Effects of an Economic Recession on Leader Personality and General Mental Ability Scores

Economic recessions have wide‐ranging implications for the workforce. The science and practice of industrial and organizational psychology are certainly not immune to those implications. The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of an economic recession on leader personality and general mental ability scores in three samples (n_{Time 1}=564; n_{Time 2}=581; n_{Time 3}=281) of US bank employees. The samples differed primarily in level of unemployment in the general US economy (Time 1=4.67%; Time 2=7.77%; Time 3=9.77%) with samples matched on five branches located in cities throughout the United States. Internal consistency reliabilities and similar variances and covariances across samples were found to be statistically indistinguishable. However, statistically significantly higher personality scale means in the Time 2 and Time 3 samples were evidenced in comparison to the Time 1 sample. Additional analyses suggested that these mean differences would result in different percentages of individuals being selected at seven of nine selection ratios. Implications, limitations, and future research are discussed.     

A Comparison of Firefighters and Police Officers: The Influence of Gender and Relationship Status

Differences between fire department and police department personnel (N = 190) concerning work‐related stressors and depression were examined with regard to gender and relationship status. Participants completed the Beck Depression Inventory—II (A. T. Beck, R. A. Steer, & G. K. Brown, 1996) and the Distressing Event Questionnaire (E. S. Kubany, M. B. Leisen, A. S. Kaplan, & M. P. Kelly, 2000). Recommendations are made concerning what crisis theories, both traditional and nontraditional, counselors should be aware of, as well as how simply working with trauma survivors can be traumatizing. E. Erikson's psychosocial stages (as cited in J. R. Studer, 2007) are considered in the framework of adult development.     

Mentoring others: A dispositional and motivational approach

Dispositional and motivational variables related to the propensity to mentor others and to the provision of career and psychosocial mentoring were examined. Results indicated that prosocial personality variables (other-oriented empathy, helpfulness) related to willingness to mentor others and also accounted for unique variance beyond variables associated with life and career stages. Other-oriented empathy related to actual experience as a mentor. Results also indicated that motives for mentoring others differentially related to psychosocial and career mentoring.     

Item method directed forgetting diminishes false memory

Directed forgetting may reduce DRM false memory illusion by interfering with meaning processing. Participants were presented with a list composed of six 10-word semantically associated sub-lists, and they were either (a) asked to remember all list items of (b) asked to remember all associates from sub-lists and to forget all associates from other sub-lists. All participants were requested to recall and recognise list items. Although directed forgetting effects have been previously reported only for true responses in the DRM paradigm with the list method, we also found directed forgetting for false responses with the item method. Such forgetting instructions reduced both verbatim and meaning processing, decreasing both the intrusion and the false alarm rate. These results are consistent with two-process explanations of DRM false memories, such as fuzzy-trace theory, and add to our understanding of false memory editing.     

Role of stress, corticotrophin releasing factor (CRF) and amygdala plasticity in chronic anxiety

Stress initiates a series of neuronal responses that prepare an organism to adapt to new environmental challenges. However, chronic stress may lead to maladaptive responses that can result in psychiatric syndromes such as anxiety and depressive disorders. Corticotropin-releasing factor (CRF) has been identified as a key neuropeptide responsible for initiating many of the endocrine, autonomic and behavioral responses to stress. The amygdala expresses high concentrations of CRF receptors and is itself a major extrahypothalamic source of CRF containing neurons. Within the amygdala, the basolateral nucleus (BLA) has an important role in regulating anxiety and affective responses. During periods of stress, CRF is released into the amygdala and local CRF receptor activation has been postulated as a substrate for stress-induced alterations in affective behavior. Previous studies have suggested that synaptic plasticity in the BLA contributes to mechanisms underlying long-term changes in the regulation of affective behaviors. Several studies have shown that acute glutamate receptor-mediated activation, by either GABA-mediated disinhibition or CRF-mediated excitation, induces long-term synaptic plasticity and increases the excitability of BLA neurons. This review summarizes some of the data supporting the hypotheses that stress induced plasticity within the amygdala may be a critical step in the pathophysiology of the development of chronic anxiety states. It is further proposed that such a change in the limbic neural circuitry is involved in the transition from normal vigilance responses to pathological anxiety, leading to syndromes such as panic and post-traumatic stress disorders.     

