Bullying is detrimental to health, but all bullying behaviours are not necessarily equally damaging

The aim of this paper is to investigate the impact of 'negative behaviours' and 'bullying' in the workplace on the health and well-being of employees, to what extent the effects remain beyond the period of the experience as well as the extent to which they affect third-parties or witnesses. The paper also raises the question whether some behaviours associated with bullying may be more damaging than others. Potential sex differences and differences between occupational contexts are considered. To achieve these aims, a national cross-sectional study (N=5,388) was carried out. In absolute terms those who labelled their experience as bullying had substantially worse health than those who were not bullied. However, counter to what was expected, stronger associations were found between negative behaviour and adverse health effects than for self-reported (self-labelled) bullying and health. Previous targets as well as witnesses also reported worse health than those who were neither bullied nor had witnessed bullying. The findings also imply that some negative behaviours were more difficult to deal with than others. In all cases differences between the sexes and between occupational contexts emerged.     

Relevance theory,pragmatic inference and cognitive architecture

Relevance Theory (RT) argues that human language comprehension processes tend to maximize “relevance,” and postulates that there is a relevance-based procedure that a hearer follows when trying to understand an utterance. Despite being highly influential, RT has been criticized for its failure to explain how speaker-related information, either the speaker’s abilities or her/his preferences, is incorporated into the hearer’s inferential, pragmatic process. An alternative proposal is that speaker-related information gains prominence due to representation of the speaker within higher level goal-directed schemata. Yet the goal-based account is still unable to explain clearly how cross-domain information, for example linguistic meaning and speaker-related knowledge, is integrated within a modular system. On the basis of RT’s cognitive requirements, together with contemporary cognitive theory, we argue that this integration is realized by utilizing working memory and that there exist conversational constraints with which the constructed utterance interpretation should be consistent. We illustrate our arguments with a computational implementation of the proposed processes within a general cognitive architecture.

Abbreviations: ACT-R Adaptive Control of Thought - RationalCOGENT Cognitive Objects within a Graphical ENvironmenTCS/SS Contention Scheduling/Supervisory SystemRBCP Relevance-Based Comprehension ProcedureRT Relevance Theory