Aligning job redesign with leadership training to improve supervisor support: a quasi-experimental study of the integration of HR practices

In this quasi-experimental study, we examine the alignment of a job redesign initiative with leadership training aimed at increasing supervisors’ opportunities for providing support to employees. In addition, we examine intervention-mediated effects on climate for innovation through increases in perceived supervisor support. To test the hypothesized process, we used employee ratings (N = 524) of perceived supervisor support and climate for innovation collected at three time points over 2 years in the home help services in seven Swedish municipalities. Results of latent growth curve analyses showed that employees in the intervention group had a stronger and positive slope of perceived supervisor support relative to the comparison group. Further, the growth trajectories of perceived supervisor support were positively associated with climate for innovation at the 24-month follow-up. The study contributes to the human resource management literature by showing that alignment of employment practices such as training with work practices such as job redesign may be a promising strategy for achieving positive outcomes at multiple levels in organizations.     

The influence of prematurity,maternal anxiety,and infants' neurobiological risk on mother–infant interactions

In this study, we investigated how the birth of a very low birth weight preterm (VLBW) infant influences the mother–infant interaction at 3 months. We also focused on the impact of the infant's neurobiological risk and maternal anxiety, and their interaction. The comparison of the VLBW preterm sample (n = 79) with an external full‐term sample (n = 35) showed mother–infant interactions of the families with the preterm infant to be more vocally responsive during the interaction, but less facially responsive during the interaction. Additionally, higher levels of maternal anxiety were associated with preterm infants being less facially responsive in interaction with their mother. While neurobiological risk of the infant played a part in this association, with higher risk infants also being less facially responsive, the relationship with maternal anxiety and the mother–child interaction was stronger. How these findings may influence therapeutic interventions is discussed.     

Some Consequences for Helpers Who Deliver “Cold Comfort”: Why it's Worse for Women than Men to be Inept When Providing Emotional Support

Two experiments were conducted to assess whether responses to helpers who used insensitive emotional support vary as a function of the interaction between sex of participant and helper. We hypothesized that women would evaluate an insensitive female helper and her behavior more negatively than they would an insensitive male helper. In Experiment 1, participants (N = 137) read conversations in which male or female helpers sought to comfort emotionally distressed friends. In Experiment 2, participants (N = 87) engaged in face-to-face interactions in which they were comforted by either a male or female helper who used insensitive comforting messages. Overall, the results imply that women with deficient emotional support skills may be at high risk of rejection by same-sex peers. A preliminary report of Experiment 1 was presented at the biennial meeting of the International Association for Relationship Research, Madison, WI, July, 2004.     

Gaze behavior in analytical and holistic face processing

We conducted two experiments examining children's and adults' gaze behavior when processing faces analytically (focusing on a single feature) or holistically (comparing the overall similarity of the faces). Children 6-8 and 9-10 years of age and adults were instructed to assign schematically drawn faces in Experiment 1 and photos of real faces in Experiment 2 to two categories. The categories were constructed so as to allow either an analytical or holistic categorization of the faces. During all trials, gaze behavior was recorded from stimulus onset until reaction. The location and duration of the fixations used were analyzed. Whereas the holistic processors fixated the whole area of the eyes and nose most and longest independently of age, analytical processors showed a more feature-specific gaze behavior, focusing their fixations upon the particular feature used for subsequent processing. Thus, differences in analytical and holistic face processing can be detected early in gaze behavior-that is, at the visual encoding stage.     

Perceptual asymmetry for chimeric stimuli in children with early unilateral brain damage

The present study used a chimeric stimuli task to assess the magnitude of the left-hemispace bias in children with congenital unilateral brain damage (n = 46) as compared to typically developing matched controls (n = 46). As would be expected, controls exhibited a significant left-hemispace bias. In the presence of left hemisphere (LH) damage, the left-hemispace preference was found to be present, but attenuated, whereas right hemisphere (RH) damage resulted in a less lateralized process. Examination of lesion severity revealed that large lesions in the RH were associated with a reversal of the typical left-hemispace bias, while small lesions resulted in a left bias approximating that of controls. In contrast, the left-hemispace preference in children with LH damage was similar across lesion size. We conclude that damage to either hemisphere early in brain development may alter hemispheric preference for processing of nonverbal stimuli, and that at least in the case of RH damage, alteration of the normal perceptual asymmetry may depend on the interaction between lesion side and severity.     

