Towards Working Life: Effects of an intervention on mental health and transition to post-basic education

The Towards Working Life group method was designed to promote the transition to the upper secondary level or vocational studies and to support mental health among young people finishing their basic education. This study examined the effects of the intervention during upper secondary and vocational studies in a randomized field experimental study among a total of 1034 students. At the one-year follow-up, the program had increased both education related social ties and the number of adults in these ties. The group intervention had interaction effects with baseline risk of depression and learning difficulties on symptoms of depression and school burnout. Among those initially at risk of depression, the intervention decreased symptoms of depression. For students who were at risk of depression and had learning difficulties, the intervention decreased school burnout.     

Difficult temperament predicts self‐esteem in adolescence

A six‐year longitudinal study investigated the impact of maternal hostile child‐rearing attitudes, role dissatisfaction, and maternal perceptions of adolescent temperamental difficultness on self‐esteem in late adolescence, after controlling for the initial self‐esteem measured in early adolescence. Adolescents (n = 313), derived from the Cardiovascular Risk in Young Finns study, rated their self‐esteem at the study entry at age 12, and six years later at age 18. Maternal reports of child‐rearing attitudes, of role satisfaction, and of the temperament of the adolescent were obtained at the study entry and three years later. Mother's perceptions of adolescent's temperament as difficult at ages 12 and 15 predicted adolescent's self‐reported self‐esteem in late adolescence, whereas earlier self‐esteem did not predict later perceptions of temperament or parenting. We found no evidence that maternal perceptions of parenting indirectly, or after controlling for the initial level, predicted adolescent's self‐reported self‐esteem. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Evaluating the interdependence of aging-related changes in visual and auditory acuity,balance, and cognitive functioning

High proportions of shared age-related variance are found among measures of perceptual acuity, balance, muscle strength, and cognitive capabilities in age-heterogeneous, cross-sectional studies. Reliance on cross-sectional studies is problematic, however, because associations may arise from age-related mean trends. Narrow age-cohort samples provide an alternative basis for testing hypotheses regarding associations among rates of change. Cross-domain associations were evaluated in combined 75-year-old cohort samples from Denmark, Finland, and Sweden. In general, no consistent associations were found across sensory, balance, strength, and cognitive domains. These findings indicate that the effects of aging on sensory acuity, balance, and cognitive functioning are likely to be largely independent, multidimensional, and complex at the level of the individual.     

Apperception in primed problem solving

Mental representation is a central theoretical concept in modern cognitive psychology. However, its investigation has been predominantly based on inapt perceptualist concepts, which presume that information contents in them, i.e., mental contents, solely arise from stimulus. This is in spite of the evidence that much in human thought does not have any sensory equivalence. Consequently, we make a difference between perception and apperception, as e.g., Kant and Wundt did, and argue in favor of a detailed analysis of this mental process that is responsible for the construction of representations. We present here five primed problem solving experiments. The basic idea was to demonstrate that depending on priming information people represent perceptually identical stimuli very differently, i.e., they ascribe different uses and meanings to objects and they integrate them differently to compose distinct solutions. In this vein, we demonstrate that people regularly rely on information, which is not or cannot be perceived in principle. On the ground of our empirical findings, we resurrect the issue on why the difference between perception and apperception is theoretically adequate and introduce some central concepts for the theoretical analysis of apperception such as "seeing as" and functional binding.     

Promoting career preparedness and intrinsic work-goal motivation: RCT intervention

We examined the role of an in-company training program aimed at enhancing employees' intrinsic work-goal motivation by increasing their career preparedness in a randomized field experimental study. The program activities were implemented using an organization-level two-trainer model with trainers from the human resources management and occupational health services. Within-organizations randomly assigned field experimental study (RCT) investigated the impact of the intervention on immediate career preparedness and both immediate and follow-up intrinsic work-goal motivation. A total of 718 eligible individuals filled in and returned the questionnaire in 17 organizations and became voluntary participants. The respondents were randomly assigned to either intervention (N = 369) or control groups (N = 349). Those in the intervention group were invited to group intervention workshops, whereas the control group received printed material covering the information content of the intervention. The participants filled in the work-goal questionnaires before intervention, after the week-long intervention and seven months later. In addition they filled in a career preparedness scale before and after the intervention. The results showed that intervention increased career preparedness which in turn was related to intrinsic work-goal motivation and increased intrinsic work-goal motivation at the follow-up.     

