Innovation in health care teams

While there has been much research on organizational innovation and on individual creativity, little research has examined the social psychological factors predicting work group innovation. In this exploratory study, using a new measure of innovativeness, eight health care teams were studied. Members of five ‘innovative’ and three ‘traditional’ teams (comprising 43 health care professionals) completed questionnaires examining aspects of individual and group work experience, and produced inventories of innovation reports. On the basis of these inventories, team innovativeness was rated by experienced health care professionals. Team innovation was predicted by climate for innovation (in particular tolerance of diversity), team commitment and team collaboration. The content of health care team innovations was also examined to reveal current trends.     

Prosocial rule breaking,ingroups and social norms: Parental decision-making about COVID-19 rule breaking in the UK

The British public generally adhered to COVID-19-related restrictions, but as the pandemic drew on, it became challenging for some populations. Parents with young children were identified as a vulnerable group. We collected rich, mixed-methods survey data from 99 UK-based parents (91 mothers) of children under 12, who described their lockdown transgressions. Household mixing was the most prevalent broken rule. Template analysis found that rule breaking was driven by ‘ingroup-level’ prosocial motivations to protect the mental and social health of family and loved ones, and that parents were ‘engaged’ decision-makers who underwent careful deliberation when deciding to break rules, making trade-offs, bending rules, mitigating risks, reaching consensus, and reacting to perceived rule injustices. Cumulative link models found that the perceived reasonableness of rule violations was predicted by social norms. Rules were broken by parents not for antisocial reasons, but for ‘ingroup-level’ prosocial reasons, linked to supporting loved ones.     

Friendships Lost: The Social Consequences of Violent Victimization

Few studies have examined the impact of violent victimization on friendship networks. This study used 2 waves of data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health) to examine the effects of violent victimization on number of peer- and self-reported friendships. Guided by stigma theory (Goffman, 1963), fixed-effect regression models controlling for depression, delinquency, substance use, and school engagement were completed to predict changes in number of friends following victimization. Consistent with the theory, results indicate that experiencing violent victimization (e.g., jumped, stabbed, shot at) was associated with a decrease in number of friends. These effects were magnified for females and for individuals with a greater number of depressive symptoms. These results were consistent even when models were run separately for each individual type of victimization. Treatment and prevention implications are discussed.     

Identification of biological neurons using adaptive observers

Change detection performance is influenced by a number of factors, among which is the informativeness of targets. It has not been clarified, yet, whether the highly informative regions have a processing priority as a result of resource deployment from other tasks or whether it results from a better resource management. In this paper, we adopted a change detection paradigm in which thirty participants were randomly assigned to two groups: single (change detection task) and dual task [change detection and a simplified version of the Paced Auditory Serial Oppository Task (PASOT, Gow and Deary in J Clin Exp Neuropsychol 26:723–736, 2004), which implies a verbal effort]. Stimulus informativeness was defined as social relevance, that is, changing targets were people (high relevance) versus objects (low relevance), all other aspects (i.e., salience and position in the scene) kept constant. As hypothesized, data analyses showed a significant main effect of social relevance and task condition, i.e., better change detection performance and lower change detection times for people versus objects and for single than for dual task condition. Interestingly, the PASOT accuracy remained stable across the person versus object trials, thus implying that the better performance with socially relevant targets could not be explained by a resources withdrawal from the secondary task.

Parenthood and productivity: A study of demands, resources and family-friendly firms

We examine how the presence of children is related to women’s and men’s productivity. We hypothesize family demands, family resources, and family-friendly workplaces are also related to productivity. Productivity for 670 Alberta law firm lawyers is analyzed using a standardized measure of productivity referred to as billable hours. The results suggest that mothers with school-aged children are less productive than non-mothers, whereas fathers with preschool-aged children are more productive than non-fathers. While time spent on household and childcare tasks significantly reduces women’s productivity, we find little support for the benefits of family resources or working in a family-friendly firm for women. Rather, fathers seem to benefit more: family resources are positively related to their productivity and family-friendly benefits allow them more time for leisure. These results support the assumption that having children is negatively related to women’s productivity but challenges the belief that family-friendly policies are primarily beneficial only to mothers trying to balancing work and family.