Understanding the emotional aspects of escalation of commitment: the role of negative affect

Despite the importance of understanding the emotional aspects of organizational decision making, prior research has paid scant attention to the role of emotion in escalation of commitment. This article attempts to fill this gap by examining the relationship between negative affect and escalation of commitment. Results showed that regardless of whether negative affect was measured as a dispositional trait (Neuroticism) in Studies 1 and 2 or as a transient mood state in Study 3, it was negatively correlated with escalation tendency when one was personally responsible for a prior decision. This pattern of results is consistent with the predictions derived from the coping perspective, suggesting that people seek to escape from the unpleasant emotions that are associated with escalation situations.     

Body-size perception, body-esteem, and parenting history in college women reporting a history of child abuse

This study investigated the relations among physical, emotional, and sexual abuse up to adolescence and subsequent perception of body size, detection of changes in body size, and body-esteem. The role of parenting history in abused participants was also examined. 38 college undergraduate women, half of whom had been abused, reported instances of abuse, childhood parenting history, and current body-esteem. A recently developed software program of Gardner and Boice was used to present a series of distorted frontal profiles of each participant's own body for the women to rate as being too wide or too thin. A psychophysical procedure called adaptive probit estimation was used to measure the amount of over- and underestimation of these ratings and whether these changes were statistically significant. Analysis showed abused participants had distorted perceptions of body size, although the direction of the distortion was not consistent. There was no difference in detection of changes in body size. Abused and nonabused participants differed on measures of body-esteem and on ratings of most parenting experiences, including experiences with both mothers and fathers.     

Interrupted visual searches reveal volatile search memory

This study investigated memory from interrupted visual searches. Participants conducted a change detection search task on polygons overlaid on scenes. Search was interrupted by various disruptions, including unfilled delay, passive viewing of other scenes, and additional search on new displays. Results showed that performance was unaffected by short intervals of unfilled delay or passive viewing, but it was impaired by additional search tasks. Across delays, memory for the spatial layout of the polygons was retained for future use, but memory for polygon shapes, background scene, and absolute polygon locations was not. The authors suggest that spatial memory aids interrupted visual searches, but the use of this memory is easily disrupted by additional searches.     

Achievement motivation among urban adolescents: Work hope, autonomy support, and achievement-related beliefs

Drawing upon expectancy value, hope, and self-determination theories, this study explores the contributions of work-based beliefs and autonomy support as predictors of adaptive achievement-related beliefs. Two hundred and one urban high school students who were enrolled in a work-based learning program completed measures of work hope, autonomy support, and achievement beliefs. Results from the full canonical correlation model revealed that work hope, career planning, and autonomy support shared 37.5% of the variance with achievement-related beliefs. Moreover, work hope and teacher autonomy support further contributed unique variance in explaining these beliefs. The findings contribute to the theoretical knowledge base concerning the value of work-based learning in fostering academic motivation among adolescents.     

Asymmetric cultural effects on perceptual expertise underlie an own-race bias for voices

The own-race bias in memory for faces has been a rich source of empirical work on the mechanisms of person perception. This effect is thought to arise because the face-perception system differentially encodes the relevant structural dimensions of features and their configuration based on experiences with different groups of faces. However, the effects of sociocultural experiences on person perception abilities in other identity-conveying modalities like audition have not been explored. Investigating an own-race bias in the auditory domain provides a unique opportunity for studying whether person identification is a modality-independent construct and how it is sensitive to asymmetric cultural experiences. Here we show that an own-race bias in talker identification arises from asymmetric experience with different spoken dialects. When listeners categorized voices by race (White or Black), a subset of the Black voices were categorized as sounding White, while the opposite case was unattested. Acoustic analyses indicated listeners’ perceptions about race were consistent with differences in specific phonetic and phonological features. In a subsequent person-identification experiment, the Black voices initially categorized as sounding White elicited an own-race bias from White listeners, but not from Black listeners. These effects are inconsistent with person-perception models that strictly analogize faces and voices based on recognition from only structural features. Our results demonstrate that asymmetric exposure to spoken dialect, independent from talkers’ physical characteristics, affects auditory perceptual expertise for talker identification. Person perception thus additionally relies on socioculturally-acquired dynamic information, which may be represented by different mechanisms in different sensory modalities.     

