Configurations of unemployment,reemployment, and psychological well-being: A longitudinal study of unemployed individuals in Portugal

This study examined how four different configurations of unemployment and reemployment (defined by history of past unemployment and unemployment/reemployment 3 years later) related to changes in psychological well-being. The longitudinal sample consisted of 566 Portuguese men and women who were unemployed at the beginning of the study. Using true change score models, we found that individuals who reported a long period of unemployment at T1 but were reemployed at T2 showed meaningful gains in positive affect and life satisfaction compared to those who had a shorter history of unemployment and were reemployed. An examination of gender differences revealed that the women who were reemployed after a long history of unemployment showed the greatest relative gains in positive affect. We conclude by noting limitations of this research and suggesting future research to address these limitations.     

Can a Supportive Workplace Impact Employee Resilience in a High Pressure Performance Environment? An Investigation of the Chinese Banking Industry

Resilience is one of the positive emotions that will enhance employees’ ability to cope in adverse conditions, such as work intensification, organisational change, and work stress. Despite growing research interest in the employee resilience area, there is limited knowledge of the process through which critical social support at workplaces, such as supportive leadership and co-worker support, affects employees’ ability to cope in challenging situations. This study, underpinned by the theory of conservation of resources and social cognitive theory, examines the role of supportive leadership and co-worker support in employee resilience, and how this may be moderated by work pressures in the context of the Chinese banking industry. Using a sample of 2,025 Chinese banking workers, we tested four hypotheses. Our findings demonstrate that supportive leadership and co-worker support are positively associated with employee resilience. High work pressure moderates the relationship between both supportive leadership and co-worker support and employee resilience, such that the relationship between these conditions is stronger when perceived performance pressure is high. Our study raises important implications for both the theoretical development of employee resilience and for management practices with respect to fostering employee resilience in organisations.     

Responding to Sexual Objectification: The Role of Emotions in Influencing Willingness to Undertake Different Types of Action

Sex Roles - Women may respond to being sexual objectified in different ways, such as confronting the perpetrator, ignoring the action, blaming oneself or considering the action as flattering....     

How Learning Goal Orientation Fosters Leadership Recognition in Self‐Managed Teams: A Two‐Stage Mediation Model

Defined as a mental framework for how individuals interpret and respond to achievement situations, learning goal orientation (LGO) has received increasing attention in organisational research. However, its effect on leadership, especially in contexts absent of formal leadership, remains understudied. Drawing on social exchange theory, we propose and test an individual‐level two‐stage process model of generalised exchange linking LGO and leadership recognition in self‐managed teams. Specifically, we posit that learning‐oriented individuals will tend to feel safer in self‐managed teams, which will enable and sustain their engagement in contextual role behavior. Such behavior, in turn, will be reciprocated with recognition of these individuals as leaders. We use a multiphase, multi‐informant approach (n = 287), and we find that felt safety mediates the effect of LGO on contextual role behavior, but that contextual role behavior alone does not mediate the effect of LGO on leadership recognition. LGO has an indirect effect on leadership recognition through the joint mediation of felt safety and contextual role behavior. Our results offer insight on the link between LGO and leadership, with practical implications for people working in self‐managed teams.     

Processing strategies in the acquisition of relative clauses: universal principles and language-specific realizations

In this study we present a cross-linguistic analysis of the strategies used by Korean, Japanese and English-speaking children in processing sentences with relative clauses. The results of an experiment on the comprehension of relative clauses in Korean are reported and compared with prior research on the acquisition of relative clauses in Japanese and English. In our experiment on Korean, 6-year-old children acted out sentences with left-branching and center-embedded relative clauses in two matrix word orders, SOV and OSV, and two intonation conditions, “clear” (syntactically motivated) and “list” intonation. The findings provide strong evidence for a basic left-to-right processing strategy and significant roles for a canonical sentence strategy and for a parallel function strategy in the comprehension of relative clauses in Korean. Intonation had a significant role as a parsing cue in center-embedded sentences; error analysis revealed the over-extension of strategies appropriate for processing simple and conjoined sentences. A rank ordering of sentence types based on the predictions of the available processing strategies was found to predict the obtained order of difficulty in comprehending sentences with relative clauses in Korean, Japanese, and English quite accurately. We propose that an adequate cross-linguistic account of relative clause comprehension must be based upon an integrated view of multiple universal processing strategies, whose application will depend upon language-specific structural properties of relative clauses and upon the developmental stage of the child.     

RESPONSE STYLE AND CROSS-CULTURAL COMPARISONS OF RATING SCALES AMONG EAST ASIAN AND NORTH AMERICAN STUDENTS

Abstract— This report examines cross-cultural differences in response style regarding the use of rating scales Subjects were high school students 944 from Sendai (Japan), 1,357 from Taipei (Taiwan), 687 from Edmonton and Calgary (Canada), and 2,174 from the Minneapolis metropolitan area and Fairfax County, Virginia Responses to fifty-seven 7-point Likert-type scales were analyzed The Japanese and Chinese students were more likely than the two North American groups to use the midpoint on the scales, the U S subjects were more likely than the other three groups to use the extreme values Within each cultural group, endorsement of individualism was positively related to the use of extreme values and negatively related to the use of the midpoint These small, albeit statistically significant, differences in response styles generally did not alter cross-cultural comparisons of item means.     

Alteration of cingulate long-term plasticity and behavioral sensitization to inflammation by environmental enrichment

Exposure to an enriched environment (EE) has been shown to induce cortical plasticity. Considerable amount of research is focused on the effects of EE in the hippocampus; however, effects of EE on other brain regions and the mechanisms involved are not well known. To investigate this, we induced cortical plasticity by placing mice in an EE for one month and measured the effects of EE in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). Here, we show that EE enhanced the expression of the plasticity gene, egr-1, in the ACC of EE animals accompanied by enhanced cingulate long-term potentiation (LTP) and decreased cingulate long-term depression (LTD). The increased NMDA receptor NR2B/NR2A subunits current ratio is associated with the plasticity seen in the ACC while total protein levels remain unchanged. Furthermore, behavioral experiments show that these mice exposed to EE demonstrate enhanced responses to acute and long-term inflammation. Our findings suggest that exposure to EE alters physiological properties within the ACC which results in enhanced responses to inflammation.