Perceived Overqualification: A Multi-Source Investigation of Psychological Predisposition and Contextual Triggers

ABSTRACT. Although employee (subjective) perceived overqualification (POQ) has recently been explored as a meaningful organizational construct, further work is needed to fully understand it. We extend the theoretical psychological underpinnings of employee POQ and examine both its determinants and outcomes based on established and newly proposed theoretical developments. Four-hundred and fifteen employees completed an online questionnaire and 208 of their supervisors completed corresponding surveys about the employees’ withdrawal behaviors and job-related attitudes, in order to explore potential predictors and outcomes of subjectively experienced POQ. Among the predictors, work conditions (uniform requirements and repetitive tasks) were most strongly associated with POQ. In terms of individual differences, narcissism predicted higher POQ while general mental ability only did when holding other variables constant. In addition, among the outcomes, higher POQ was related to lower job satisfaction and organizational commitment, but was not related to withdrawal behaviors such as truancy, absenteeism, and turnover intentions.     

Negative emotionality and relationships with God among religious Jewish Holocaust survivors

For those who believe in God, tragedy and misfortune often raise internal emotional and religious dissonance. Regardless of one's theological stance, emotional reactions to the Holocaust can be expected to elicit negative feelings towards God, resembling the reactions one would experience towards parents or caretakers who perpetrate or facilitate aggression. Coining the term “theistic object relations” to reflect the maturity level of relationship with God, it is posited that it is predicated on a safe and nurturing environment – paralleling the maturational development of healthy interpersonal interactions. In this context, survivors’ reactions are elaborated using the lens of parental abuse and neglect. Individual beliefs about God's role, while affecting the options for cognitive rationalisations among victims, are posited to have only minimal relevance to the expected negative emotionality. Variations in such reactions are explored from a psychoanalytic perspective within the intersectional context of trauma, divine providence, object relations development, and defence mechanism theory. Unresolved questions about the developmental hallmarks of theistic object relations are outlined insofar as they are relevant to our population.     

1 + 2 is more than 2 + 1: Violations of commutativity and identity axioms in mental arithmetic

Over the past decade or so, a large number of studies have revealed that conceptual meaning is sensitive to situational context. More recently, similar contextual influences have been documented in the domain of number knowledge. Here we show such context dependency in a length production task. Adult participants saw single digit addition problems of the form n1 + n2 and produced the sum by changing bi-directionally the length of a horizontally extended line, using radially arranged buttons. We found that longer lines were produced when n1 < n2 compared to n1 > n2 and that unit size increased with result size. Thus, the mathematical axioms of commutativity and identity do not seem to hold in mental addition. We discuss implications of these observations for our understanding of cognitive mechanisms involved in mental arithmetic and for situated cognition generally.     

Heuristics and biases in mental arithmetic: revisiting and reversing operational momentum

ABSTRACT

Mental arithmetic is characterised by a tendency to overestimate addition and to underestimate subtraction results: the operational momentum (OM) effect. Here, motivated by contentious explanations of this effect, we developed and tested an arithmetic heuristics and biases model that predicts reverse OM due to cognitive anchoring effects. Participants produced bi-directional lines with lengths corresponding to the results of arithmetic problems. In two experiments, we found regular OM with zero problems (e.g., 3+0, 3?0) but reverse OM with non-zero problems (e.g., 2+1, 4?1). In a third experiment, we tested the prediction of our model. Our results suggest the presence of at least three competing biases in mental arithmetic: a more-or-less heuristic, a sign-space association and an anchoring bias. We conclude that mental arithmetic exhibits shortcuts for decision-making similar to traditional domains of reasoning and problem-solving.     

Semantic reasons

An analysis of a predicate normally takes the form of a condition that is both necessary and sufficient for the predicate's application. Here I consider the idea, due originally to Friedrich Waismann, that semantic analyses might include conditions that are defeasible, and so allow for exceptions. Analyses of this sort can be expressed in nonmonotonic logic, a post-Waismann development. I'll argue that defeasibility makes analysis tractable, without making it trivial. I'll also show that a defeasible account of vague predicates can predict our intuitions about particular cases (for instance, that a seven-foot person counts as tall) without drawing artificial boundaries.     

Dialectical Negations,Absolute Affirmation

Studies in Philosophy and Education -