Attributional Style and Engagement/Disengagement Responses in the Chinese Workforce

Internal attribution for bad events, along with stable and global attributions, has been regarded as a component of pessimism, a precursor of negative work outcomes. Most evidence in support of this conceptualisation has come from research conducted in individualist cultures. We questioned if internal attribution has the same pessimistic implication in a collectivist culture. Findings from two studies conducted on Chinese employees supported our expectations that the stability and globality dimensions (but not the internality dimension) would predict disengagement responses (such as quitting and being neglectful at work) and lack of engagement responses (such as voicing suggestions and being loyal to the organisation). A reconceptualisation of pessimism in the workplace is therefore necessary. A dimensional, rather than a composite, scoring method is proposed for maintaining the predictive and construct validities of attributional style as an indicator of pessimism.     

Divergent and Convergent Group Creativity in an Asynchronous Online Environment

This study examined the influence of various group diversity dimensions on collaborative creativity related to the healthcare system. Research findings on the association between diversity and brainstorming performance has been mixed. Diversity that increases cognitive stimulation or promotes elaboration has been shown to increase group performance. Participants exchanged ideas, replied, and elaborated using an electronic discussion board in an asynchronous fashion in groups of five over a period of 4 weeks. The groups varied in diversity of ethnicity, gender, age, and political orientation, but participants were not made aware of this diversity. Age and gender diversity were related to lower levels of replying to ideas and lower idea novelty but political diversity was related to increased replies and novelty. If a topic engages people with different perspectives to actively respond to others’ ideas, this can increase the creative potential of idea sharing in groups. Political or value-based diversity has the potential for creative solutions if the other participants’ political or value-based identities are not made salient.     

Preschool children's eye‐movements during pictorial recall

We investigated eye‐movements during preschool children's pictorial recall of seen objects. Thirteen 3‐ to 4‐year‐old children completed a perceptual encoding and a pictorial recall task. First, they were exposed to 16 pictorial objects, which were positioned in one of four distinct areas on the computer screen. Subsequently, they had to recall these pictorial objects from memory in order to respond to specific questions about visual details. We found that children spent more time fixating the areas in which the pictorial objects were previously displayed. We conclude that as early as age 3–4 years old, children show specific eye‐movements when they recall pictorial contents of previously seen objects.     

The effect of varied physician affect on recall, anxiety, and perceptions in women at risk for breast cancer: an analogue study.

Evaluated the effect of varied physician affect on subject recall, anxiety, and perceptions in a simulated tense and ambiguous medical situation. Forty women at risk for breast cancer viewed videotapes of an oncologist presenting--with either worried or nonworried affect--mammogram results. Although the mammogram results and the oncologist were the same in both presentation, analyses indicated that, compared to the women receiving the results from a nonworried physician, the women receiving the results from a worried physician recalled significantly less information, perceived the clinical situation as significantly more severe, reported significantly higher levels of state anxiety, and had significantly higher pulse rates. These results suggest that physician affect plays a critical role in patient reaction to medical information. Implications for compliance research, patient satisfaction, and physician training are discussed.     

Are rats short-sighted? Effects of stimulus distance and size on visual detection

Behavioural evidence concerning short-sightedness in rats is apparently conflicting: in some experiments rats have performed poorly with visual stimuli further than about 60 cm distant, while in others they have made efficient use of more distant cues, for example to find their way through mazes. However, in the experiments suggesting short-sightedness, the physical size of the stimuli was not varied, so that stimulus distance and visual angle were confounded. In the present experiment, therefore, the size and distance of the stimuli to be detected were varied independently. Over the range tested (30-160 cm), distance was found to produce relatively slight effects on the smallest detectable visual angle, and these tended to diminish with practice. Thus, no good evidence was found for short-sightedness in rats up to 160 cm, a finding consistent with current views of the structure and image-forming capacities of the rat's eye. The smallest detectable targets were, however, surprisingly large in view of the rat's visual acuity (which is about 1c/deg): at the distances tested, animals required considerable training to run reliably to targets subtending less than 5-10° of visual angle. Difficulties in responding to stationary stimuli of this size are likely to restrict severely the use that rats make of vision both in the laboratory and in their natural surroundings.