Explicating the Openness to Experience Construct and its Subdimensions and Facets in a Work Setting

Recent meta‐analyses (e.g. Barrick, Mount, & Judge, 2001 ) found openness to experience, a factor in the five‐factor model of personality, to be uncorrelated with job performance. We argue that, among others, insignificant validity is due to the broad and heterogeneous nature of the construct. In line with our hypotheses, we found internal structure of openness to be multidimensional. Further analyses on subdimensional and facet level revealed large differences in criterion‐ and construct‐related validity. It could be demonstrated that a subdimension labeled epistemic curiosity and, especially, the facet openness to ideas, which includes aspects like curiosity, flexibility, willingness to learn, and creativity, are highly relevant for work‐related criteria and so far understudied in organizational research.     

Cognitive Behavior Therapy for Fear of Cancer Recurrence: A Case Study

This case study describes the course and content of cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) for clinical fear of cancer recurrence (FCR) in a breast cancer survivor. The CBT for clinical FCR consisted of seven face-to-face therapy sessions and one telephone session. The primary treatment goal was to reduce FCR severity by modifying cognitive processes and dysfunctional behavior. Assessments of FCR and quality of life were completed by the breast cancer survivor pre-therapy, post-therapy, and at 6 and 12 months of post-therapy. In each treatment session, perceived control over FCR was assessed. A clinical nurse specialist participated in evaluation interviews. The patient’s perceived control over FCR increased during the therapy, and FCR severity declined to a non-clinical level. This improvement was still evident at the 6- and 12-month follow-up assessments and was supported by results for secondary and exploratory outcomes measures. FCR offers a great challenge for health care professionals due to the lack of effective treatment options. This case study shows how clinical FCR can be addressed with CBT and can contribute to the improvement of care for cancer survivors.     

Computerized cognitive training during physical inactivity improves executive functioning in older adults

The hippocampus is closely tied to spatial navigation, a central component in cognitive functioning, and critically involved in age-associated cognitive decline and dementia. This study evaluated a novel, cognitive computerized spatial navigation training (CSNT) program targeting the hippocampus, with expectation of mitigating possible cognitive decline with bed rest (BR). During a 14-day BR study with 16 healthy, older men (mean age = 60 ± 3, range = 55–65 years), half received CSNT for 12 days in 50-min sessions and half were controls (watching documentaries). This design uniquely controlled diet, sleep, and other personal and environmental activities. Although there were no cognitive declines in controls post-BR, CSNT participants demonstrated significant increases in executive/attention ability and processing speed, and continued spatial navigation testing showed improvement to 400 days post-BR. This intervention may prove useful to mitigate cognitive declines known to occur in long periods of immobilization and could have broader implications in protecting against age-related cognitive decline.     

A set of 150 pictures with morphologically complex English compound names: Norms for name agreement,familiarity, image agreement,and visual complexity

We present a set of 150 pictures with morphologically complex English compound names. The pictures were collected from various sources and were standardized to appear as grayscale line drawings of a fixed size. All the compounds had two constituents and were primarily of the noun–noun type. Following previous studies, we collected name agreement (percentage and H), familiarity, image agreement, and visual complexity norms, as well as frequency estimates for the whole compound word and its first and second constituents. These pictures and their corresponding norms (available from the Psychonomic Society's supplemental archive) are a valuable tool in the study of the morphological representation of complex words in language processing.     

Between Islam and anti-globalization: cultural, political and religious debates in the German Muslim newspaper Islamische Zeitung

This paper examines the Islamische Zeitung (IZ), a newspaper made by German Muslims for German Muslims that informs about political, cultural, and theological topics. I argue that beyond providing information, the paper aims to create a platform of debate for a growing group of, in particular, younger pious educated Muslims who examine current politics by way of an Islamic and also an anti-globalization perspective. Of relevance for this audience are Islamic knowledge, local and global politics, everyday religious concerns and practices, and cultural affairs. I illustrate how by discussing certain topics on its pages, the makers of the IZ support specific issues of debates among some pious individuals, such as for example the participation of pious Muslims (men and women) in the democratic process by way of running in elections. Finally I argue that the IZ seeks to link the German Muslim community to the context of the global ummah and here in particular the globalized ummah as a new community marked by a shared popular culture universe. I illustrate that contrary to the claims of some of its opponents, the IZ is a platform for German Muslim affairs that participates in the broader public sphere as much as it helps to mediate a variety of possibilities for the participation of individuals and communities.     

