Newcomer psychological contracts and employee socialization activities: Does perceived balance in obligations matter?

We sought to determine the extent to which one’s beliefs about the relationship between an employee and an organization at the start of employment influence subsequent socialization activities. The balance of employee exchange relationships, employee perceptions of both their own obligations and the employers’ obligations, were collected from 120 newcomers in a public sector organization on the first day of employment and again three months later. We found the relationship between employee obligations and two socialization activities (time with mentor and time spent in training) depended on the employee’s perceptions of what the employer owed the employee, such that employees in unbalanced relationships tended to engage in more socialization activities than employees in balanced relationships.     

Counselling strategies for bereaved people offered in primary care

The aim of this study was to identify strategies that general practice-based counsellors used when offering support to bereaved clients. Over the last decade, there has been a rapid growth in the provision of counselling services associated with British primary care services. A study was designed involving qualitative methods of data collection (semi-structured interviews) and analysis (a grounded theory approach). Counsellors were recruited from two cities in Southern Britain (Plymouth and Southampton). Twenty nine (76% response rate) counsellors agreed to participate (Southampton n = 15, Plymouth, n = 14). Semi-structured face-to-face audio-taped interviews elicited information about their perceptions of the appropriateness of general practitioner referrals, counselling strategies and models of bereavement. Analysis indicated that counsellors saw bereavement counselling within a broader agenda of work concerned with loss and relationship management. Many drew on eclectic approaches to bereavement counselling and specific strategies included: facilitating telling of the 'story' of the loss; engaging in active listening and valuing allowing people to talk; establishing a supportive relationship; and enabling the bereaved person to deal with unfinished business and to say 'goodbye'. Counsellors drew on implicit stage/phase models of grief that assumed levels of distress reduced over time. The value of these strategies requires more exploration.     

Multinomial process tree models of control and automaticity in weapon misidentification

When primed with a Black face, people are more likely to misidentify a non-weapon as a weapon. Weapon misidentification may hinge on the distinction between controlled and automatic processes. Various relationships between controlled and automatic processes are cast in the form of five multinomial process models, which are illustrated and compared. It is shown that variants of the traditional Process Dissociation model and the Stroop model are nested within the Quad-Model. Across four different studies, various complexity corrected model performance measures converged to support the Process Dissociation account. This account suggests that the automatic association between race and weapons is subordinate to controlled processing. More generally, these results suggest that the weapon-bias might be alleviated without interventions that directly target stereotypes.     

Historical inferences from ethnohistorical data: Boasian views

Just before Boasian anthropologists turned from trying to reconstruct North American prehistory to synchronic work on social organization and on the psychological integration of intact cultures, they considered the validity of traditional/folk accounts. Robert Lowie, editor of the official journal of the American Anthropological Association, categorically rejected any use of such data, twisting the carefully delimited claims made for them by the anthropologists engaged in disentangling American ethnic groupings, who were unwilling to throw out all data except those provided by professionally trained (that is, Boasian) anthropologists. Rather than the “refutation” (in the Popperian sense) this episode has been taken to represent, it exemplifies a problematic along with the appropriate methods for the problematic being dropped as other problematics and methods become fashionable.     

Impartiality in pre-entry guidance for adults in further education colleges

The growth in the provision of guidance through institution-based services in the United Kingdom has raised concerns about whether the principle of impartiality is being compromised. The understandings and practices of impartiality among those involved in providing pre-entry guidance to adults in three further education colleges in London are examined. A complex picture is presented in which impartiality is only one aspect of guidance and one with different and uncertain meanings emerging from and situated within differing individual, social and institutional contexts. Thus while the meaning of impartiality can be clearly stated in professional codes of practice and quality frameworks, its meanings in practice are less clear. Further areas of research are identified.     

Speech anxiety as a multiplicative function of size of audience and social desirability

Social impact theory, especially the constructs of importance and number of people present, have been useful in explaining the magnitude of speech anxiety experienced by speakers. In the present study, Crowne and Marlowe's social desirability construct was evaluated as an operational definition of importance. A multiple regression analysis indicated that speech anxiety is best explained by a multiplicative rather than a simple linear model, using size of audience and social desirability as independent variables for 50 speakers.     

“Masculinity,” “femininity,” and adjustment in college men

The regression of adjustment—indexed by measures of anxiety and depression— on “masculinity” (instrumentality) and “femininity” (expressiveness)—as assessed by the BSRI, PRF ANDRO, and the Short BSRI—was studied in 122 college men. The findings revealed that: (a) anxiety and depression marked a single adjustment factor; (b) self-esteem mediated the relationships between instrumentality, expressiveness, and adjustment, such that when the variance due to it was removed, neither instrumentality nor expressiveness accounted for significant variance in Anxiety-Depression; (c) the Short BSRI index of expressiveness behaved differently from the other indices and more like that of the PAQ; (d) instrumentality and expressiveness interacted significantly, such that instrumentality was positively associated with adjustment for those with low or average expressiveness and expressiveness was positively associated with adjustment only for those with low or average instrumentality; and (e) men high in instrumentality and low in expressiveness reported slightly higher adjustment than “androgynous” men.