The role of change in the relationship between commitment and turnover: a latent growth modeling approach

Through the use of affective, normative, and continuance commitment in a multivariate 2nd-order factor latent growth modeling approach, the authors observed linear negative trajectories that characterized the changes in individuals across time in both affective and normative commitment. In turn, an individual's intention to quit the organization was characterized by a positive trajectory. A significant association was also found between the change trajectories such that the steeper the decline in an individual's affective and normative commitments across time, the greater the rate of increase in that individual's intention to quit, and, further, the greater the likelihood that the person actually left the organization over the next 9 months. Findings regarding continuance commitment and its components were mixed.     

Constraints and triggers: situational mechanics of gender in negotiation

The authors propose 2 categories of situational moderators of gender in negotiation: situational ambiguity and gender triggers. Reducing the degree of situational ambiguity constrains the influence of gender on negotiation. Gender triggers prompt divergent behavioral responses as a function of gender. Field and lab studies (1 and 2) demonstrated that decreased ambiguity in the economic structure of a negotiation (structural ambiguity) reduces gender effects on negotiation performance. Study 3 showed that representation role (negotiating for self or other) functions as a gender trigger by producing a greater effect on female than male negotiation performance. Study 4 showed that decreased structural ambiguity constrains gender effects of representation role, suggesting that situational ambiguity and gender triggers work in interaction to moderate gender effects on negotiation performance.     

Dual scaling for the analysis of categorical data

Dual scaling is a set of related techniques for the analysis of a wide assortment of categorical data types including contingency tables and multiple-choice, rank order, and paired comparison data. When applied to a contingency table, dual scaling also goes by the name "correspondence analysis," and when applied to multiple-choice data in which there are more than 2 items, "optimal scaling" and "multiple correspondence analysis. " Our aim of this article was to explain in nontechnical terms what dual scaling offers to an analysis of contingency table and multiple-choice data.     

Making syntax of sense: number agreement in sentence production

Grammatical agreement flags the parts of sentences that belong together regardless of whether the parts appear together. In English, the major agreement controller is the sentence subject, the major agreement targets are verbs and pronouns, and the major agreement category is number. The authors expand an account of number agreement whose tenets are that pronouns acquire number lexically, whereas verbs acquire it syntactically but with similar contributions from number meaning and from the number morphology of agreement controllers. These tenets were instantiated in a model using existing verb agreement data. The model was then fit to a new, more extensive set of verb data and tested with a parallel set of pronoun data. The theory was supported by the model's outcomes. The results have implications for the integration of words and structures, for the workings of agreement categories, and for the nature of the transition from thought to language.     

Is Workplace Harassment Hazardous to Your Health?

We examined cross-sectional and lagged effects of sexual harassment (SH) and generalized workplace harassment (GWH) on incidence of self-reported illness, injury, or assault in a sample of over 1,500 university employees. SH and GWH, but not other job stressors, were related to increased odds of illness, injury, or assault. This was true when SH, GWH, and illness, injury, or assault were measured at the same time point, as well as when SH and GWH were measured in year prior to illness, injury, or assault.The data presented here are part of an ongoing longitudinal study of workplace harassment conducted at the Department of Psychiatry of the University of Illinois at Chicago. This research was supported by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (grants AA09989 and AA13332). Portions of this paper were presented at the annual meeting of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology, April 2004, Chicago, Illinois. The data were collected by the Survey Research Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Chicago.     

Linguistically mediated visual search: The critical role of speech rate

Recent studies have shown that the presentation of concurrent linguistic context can lead to highly efficient performance in a standard conjunction search task by the induction of an incremental search strategy (Spivey, Tyler, Eberhard, & Tanenhaus, 2001). However, these findings were obtained under anomalously slow speech rate conditions. Accordingly, in the present study, the effects of concurrent linguistic context on visual search performance were compared when speech was recorded at both a normal rate and a slow rate. The findings provided clear evidence that the visual search benefit afforded by concurrent linguistic context was contingent on speech rate, with normal speech producing a smaller benefit. Overall, these findings have important implications for understanding how linguistic and visual processes interact in real time and suggest a disparity in the temporal resolution of speech comprehension and visual search processes.     

Intuition and autism: a possible role for Von Economo neurons

Von Economo neurons (VENs) are a recently evolved cell type which may be involved in the fast intuitive assessment of complex situations. As such, they could be part of the circuitry supporting human social networks. We propose that the VENs relay an output of fronto-insular and anterior cingulate cortex to the parts of frontal and temporal cortex associated with theory-of-mind, where fast intuitions are melded with slower, deliberative judgments. The VENs emerge mainly after birth and increase in number until age 4 yrs. We propose that in autism spectrum disorders the VENs fail to develop normally, and that this failure might be partially responsible for the associated social disabilities that result from faulty intuition.     

Chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes) intentional communication is not contingent upon food

Studies of great apes have revealed that they use manual gestures and other signals to communicate about distal objects. There is also evidence that chimpanzees modify the types of communicative signals they use depending on the attentional state of a human communicative partner. The majority of previous studies have involved chimpanzees requesting food items from a human experimenter. Here, these same communicative behaviors are reported in chimpanzees requesting a tool from a human observer. In this study, captive chimpanzees were found to gesture, vocalize, and display more often when the experimenter had a tool than when she did not. It was also found that chimpanzees responded differentially based on the attentional state of a human experimenter, and when given the wrong tool persisted in their communicative efforts. Implications for the referential and intentional nature of chimpanzee communicative signaling are discussed.