one of a pair of to-be-matched letters. Case agreement (upper- and lowercase) between the prime letter and the letter pair was manipulated to differentiate facilitation based on concrete features of the stimulus letter from that based on the letter's abstract visual code. For physical matches second graders showed greater facilitation from same-case primes than from different-case primes, whereas sixth graders benefited equally from both types of prime. For same-name and different conditions, no qualitative developmental differences were revealed as all subjects benefited from letter primes irrespective of case agreement. The acquisition and utilization of abstract visual codes for letters are a later acquisition than name codes, which were clearly operative at the lowest grade level in the present experiment.     

Index to Volume 22 of Journal of Personal Selling & Sales Management

A considerable amount of research has focused on stress in personal selling, primarily focusing on role demands. However, the issue of how a salesperson’s sales behaviors relate to his or her own stress has largely been unaddressed. The author investigates felt stress in the salesperson as a consequence of using coercive sales tactics. The role of learning orientation as a coping resource is also examined. It was found that the use of coercive sales tactics (threats and promises) is associated with higher levels of felt stress. This stress, in turn, is related to lower levels of manifest influence. Learning orientation serves as a coping resource, moderating the relationship between threats and felt stress.     

Measuring Religiousness Among Older African Americans: Exploring Race-of-Interviewer Effects

In recent years a number of studies have explored possible sources of nonrandom error and response bias in survey data on religion. Building on a longstanding body of work in the social sciences, we examine a neglected issue in this domain: the potential for race-of-interviewer effects, specifically in African Americans’ self-reports of various dimensions of religiousness. After outlining two competing perspectives on this issue—which we term racial deference and racial solidarity—we test relevant hypotheses using data from the African American oversample of a nationwide study of older adults. Results indicate that older blacks tend to report higher levels of non-organizational religious practices and subjective religiousness when interviewed by whites. A number of implications and promising directions for future research are discussed.     

Identification with all humanity—A test of the factorial structure and measurement invariance of the scale in five countries

Identification with all humanity measured as an individual characteristic is an important factor related to social and international relations, such as concern for global issues and human rights, prosocial attitudes, intergroup forgiveness, attitudes toward immigrants, solving global problems, reactions to hate crimes and dehumanisation. We examine the factorial structure, psychometric properties and measurement invariance of the Identification with All Humanity (IWAH) scale in student samples from five countries (the United States, Poland, France, Mexico and Chile; N = 1930). Separate confirmatory factor analyses (CFAs) for each country showed a second-order model of one superordinate factor with two subfactors. The cross-country validation of the scale, based on multigroup CFA, confirmed configural and metric invariance between countries for raw scores, and full metric invariance for “pure” scores. This study showed that the IWAH scale can be successfully used for cross-country research and the results from different countries can be compared and integrated.     

Sin and the Limits of Theology: A Reflection in Conversation with Julian of Norwich and Martin Luther

While the confession of divine transcendence entails that all theological speech faces intrinsic limits, the problem of sin brings theology’s limits into focus in a very particular way. For while Christians confess that God has been uniquely and unsurpassably revealed in Jesus Christ, insofar as they do not claim that even this revelation explains the place of sin in the divine economy, the ongoing mystery of sin and evil presents the theologian with a stark alternative. On the one hand, if the grace of God revealed in Christ is emphasized, less attention will be given to the mystery of sin that remains hidden in God; on the other, if theologians emphasize what is hidden, the light of Christ will be obscured. This article explores the tension between these two alternatives with reference to the Showings of Julian of Norwich and Martin Luther’s Bondage of the Will.