What does rapid automatized naming measure? A new RAN task compared to naming and lexical decision

The present research investigated the relationship between Rapid Automatized Naming (RAN) performance, letter-string reading measures of sight vocabulary (SV) and phonetic decoding (PD), and lexical decision. Criterion-based naming rates were obtained from three types of RAN tasks: digits, letters, and letter sounds. Latency measures were obtained from the naming of regular words, exception words, nonwords and pseudohomophones; as well as button press and verbal lexical decision tasks. Regression analyses supported the hypotheses that RAN-Letters latency reflects SV processing in that its variance is uniquely accounted for by exception word naming latency and button press lexical decision latency, and that RAN-Letter Sounds latency best reflects PD processing in that its variance is uniquely accounted for by pseudohomophone and nonword naming latency. Findings are discussed in light of what the RAN tasks are measuring, implications involving visual word recognition models of reading, and the utility of the new RAN-Letter Sounds task with respect to diagnostic and remediation applications.     

The role of neuropeptide Y in the amygdala on corticotropin-releasing factor receptor-mediated behavioral stress responses in the rat

Neuropeptide Y (NPY) is one of the most abundant peptides in the brain and has been shown to be a critical regulator of emotionality, most notably for its effect in decreasing anxiety-like behaviors. The stress response in both humans and animals has been shown to involve a cascade of biological events initiated by corticotropin releasing factor (CRF), another centrally acting peptide. Interestingly, NPY and CRF are present in similar brain regions mediating stress responses and may act in an opposing fashion. The basolateral nucleus of the amygdala (BLA) is a distinct division of the amygdala and contains CRF receptors and the highest concentration of NPY neurons. The current study investigates the behavioral effects in rodents when NPY is injected directly into the BLA prior to the pharmacological stressor, urocortin I (Ucn; a CRF receptor agonist) or the emotional stressor, restraint. The animals that underwent restraint were evaluated in the social interaction (SI) test, while those injected with Ucn into the BLA were assessed in the two floor choice test, a modified version of the conditioned-place avoidance paradigm. The results showed that injections of NPY into the BLA prior to Ucn significantly blocked the development of the avoidance behavior in the two floor choice test and the decrease in SI time that is usually seen following restraint stress. These results provide further support that an interaction between NPY and CRF within the BLA may be critical for maintaining a normal homeostatic emotional state.     

Self-verification and contextualized self-views

Whereas most self-verification research has focused on people's desire to verify their global self-conceptions, the present studies examined self-verification with regard to contextualized selfviews-views of the self in particular situations and relationships. It was hypothesized that individuals whose core self-conceptions include contextualized self-views should seek to verify these self-views. In Study 1, the more individuals defined the self in dialectical terms, the more their judgments were biased in favor of verifying over nonverifying feedback about a negative, situation-specific self-view. In Study 2, consistent with research on gender differences in the importance of relationships to the self-concept, women but not men showed a similar bias toward feedback about a negative, relationship-specific self-view, a pattern not seen for global self-views. Together, the results support the notion that self-verification occurs for core self-conceptions, whatever form(s) they may take. Individual differences in self-verification and the nature of selfhood and authenticity are discussed.     

Bimodal score distributions and the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator: fact or artifact?

We examined Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) score distributions computed using item response theory (IRT) to assess the generalizability of earlier bimodality reports that have been cited in support of the "type" versus "trait" view of personality. Using the BILOG IRT program to score a sample of approximately 12,000 individuals who participated in leadership development programs, theta score distributions for the 4 dimensions of the MBTI computed using 10 (the BILOG default) versus 50 quadrature points were compared. Results indicated that past reports of bimodality were artifacts caused by BILOG's default use of a small number of quadrature points; when larger numbers of points were used, score distributions became strongly center-weighted. Although our findings are not supportive of the "type"-based hypothesis, the extremely high correlations between theta scores (rs > .996) suggest that no practical differences would be expected as a function of the number-of-quadrature-points decision.     

Fits and Starts: A Mother-Infant Case-Study Involving Intergenerational Violent Trauma and Pseudoseizures Across Three Generations

This case-study presents in detail the clinical assessment of a 29-year-old mother and her daughter who first presented to infant mental health specialists at age 16-months, with a hospital record suggesting the presence of a dyadic disturbance since age 8-months. Data from psychiatric and neurological assessments, as well as observational measures of child and mother are reviewed with attention to issues of disturbed attachment, intergenerational trauma, and cultural factors for this inner-city Latino dyad. Severe maternal affect dysregulation in the wake of chronic, early-onset violent-trauma exposure manifested as psychogenic seizures, referred to in the mother's native Spanish as "ataques de nervios," the latter, an idiom of distress, commonly associated with childhood trauma and dissociation. We explore the mechanisms by which the mothers' reexperiencing of violent traumatic experience, together with physiologic hyperarousal and associated negative affects, are communicated to the very young child and the clinician-observer via action and language from moment to moment during the assessment process. The paper concludes with a discussion of diagnostic and treatment implications by Drs. Marshall, Gaensbauer, and Zeanah.