Are Risk‐Taking Persons Less Religious? Risk Preference,Religious Affiliation,and Religious Participation in Taiwan

The "risk-preference" thesis is a controversial topic in the sociology of religion. Thus far, cross-cultural empirical research on risk preference and religiosity has been meager. This study attempts to replicate Miller's ( Miller, Alan S. 2000 . Going to hell in Asia: The relationship between risk and religion in a cross cultural setting.   Review of Religious Research 42(1):5–18) study for Taiwanese society, using data from the 2007 Taiwan Social Change Survey (TSCS). Logistic regression results show that for the Taiwanese (1) risk preference has little estimated net effect on religious affiliation, but (2) the relationship between risk preference and frequency of religious participation is statistically significant.     

Self-Efficacy and the Prediction of Domain-Specific Cognitive Abilities

ABSTRACT We evaluated predictors of performance in 4 specific cognitive ability domains: verbal, numerical, spatial, and mechanical. The predictors were individual differences in self-efficacy beliefs, self-enhancement tendencies, and cross-domain abilities. Our university students' beliefs about their verbal, numerical, and spatial capabilities correlated well with their actual performance on standardized tests (verbal r =.33, numerical r =.27, spatial r =.36). In contrast, the students' self-efficacy for mechanical tasks did relatively poorly in predicting mechanical test performance ( r =.10). Most interesting were two other findings: (a) The best predictor of domain performance was level of cross-domain performance by far, even for mechanical tasks, and (b) self-enhancement tendencies added to cross-domain abilities and self-efficacy beliefs in the prediction of performance. The results are discussed in terms of possible mechanisms explaining how one's score on a maximal performance task can be affected by self-efficacy beliefs and self-enhancement tendencies.     

Observing behavior and atypically restricted stimulus control

Restricted stimulus control refers to discrimination learning with atypical limitations in the range of controlling stimuli or stimulus features. In the study reported here, 4 normally capable individuals and 10 individuals with intellectual disabilities (ID) performed two-sample delayed matching to sample. Sample-stimulus observing was recorded with an eye-tracking apparatus. High accuracy scores indicated stimulus control by both sample stimuli for the 4 nondisabled participants and 4 participants with ID, and eye tracking data showed reliable observing of all stimuli. Intermediate accuracy scores indicated restricted stimulus control for the remaining 6 participants. Their eye-tracking data showed that errors were related to failures to observe sample stimuli and relatively brief observing durations. Five of these participants were then given interventions designed to improve observing behavior. For 4 participants, the interventions resulted initially in elimination of observing failures, increased observing durations, and increased accuracy. For 2 of these participants, contingencies sufficient to maintain adequate observing were not always sufficient to maintain high accuracy; subsequent procedure modifications restored it, however. For the 5th participant, initial improvements in observing were not accompanied by improved accuracy, an apparent instance of observing without attending; accuracy improved only after an additional intervention that imposed contingencies on observing behavior. Thus, interventions that control observing behavior seem necessary but may not always be sufficient for the remediation of restricted stimulus control.     

Emotional context at learning systematically biases memory for facial information

Emotion influences memory in many ways. For example, when a mood-dependent processing shift is operative, happy moods promote global processing and sad moods direct attention to local features of complex visual stimuli. We hypothesized that an emotional context associated with to-be-learned facial stimuli could preferentially promote global or local processing. At learning, faces with neutral expressions were paired with a narrative providing either a happy or a sad context. At test, faces were presented in an upright or inverted orientation, emphasizing configural or analytical processing, respectively. A recognition advantage was found for upright faces learned in happy contexts relative to those in sad contexts, whereas recognition was better for inverted faces learned in sad contexts than for those in happy contexts. We thus infer that a positive emotional context prompted more effective storage of holistic, configural, or global facial information, whereas a negative emotional context prompted relatively more effective storage of local or feature-based facial information