Resistance to change: developing an individual differences measure

The Resistance to Change Scale was designed to measure an individual's dispositional inclination to resist changes. In Study 1, exploratory analyses indicated 4 reliable factors: Routine Seeking, Emotional Reaction to Imposed Change, Cognitive Rigidity, and Short-Term Focus. Studies 2, 3, and 4 confirmed this structure and demonstrated the scale's convergent and discriminant validities. Studies 5, 6, and 7 demonstrated the concurrent and predictive validities of the scale in 3 distinct contexts. The scale can be used to account for the individual-difference component of resistance to change and to predict reactions to specific change.     

Burn-out in student counsellors

This study investigated the relations among perceived work stress, sources of support and reported levels of distress and burn-out of men and women who have been employed for shorter and longer periods as Technical & Further Education (TAFE) counsellors. Stress, types of support, with one exception, and symptoms reported by men and women were not significantly different. Length of time spent counselling influenced level of burn-out but not level of distress. Distress and burn-out were significantly positively correlated. Levels of work stress were significantly correlated with distress and burn-out but the effect was strongest for burn-out. There were low but significant correlations between some sources of support and work stress and burn-out. Results are discussed in terms of the extent to which they support the uniqueness of burn-out in helping professions and the action of support on work stress to reduce burn-out.     

Threat-related attentional bias in anxious and nonanxious individuals: a meta-analytic study

This meta-analysis of 172 studies (N = 2,263 anxious,N = 1,768 nonanxious) examined the boundary conditions of threat-related attentional biases in anxiety. Overall, the results show that the bias is reliably demonstrated with different experimental paradigms and under a variety of experimental conditions, but that it is only an effect size of d = 0.45. Although processes requiring conscious perception of threat contribute to the bias, a significant bias is also observed with stimuli outside awareness. The bias is of comparable magnitude across different types of anxious populations (individuals with different clinical disorders, high-anxious nonclinical individuals, anxious children and adults) and is not observed in nonanxious individuals. Empirical and clinical implications as well as future directions for research are discussed.     

How and Why Did Hasidism Spread?

This article aims to answer a basic question: How was it that Hasidism spread among the masses even though most of the adherents probably did not fully understand the ideas of the movement and could not maintain regular direct contact with the tsadik? Diffusion analysis shows how the shtibl (hasidic prayer house) was a radical innovation that, by combining synagogue with social framework, created an attractive venue for hasidim to gather, to spend time, and to attract new adherents. In places where shtiblekh could not be opened, Hasidism usually failed to spread. In addition, cultural distinctiveness, varying attitudes towards Kabbalistic practice, the presence or absence of trade routes, and ongoing contacts between communities all played their part in influencing the spread of Hasidism.     

Identification During Imposed Change: The Roles of Personal Values,Type of Change,and Anxiety

Using a person‐situation perspective, we explain what happens to individuals' identification with a collective in the context of a change. We propose that given the anxiety that often emerges during change, individuals' personal values (conservation and openness to change) interact with type of change (imposed vs. voluntary) in predicting identification following change. In a pilot, longitudinal field study (N = 61, 67% female) of an imposed university campus relocation, we measured employees' values and identification with the university before and several months after the relocation. In two lab experiments (Study 1: N = 104, 91.3% female; Study 2: N = 113, 75.2% female), we manipulated a change to be either imposed or voluntary and compared the relationships between values and identification across types of change. In Study 2, we also measured anxiety from the change. When change was imposed (all three studies), but not when voluntary (Studies 1 and 2), individuals' conservation was positively, and openness negatively, related to individuals' post‐change identification. The effects emerged only for individuals who experienced change‐related anxiety (Study 2). Our findings demonstrate that individuals' identification with a changing collective depends on the amount of anxiety change elicits and on the particular combination of their values and type of change.     

When Do Leaders Initiate Changes? The Roles of Coping Style and Organization Members’ Stability-Emphasizing Values

We explore the roles of leaders’ coping style and organization members’ emphasis on stability in predicting leaders’ initiation of changes in their organizations. Specifically, we hypothesized that leaders’ problem-focused style will be positively, and emotion-focused style negatively, related to the initiation of change. We further proposed that organization members' emphasis on stability will moderate the effect of leaders’ problem-focused style. We tested our model using time-lagged data from 75 school principals and 495/409 (Time 1/Time 2) teachers. Our results support the moderating role that the emphasis on stability has on the effect of problem-focused coping on leaders’ initiation of changes and provide some support for the negative effect of emotion-focused coping. Our findings complement the psychological literature on recipients of change with psychological insights about the factors that make leaders become change agents.     

Translating Dispositional Resistance to Change to the Culture Level: Developing a Cultural Framework of Change Orientations

A fundamental societal challenge is to balance the desire for growth, development, and progress on the one hand and the need for stability and maintenance of the status quo on the other. To better understand how societies deal with this challenge we employ the personality trait of dispositional resistance to change to conceptualize and empirically establish the concept of cultural change orientation. With data from individuals in 27 countries (N = 6487), we identify three culture‐level change orientation dimensions (routine seeking, affective reactance, and cultural rigidity) and interpret their meaning through their relationships with established cultural frameworks (e.g. GLOBE, Hofstede, Inglehart, and Schwartz). We thus propose a new culture‐level framework and test hypotheses about relationships between change orientation dimensions and national indexes of economic, technological, social, and environmental change. Our findings demonstrate meaningful differential relationships between the three change orientation dimensions and these societal outcomes. Copyright © 2018 European Association of Personality Psychology     

The reverse hierarchy theory of visual perceptual learning

Perceptual learning can be defined as practice-induced improvement in the ability to perform specific perceptual tasks. We previously proposed the Reverse Hierarchy Theory as a unifying concept that links behavioral findings of visual learning with physiological and anatomical data. Essentially, it asserts that learning is a top-down guided process, which begins at high-level areas of the visual system, and when these do not suffice, progresses backwards to the input levels, which have a better signal-to-noise ratio. This simple concept has proved powerful in explaining a broad range of findings, including seemingly contradicting data. We now extend this concept to describe the dynamics of skill acquisition and interpret recent behavioral and electrophysiological findings.     

The Effects of Two Different Reading Acceleration Training Programs on Improving Reading Skills of Second Graders

It has been well established that poor reading skills in the first grades of primary school can lead to poor reading skills in all coming years. A reading acceleration program (RAP) known to improve reading skills in adults and children with and without reading difficulties (RD) was tested for its effect on children in second grade with standard reading skills. The influence of the RAP on improving all reading skills—decoding, fluency, and reading comprehension—was examined. Seventy-nine children in second grade were divided into two study groups and one control group. Each study group received a training program that emphasizes reading skills: decoding, fluency, and comprehension were trained at the levels of words and sentences in Version A and at the levels of words and paragraphs in Version B. Both programs significantly improved reading skills compared with the control group that was not trained: Group A improved word fluency whereas Group B improved accuracy measures (word, pseudo-word, and text). Both training groups showed significantly greater improvement over time than the control group on reading comprehension. We conclude that a RAP training that combines words, sentences, and paragraphs is the most effective for improving reading skills.