The effect of low social support on short-term prognosis in patients following a first myocardial infarction

The objectives of the current study were (1) to assess adjustment in patients following a first myocardial infarction (MI) at 9 months compared with 4-6 weeks post-MI, (2) to examine the availability of and satisfaction with social support over time, and (3) to determine separate baseline psychosocial predictors of recurrent cardiac events. A questionnaire assessing post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety, depression, health complaints, and social support, was distributed to consecutive patients 4-6 weeks and 9 months post-MI. Prior to assessment at follow-up, 8 (7%) of 112 patients had dropped out, and two had died due to cardiac causes. Objective clinical measures were obtained from medical records. There was an improvement in somatic and cognitive symptoms at follow-up, but no change in symptoms of arousal, depression, and anxiety. Half of the patients were afraid of a recurrent MI. There was a significant decrease in social support between baseline and follow-up, and lower social support at baseline was associated with a 10% increased risk of recurrent cardiac events at follow-up (OR: 0.90; 95% CI: 0.84 to 0.97) adjusting for all other variables. Some patients still experienced difficulties with psychosocial adjustment 9 months post-MI despite a reduction in somatic and cognitive symptoms. Social support decreased over time, which may have serious prognostic implications; lower social support at baseline was an independent predictor of recurrent events at 9 months. An important step for future research will be to investigate how social support can be enhanced in patients at risk.     

The owl and the pussycat: Gaze cues and visuospatial orienting

Recent research has shown that nonpredictive gaze cues trigger reflexive shifts in attention toward the looked-at location. But just how generalizable is this spatial cuing effect? In particular, are people especially tuned to gaze cues provided by conspecifics, or can comparable shifts in visual attention be triggered by other cue providers and directional cues? To investigate these issues, we used a standard cuing paradigm to compare the attentional orienting produced by different cue providers (i.e., animate vs. inanimate) and directional cues (i.e., eyes vs. arrows). The results of three experiments revealed that attentional orienting was insensitive to both the identity of the cue provider and the nature of the triggering cue. However, compared with arrows, gaze cues prompted a general enhancement in the efficiency of processing operations. We consider the implications of these findings for accounts of reflexive visual orienting.     

Determining inhibition: Individual differences in the 'lexicon context' trade-off during lexical ambiguity resolution in working memory

The current experiment assessed the relation between inhibitory mechanisms underlying language processing in working memory (WM) and the influence of a postulated internal cognitive trade-off between lexicon and context factors driving inhibition in sentence processing. Participants with high and low WM span (Daneman & Carpenter, 1980) were presented with sentences that began with an ambiguous noun (being both homographic and homophonic). A cue towards the relevant meaning of the ambiguous word was presented three words later by another noun. Immediately after the cue, a verb was presented that finally disambiguated the ambiguous noun. In half of the cases, the final disambiguation was congruent with the disambiguation cue. In the other half, subjects had to realize that it was not the cued but the other meaning, which turned out to be relevant in the actual sentence. This experimental paradigm was identical to the one used in Gunter et al. (2003). In contrast to the original experiment, the filler items in the present study were unambiguous. Both groups showed a smaller N400 component for the cue related to the dominant as compared to the subordinate meaning, suggesting that the dominant meaning was more active in WM than the subordinate one. In the original experiment, only the high-span subjects manifested this effect. Thus, a change in the global experimental setting changed the use of WM-related inhibitory processes. Data also suggest that, as a default strategy, the lexicon-context trade-off of high-span subjects relies more on lexicon information than does that of low-span subjects.     

The Obsessive-Compulsive Inventory: development and validation of a short version

This article reports on the development of a revised version of the Obsessive-Compulsive Inventory (OCI; E. B. Foa, M. J. Kozak, P. Salkovskis, M. E. Coles, & N. Amir, 1998), a psychometrically sound, theoretically driven, self-report measure. The revised OCI (OCI-R) improves on the parent version in 3 ways: It eliminates the redundant frequency scale, simplifies the scoring of the subscales, and reduces overlap across subscales. The reliability and validity of the OCI-R were examined in 215 patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), 243 patients with other anxiety disorders, and 677 nonanxious individuals. The OCI-R, which contains 18 items and 6 subscales, has retained excellent psychometric properties. The OCI-R and its subscales differentiated well between individuals with and without OCD. Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analyses demonstrated the usefulness of the OCI-R as a diagnostic tool for screening patients with OCD, utilizing empirically derived cutscores.