Adjustment in aging: the roles of life stress, hassles, and self-efficacy

This study examines the relationship of life stress, daily hassles, and perceived self-efficacy to adjustment in a community sample of 32 men and 32 women between ages 65 and 75. In a structured interview, negative life change events, daily hassles, self-efficacy, depression, psychosomatic symptoms, and negative well being were assessed. Both negative life events and daily hassles were related to psychological distress and physical symptoms for men, and hassles were associated with psychological distress and physical symptoms for women. An inverse relationship between self-efficacy and maladjustment was also found. Hassles showed the most powerful relationship to distress.     

Rivals without a cause? Relative performance feedback creates destructive competition despite aligned incentives

Whether people compete or cooperate with each other has consequences for their own performance and that of organizations. To explain why people compete or cooperate, previous research has focused on two main factors: situational outcome structures and personality types. Here, we propose that—above and beyond these two factors—situational cues, such as the format in which people receive feedback, strongly affect whether they act competitively, cooperatively, or individualistically. Results of a laboratory experiment support our theorizing: After receiving ranking feedback, both students and experienced managers treated group situations with cooperative outcome structures as competitive and were in consequence willing to forgo guaranteed financial gains to pursue a—financially irrelevant—better rank. Conversely, in dilemma situations, feedback based on the joint group outcome led to more cooperation than ranking feedback. Our study contributes to research on competition, cooperation, interdependence theory, forced ranking, and the design of information environments.     

Syntactic context and lexical access

Recent studies demonstrating that multiple meanings of an ambiguous word are initially accessed even when only one reading is syntactically appropriate with the preceding context can be criticized on at least two grounds. First, many of the syntactic contexts used were not truly restrictive, and, secondly, subjects may not have had time to integrate the context before processing the ambiguous word. In the present study, subjects listened to a sentence ending in an ambiguous word and then made a lexical decision to a target related to either the appropriate or inappropriate reading. Contexts were completely restrictive, and a pause was introduced between the context and the ambiguous word. Multiple access still obtained, providing further support for the claim that lexical access is not guided by syntactic context.     

Perceptual learning in maze discriminations

In Experiment 1, rats were trained on a discrimination between rubber- and sandpaper-covered arms of a maze after one group had been pre-exposed to these intra-maze cues. Pre-exposure facilitated subsequent discrimination learning, unless the discrimination was made easier by adding further discriminative stimuli, when it now significantly retarded learning. In Experiment 2, rats were trained on an extra-maze spatial discrimination, again after one group, but not another, had been pre-exposed to the extra-maze landmarks. Here too, pre-exposure facilitated subsequent discrimination learning, unless the discrimination was made substantially easier by arranging that the two arms between which rats had to choose were always separated by 135°. The results of both experiments can be explained by supposing that perceptual learning depends on the presence of features common to S+ and S-.