Assessing interactional competencies: The early social-communication scales

Interactional competencies that develop in the first two years of life provide a foundation for all further social and communicative developments. Their normal acquisition, especially in the handicapped, can not be taken for granted. If delays in social-communicative development can be identified early in life and changes made in how the social environment interacts with the child, intervention may effectively facilitate social development. However, to accomplish this, both a model for describing and an instrument for assessing interactional competencies are needed. A recently developed set of scales, organized according to a cognitive-developmental framework and drawing upon recent research literature, is described in terms of its organization and content. Results that support the cognitive model underlying the set of scales are reported. The paper concludes with a consideration of potential criticisms that may apply to such a theoretically based instrument.     

Promoting the underestimated: A vignette study on the importance of the need for affiliation to successful leadership

Research on the relationship of implicit motives and effective leadership emphasises the importance of a socialised need for power, whereas high levels of the need for affiliation are assumed to thwart a leader’s success. In our study, we experimentally analysed the impact of leaders’ socialised need for power and their need for affiliation on perceptions of transformational leadership and various success indicators. Using paper-people vignettes, we contrasted leaders characterised by either motive with those concerned with personalised power or achievement. Results based on N?=?80 employees show that leaders high in socialised power were rated more successful and elicited more identification and organisational citizenship behaviour (OCB) in followers, and that in most cases this effect was mediated by perceptions of transformational leadership. For all outcomes but OCB, findings remained unchanged when affiliation-motivated leaders were considered. Exploratory analyses contrasting socialised power-motivated and affiliation-motivated leaders show that with regard to attitudinal outcomes affiliation-motivated leaders were, on average, as effective as socialised power-motivated ones.

     

Risk assessment in sentencing and plea bargaining: The roles of prosecutors and defense attorneys

Research on risk assessment in sentencing has focused heavily on the role of judges. Ignoring the role of other courtroom actors in the sentencing process, however, leaves unexamined the potentially significant effects on judicial decision making of arguments made by prosecutors and defense attorneys at sentencing hearings. Unduly focusing on judges also overlooks the vast majority of sentences arrived at through negotiated guilty pleas. We explored the extent to which considerations of risk are made among prosecutors and defense attorneys when advocating for given sentences in open court or during plea negotiations. We surveyed all prosecutors and defense attorneys in 14 judicial circuits in Virginia and found that most prosecutors and defense attorneys at least “sometimes” explicitly invoked actuarial risk estimates both at sentencing hearings and during plea negotiations. However, defense attorneys were much more likely than prosecutors to be averse to the use of risk assessment in either form of case disposition.     

What moderates the attainment gap? The effects of social identity incompatibility and practical incompatibility on the performance of students who are or are not Black,Asian or Minority Ethnic

Social Psychology of Education - A successful journey through higher education is, for many, a once in a lifetime opportunity for social mobility. Unfortunately, one notable feature of higher...     

Where and when to look: Sequential effects at the millisecond level

Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics - Learning and imitating a complex motor action requires to visually follow complex movements, but conscious perception seems too slow for such tasks....     

Taxonomies of aggressive behavior: A preliminary report

It has been widely and regularly suggested that aggression is not a unitary concept but rather an omnibus term concealing important and distinct subclasses of behavior. Psychologists have offered various categorical schemes highlighting motivation and form as distinguishing criteria. Many writers have also noted the social relativity of dermitions of classes of aggression and called for a consideration of lay conceptions of aggressive behavior. The present paper explores the correspondence between psychologists' and laypersons' categorizations of aggressive acts. Ten short scenarios of aggression were generated to embody systematic permutations of form and motive as suggested by the published work of social psychologists. Subjects rated every pairwise combination in terms of perceived similarity. The data were subjected to three-factor, multidimensional scaling. The resulting structure indicated that subjects' ratings were not random and reflected consideration of motive (hostile, normative, instrumental, status) and of direct versus indirect form. The data were thus in close correspondence with the classifications generated by psychologists. The desirability of refining this technique and extending it to other cultural and subcultural groups is discussed.     

Reduced or increased influence of non-pertinent information in patients with schizophrenia?

We tested the ability of 18 patients with schizophrenia and 18 matched controls to filter non-pertinent information in orientation matching tasks. The non-pertinent information consisted of pictures conveying semantic information. The pertinent information consisted of oriented line-segments drawn inside pictures or was represented by the overall orientation of the picture itself. The results showed that non-pertinent information interfered with performance of control subjects in all tasks. In contrast, non-pertinent information interfered with the performance of patients with schizophrenia to the same extent as that of matched controls only when non-pertinent and pertinent information was physically mingled, but not when they were separated. Yet, patients processed non-pertinent information in all experiments, as shown by reversed interference effects when non-pertinent and pertinent information was physically separated. These results suggest a deficit at linking physically distinct visual information in patients with schizophrenia. Additionally, performance was more impaired in patients with schizophrenia than in control subjects when the amount of displayed information increased. The results suggest the coexistence, and a possible relationship between attentional deficits and impairments at linking distinct visual information in patients with schizophrenia.