Fighting Like Brother and Sister: Sibling Relationships and Future Adult Romantic Relationship Quality

Many factors influence the quality of a romantic relationship, and there has been increasing evidence that early attachment plays a vital role in adult bonds, including romantic relationships. However, most of the literature has focused on the role of parent–child and peer attachments with little focus on sibling attachments. Using the Sibling Relationship Questionnaire, we asked a sample of New Zealand university students to retrospectively rate the relationship they had with a significant sibling during their adolescence, and to rate their current romantic relationship quality using the Relationship Assessment Scale. We found no significant correlations between the subscales of the Sibling Relationship Questionnaire and the Relationship Assessment Scale. However, further analysis uncovered a significant association between the Relationship Assessment Scale, birth order, and relationship length.     

Identity From Variation: Representations of Faces Derived From Multiple Instances

Research in face recognition has tended to focus on discriminating between individuals, or “telling people apart.” It has recently become clear that it is also necessary to understand how images of the same person can vary, or “telling people together.” Learning a new face, and tracking its representation as it changes from unfamiliar to familiar, involves an abstraction of the variability in different images of that person's face. Here, we present an application of principal components analysis computed across different photos of the same person. We demonstrate that people vary in systematic ways, and that this variability is idiosyncratic—the dimensions of variability in one face do not generalize well to another. Learning a new face therefore entails learning how that face varies. We present evidence for this proposal and suggest that it provides an explanation for various effects in face recognition. We conclude by making a number of testable predictions derived from this framework.     

Disguising Superman: How Glasses Affect Unfamiliar Face Matching

Could a simple pair of glasses really fool us into thinking Superman and Clark Kent are two different people? Here, we investigated the perception of identity from face images with a task that relies on visual comparison rather than memory. Participants were presented with two images simultaneously and were asked whether the images depicted the same person or two different people. The image pairs showed neither image with glasses, both images with glasses, and ‘mixed’ pairs of one image with and one without glasses. Participants' accuracies, measured by both percentage correct and d′ sensitivity, were significantly lower for ‘mixed’ trials. Analysis of response bias showed that when only one face wore glasses, people tended to respond ‘different’. We demonstrate that glasses affect face matching ability using unconstrained images, and this has implications for both disguise research and authenticating identity in the real world. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Successful Postgraduate Placement Experiences: What is the Influence of Job and Supervisor Characteristics?

We know little about what determines an effective placement experience, yet vocational placements are an integral part of many professional degree programmes. The aim of this research was to examine the influence of job (task variety, task identity, task significance, feedback, and autonomy) and supervisor (relationship quality and mentoring) characteristics on placement outcomes. The findings were tested on samples from two professions for which placement were a compulsory part of their course. Sample 1 consisted of 266 undergraduate nurses, and sample 2 consisted of 176 postgraduate psychologists. The findings showed that job and supervisor characteristics explained unique variance in professional development and placement satisfaction. Of the five job characteristics examined, skill variety, feedback from the job, and task significance influenced placement outcomes. Mentoring emerged as the most important supervisor characteristic that was associated with professional development and placement satisfaction, and to a slightly less extent, supervisor–student relationship quality was also important. The research and practical implications of the findings were discussed.     

Consumer complaints and recovery through guaranteeing self‐service technology

Self‐service technologies are shaping the future of consumer behaviour, yet consumers often experience service failure in this context. This conceptual paper focuses on self‐service technology failure and recovery. A consumer perspective is taken. Recovering from self‐service technology failure is fraught with difficulty, mainly because of the absence of service personnel. The aim of this paper is to present a theoretical framework and associated research propositions in respect to the positive role that service guarantees can play in the context of self‐service technology failure and recovery. It contributes to the consumer behaviour domain by unifying the theory pertaining to consumer complaint behaviour, service recovery, specifically consumers' perceptions of justice, and service guarantees, which are set in a distinctive self‐service technology context. It is advanced that service guarantees, specifically multiple attribute‐specific guarantees, are associated with consumer voice complaints following self‐service technology failure, which is contingent on the attribution of blame in the light of consumers' production role. Service guarantees are argued to be associated with consumers' perceptions of just recovery in the self‐service technology context when they promise to fix the problem, compensate only when the problem cannot be remedied, offer a choice of compensation that is contingent on failure severity, afford ease of invocation and collection, and provide a personalised response to failures. Previous classifications of SSTs are used to highlight the applicability of guarantees for different types of SSTs. Managerial implications based on the theoretical framework are presented, along with future research directions. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Odyssey's end: lay conceptions of nostalgia reflect its original Homeric meaning

Nostalgia fulfills pivotal functions for individuals, but lacks an empirically derived and comprehensive definition. We examined lay conceptions of nostalgia using a prototype approach. In Study 1, participants generated open-ended features of nostalgia, which were coded into categories. In Study 2, participants rated the centrality of these categories, which were subsequently classified as central (e.g., memories, relationships, happiness) or peripheral (e.g., daydreaming, regret, loneliness). Central (as compared with peripheral) features were more often recalled and falsely recognized (Study 3), were classified more quickly (Study 4), were judged to reflect more nostalgia in a vignette (Study 5), better characterized participants' own nostalgic (vs. ordinary) experiences (Study 6), and prompted higher levels of actual nostalgia and its intrapersonal benefits when used to trigger a personal memory, regardless of age (Study 7). These findings highlight that lay people view nostalgia as a self-relevant and social blended emotional and cognitive state, featuring a mixture of happiness and loss. The findings also aid understanding of nostalgia's functions and identify new methods for future research.     

Phonon densities of states of gamma-cerium and delta-cerium measured by time-of-flight inelastic neutron scattering

Time-of-flight inelastic neutron scattering spectra were measured on cerium metal at temperatures near the fcc (gamma)-to-bcc (delta) transition temperature. Phonon density-of-states (DOS) curves were extracted from data acquired over a wide range of momentum transfers. A large softening of the phonon DOS was found in going from gamma-cerium to delta-cerium, and this accounts for an increase in vibrational entropy of (0.71 +/- 0.05)k _B/atom. To be consistent with the latent heat of the gamma-delta transition, this increase in vibrational entropy must be accompanied by a large decrease in electronic entropy. The results not only confirm the recent discovery of a significant electronic contribution to the gamma-delta transition but also suggest that it may be twice that previously reported.