Happy with a difference, unhappy with an identity: Observers’ mood determines processing depth in visual search

Visual search for feature targets was employed to investigate whether the mechanisms underlying visual selective attention are modulated by observers’ mood. The effects of induced mood on overall mean reaction times and on changes and repetitions of target-defining features and dimensions across consecutive trials were measured. The results showed that reaction times were significantly slower in the negative than in the positive and neutral mood groups. Furthermore, the results demonstrated that the processing stage that is activated to select visual information in a feature search task is modulated by the observer’s mood. In participants with positive or neutral moods, dimension-specific, but no feature-specific, intertrial transition effects were found, suggesting that these observers based their responses on a salience signal coding the most conspicuous display location. Conversely, intertrial effects in observers in a negative mood were feature-specific in nature, suggesting that these participants accessed the feature identity level before responding.     

Wayfinding behavior and spatial knowledge of adults and children in a virtual environment: The role of landmarks

This study investigated the effect of different organizations of landmark-location pairings as fine-space information on wayfinding behavior and spatial knowledge on a total of 90 participants: 30 second graders, 30 sixth graders, and 30 adults. All participants had to find their way to a goal in a virtual environment with either randomized or categorical landmarks, or without any landmarks. Thereafter, they had to find the shortest way from the start position to the goal in two consecutive trials (wayfinding performance), and they had to solve a number of spatial knowledge tasks. The results showed that independent of their categorical function, the existence of landmarks influenced the way-finding performance of adults and children in the same way. Whereas the presence of landmarks had no effect on spatial survey knowledge, landmark knowledge itself was influenced by the categorical function of the landmarks presented. Moreover, second graders showed limited achievement compared to adults independent of the existence of landmarks. The main results implicate firstly that children at school age indeed are able to use landmark-location pairings as fine-space information like adults during learning an unknown environmental space, and secondly that a dissociation between wayfinding behavior and spatial knowledge might exist.     

Processing the noun phrase versus sentence coordination ambiguity: thematic information does not completely eliminate processing difficulty

When faced with the noun phrase (NP) versus sentence (S) coordination ambiguity as in, for example, The thief shot the jeweller and the cop ..., readers prefer the reading with NP-coordination (e.g., "The thief shot the jeweller and the cop yesterday") over one with two conjoined sentences (e.g., "The thief shot the jeweller and the cop panicked"). A corpus study is presented showing that NP-coordinations are produced far more often than S-coordinations, which in frequency-based accounts of parsing might be taken to explain the NP-coordination preference. In addition, we describe an eye-tracking experiment investigating S-coordinated sentences such as Jasper sanded the board and the carpenter laughed, where the poor thematic fit between carpenter and sanded argues against NP-coordination. Our results indicate that information regarding poor thematic fit was used rapidly, but not without leaving some residual processing difficulty. This is compatible with claims that thematic information can reduce but not completely eliminate garden-path effects.     

Lack of pervasiveness of the underconfidence-with-practice effect: boundary conditions and an explanation via anchoring

The authors investigated whether underconfidence in judgments of learning (JOLs) is pervasive across multiple study-test trials as suggested by A. Koriat, L. Sheffer, and H. Ma'ayan (2002) or whether underconfidence with practice (UWP) might be a kind of anchoring-and-adjustment effect, such that the occurrence or nonoccurrence of the UWP effect depends on whether recall is above a psychological anchor. Participants studied normatively difficult items or normatively easy items and made immediate JOLs or delayed JOLs. The UWP effect occurred for easy items, but for difficult items an overconfidence-with-practice (OWP) effect occurred for delayed JOLs and no bias occurred for immediate JOLs. The systematic occurrence of all 3 outcomes establishes boundary conditions for the UWP effect and confirms the hypothesis that underconfidence (or the lack thereof) may arise at least in part from an anchoring-and-adjustment mechanism.