Effects of resource-building group intervention on career management and mental health in work organizations: randomized controlled field trial

A resource-building group intervention was developed to enhance career management, mental health, and job retention in work organizations. The in-company training program provided employees with better preparedness to manage their own careers. The program activities were universally implemented using an organization-level, 2-trainer model with trainers from the human resources management and occupational health services. The study was a within-organizations, randomly assigned field experimental study; it investigated the impacts of the intervention on immediate career management preparedness and later mental health and intentions to retire early. A total of 718 eligible individuals returned a questionnaire in 17 organizations and became voluntary participants. The respondents were randomly assigned to either an intervention (N = 369) or a comparison group (N = 349). Those in the intervention group were invited to group intervention workshops, whereas those in the comparison group received printed information about career and health-related issues. The 7-month follow-up results showed that the program significantly decreased depressive symptoms and intentions to retire early and increased mental resources among the group participants compared to the others. The mediation analyses demonstrated that the increase in career management preparedness as a proximal impact of the intervention mediated the longer term mental health effects. Those who benefited most from the intervention as regards their mental health were employees with elevated levels of depression or exhaustion and younger employees, implying additional benefits of a more targeted use of the intervention. The results demonstrated the benefits of the enhancement of individual-level career management and resilience resources as career and health promotion practice in work organizations.     

Location coding in chess

Whether the chunks used in memorizing chess positions are general and relatively encoded schemata or very precisely coded instances is a problem that has raised some controversy within the psychology of chess skill. As chess research has had a strong impact on expertise research, this problem is important in many areas of skills research other than chess. To resolve it, four experiments were set up. In the experiments it was shown that subjects were better at recalling correctly located non-transposed chunks than transposed chunks, which were similar in structure but incorrectly located on the chessboard. The results imply that the representation of chess-specific patterns in the memory of a chess player contains not only information about the forms of chess-specific patterns, but also about their absolute locations on the chessboard. This provides an explanation for the well-known interaction between skill and type of position and its disappearance in recent experiments by Lories and Saariluoma. It can be argued that the difficulty of recalling random positions is not chiefly caused by the total absence of chunks but by their dislocation.     

Transactional development of parent personality and child temperament

Stability and change in parental extraversion and neuroticism were studied in transaction with their views of their child's temperament from the age of six months to the age of five‐and‐a‐half years in 109 mother–father–child triads (parent–daughter: n = 61, parent–son: n = 48). While parental traits showed high stability, infants' higher positive affectivity predicted an increase in parental extraversion over 5 years, and infant's higher activity predicted a decrease in parental neuroticism. Parent‐rated temperament showed expected heterotypic continuity. Initially higher parental extraversion predicted an increase in the child's effortful control, and higher parental neuroticism predicted an increase in the child's negative affectivity. The results indicate that parental personality and child temperament develop in transaction promoting change in each other. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Confidence in work‐related goals and feelings of exhaustion during a therapeutic intervention for burnout: A time‐series approach

This study investigated recursive relations between confidence in achieving work‐related goals and work exhaustion among employees who participated in an intervention to reduce their burnout. Thirty‐six employees of age 33–59 years suffering from severe burnout (28 females and 8 males) filled in burnout and well‐being measures before and after a 10‐month therapeutic intervention. They also filled in weekly measures of confidence in work‐related goals (progress and capability) and work exhaustion throughout the intervention, as well as 4 weeks before and 4 weeks afterwards. Intra‐individual variation was modelled using dynamic factor analyses. The results showed that, for most participants, confidence in work‐related goals and work exhaustion during a given week could be predicted from those of the preceding week. Moreover, high self‐esteem predicted low weekly stability in goal confidence, whereas high burnout contributed to high weekly stability in work exhaustion. The intra‐individual stabilities in goal confidence and exhaustion also predicted which of the participants benefited from the intervention in terms of increasing well‐being and decreasing work‐related stress.