Why do leaders engage in destructive behaviours? The role of leaders’ working environment and stress

Complementing previous research on antecedents of destructive leadership, we examined the role of work stressors in the emergence of active and passive destructive leadership behaviours. Building on conservation of resources theory, we examined direct and indirect relations between leaders’ perceptions of workload, role ambiguity and intragroup conflict on ratings of their own destructive leadership, as well as mediating paths through perceived stress. We used a two-wave survey design consisting of a random sample of 1311 managers. Structural equation modelling revealed that work stressors were only related to passive forms of destructive leadership, whereas personality was related to both active and passive forms of destructive leadership. Implications for research and practice are discussed.     

Levels and change in autonomous and controlled work motivation in older workers—The role of proximity to retirement and sense of community at work

Previous studies suggest a preretirement disengagement process from work, which includes reduced work motivation. In this study, we investigated changes in autonomous and controlled work motivation over two years among participants of the Health, Aging and Retirement Transition in Sweden (HEARTS) study. We found stability in both types of motivation; however, those who retired after the study period showed more distinct declines in autonomous motivation. A stronger sense of community at work was related to level, but not change in autonomous motivation. Intra-individual fluctuations in the expected retirement age did not predict work motivation or vice versa. Future studies are needed to better understand the antecedents and consequences of preretirement declines in autonomous work motivation.     

Verb subcategorization frequencies: American English corpus data, methodological studies, and cross-corpus comparisons.

Verb subcategorization frequencies (verb biases) have been widely studied in psycholinguistics and play an important role in human sentence processing. Yet available resources on subcategorization frequencies suffer from limited coverage, limited ecological validity, and divergent coding criteria. Prior estimates of verb transitivity, for example, vary widely with corpus size, coverage, and coding criteria This article provides norming data for 281 verbs of interest to psycholinguistic research, sampled from a corpus of American English, along with a detailed coding manual. We examine the effect on transitivity bias of various coding decisions and methods of computing verb biases.     

Maternal sensitivity in interactions with three‐ and 12‐month‐old infants: Stability,structural composition,and developmental consequences

This study addresses three topics related to the structural components of maternal sensitivity: (a) The stability of sensitivity over a nine‐month period, (b) the predictability of maternal sensitivity assessed at 12 months from early parameters of parenting and (c) the relation between maternal sensitivity and developmental outcomes assessed at 12 months. Maternal sensitivity and its components (signal perception, correct interpretation, prompt, and appropriate reaction) were evaluated for 60 mother–infant‐dyads when their infants were aged three and 12 months. Additional parameters of early parenting were maternal emotional warmth and behavioural contingency. Developmental outcome measures were the amount of infant crying and the quality of attachment at twelve months. The results showed close correlations between the sensitivity components suggesting a unidimensional structure for maternal sensitivity. The sensitivity assessments were significantly related to measures of maternal warmth. Stability of maternal sensitivity over time was, however, quite low. There was no relation between the early sensitivity assessments and later developmental outcomes, whereas there was a significant relation between the sensitivity parameters assessed at twelve months and developmental outcomes. The results indicate changes in the meaning of maternal sensitivity during infants' development. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Gaining Perspectives on Our Lives: Moods and Aesthetic Experience

Philosophia - This article examines the role of moods in aesthetic experience by focussing on film. It considers specifically the function of moods in relation to narrative and aesthetic...     

Children's initial sleep‐associated changes in motor skill are unrelated to long‐term skill levels

Sleep is considered to support the formation of skill memory. In juvenile but not adult song birds learning a tutor's song, a stronger initial deterioration of song performance over night‐sleep predicts better song performance in the long run. This and similar observations have stimulated the view of sleep supporting skill formation during development in an unsupervised off‐line learning process that, in the absence of external feedback, can initially also enhance inaccuracies in skill performance. Here we explored whether in children learning a motor sequence task, as in song‐learning juvenile birds, changes across sleep after initial practice predict performance levels achieved in the long run. The task was a serial reaction time task (SRTT) where subjects had to press buttons which were lighted up in a repeating eight‐element sequence as fast as possible. Twenty‐five children (8–12 years) practised the task in the evening before nocturnal sleep which was recorded polysomnographically. Retrieval was tested on the following morning and again 1 week later after daily training on the SRTT. As expected, changes in response speed over the initial night of sleep were negatively correlated with final performance speed after the 1‐week training. However, unlike in song birds, this correlation was driven by the baseline speed level achieved before sleep. Baseline‐corrected changes in speed or variability over the initial sleep period did not predict final performance on the trained SRTT sequence, or on different sequences introduced to assess generalization of the trained behaviour. The lack of correlation between initial sleep‐dependent changes and long‐term performance might reflect that the children were too experienced for the simple SRTT, possibly also favouring ceiling effects in performance. A consistent association found between sleep spindle activity and explicit sequence knowledge alternatively suggests that the expected correlation was masked by explicit memory systems interacting with skill memory formation.     

Perceiving subjectivity in bodily movement: The case of dancers

This paper is about one of the puzzles of bodily self-consciousness: can an experience be both and at the same time an experience of one′s physicality and of one′s subjectivity? We will answer this question positively by determining a form of experience where the body′s physicality is experienced in a non-reifying manner. We will consider a form of experience of oneself as bodily which is different from both “prenoetic embodiment” and “pre-reflective bodily consciousness” and rather corresponds to a form of reflective access to subjectivity at the bodily level. In particular, we argue that subjectivity is bodily expressed, thereby allowing the experience of the body′s subjectivity directly during perceptual experiences of the body. We use an interweaving of phenomenological explorations and ethnographical methods which allows validating this proposal by considering the experience of body experts (dancers).     

Auditory location negative priming: A case of feature mismatch

In an auditory four-alternative forced choice localization task, participants had to localize one of two simultaneously presented sounds while ignoring the location of the second sound. Negative priming—that is, sloweddown responses to a location that had to be ignored in the previous trial—was found only when the sound at the repeated location changed between prime and probe. There was also no increase in prime response errors to the probes of ignored repetition trials. These findings allow for the conclusion that auditory location priming is caused by feature mismatch only and that other mechanisms, such as inhibition of ignored locations or episodic retrieval of transfer-inappropriate prime information, do not play a role. The research reported in this article was supported by a grant from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (Ma 2610/2-1).     

No Retrieval-Induced Forgetting Under Stress

ABSTRACT— Stress affects memory, yet no study has investigated the effects of stress on memory inhibition: Remembering not only facilitates later recall, but also inhibits retrieval of related material, a phenomenon known as retrieval-induced forgetting. We investigated the effects of stress on this mechanism, which is thought to adaptively guide memory selection. Participants learned categorized lists and were then exposed to either a psychosocial laboratory stressor or a cognitively challenging control treatment. They then actively retrieved parts of the previously learned material. Finally, memory for all initially learned items was tested. In the stress group, unlike in the control group, intervening retrieval practice did not impair final recall. Moreover, salivary cortisol levels increased and psychological well-being decreased in the stress group only. Thus, psychosocial stress abolishes retrieval-induced forgetting. This effect may result from stress-induced hormone release from the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis and may have implications for educational, legal, and clinical issues.