The impact of role stress on workers' behaviour through job satisfaction and organizational commitment

Dysfunctions in role performance have been associated with a large number of consequences, almost always negative, which affect the well-being of workers and the functioning of organizations. An individual's experience of receiving incompatible or conflicting requests (role conflict) and/or the lack of enough information to carry out his/her job (role ambiguity) are causes of role stress. According to previous theory, role ambiguity and conflict decrease workers' performance and are positively related to the probability of workers leaving the organization. Job satisfaction refers to a positive evaluation of a job, while organizational commitment refers to an employee's attachment to the organization. The affective dimensions of organizational commitment and job satisfaction are considered to be important predictors of turnover intention, absenteeism, and job performance. In the literature, role conflict and ambiguity have been proposed as determining factors of workers' job satisfaction and their commitment towards the organization. The role of job satisfaction and organizational commitment were analysed as variables that should mediate between role ambiguity and conflict and employees' behaviour. The hypotheses were confirmed by means of path analysis carried out with data obtained from a sample of Spanish blue-collar workers employed by a bus company and a water supply company. Role stressors were negatively related to affective commitment mediated through job satisfaction. Affective commitment to the organization exerted a positive influence on performance and reduces the withdrawal behaviour analysed— intention to leave and absenteeism—although the strongest predictor of intention to leave was, in this study, job satisfaction.     

Two-year-olds exclude novel objects as potential referents of novel words based on pragmatics

Many studies have established that children tend to exclude objects for which they already have a name as potential referents of novel words. In the current study we asked whether this exclusion can be triggered by social-pragmatic context alone without pre-existing words as blockers. Two-year-old children watched an adult looking at a novel object while saying a novel word with excitement. In one condition the adult had not seen the object beforehand, and so the children interpreted the adult’s utterance as referring to the gazed-at object. In another condition the adult and child had previously played jointly with the gazed-at object. In this case, children less often assumed that the adult was referring to the object but rather they searched for an alternative referent - presumably because they inferred that the gazed-at object was old news in their common ground with the adult and so not worthy of excited labeling. Since this inference based on exclusion is highly similar to that underlying the Principle of Contrast/Mutual Exclusivity, we propose that this principle is not purely lexical but rather is based on children’s understanding of how and why people direct one another’s attention to things either with or without language.     

Inequities in Under-Five Mortality in Nigeria: Differentials by Religious Affiliation of the Mother

Observations in Nigeria have indicated polio vaccination refusal related to religion that ultimately affected child morbidity and mortality. This study assessed the role of religion in under-five (0–59 months) mortality using a cross-sectional, nationally representative sample of 7,620 women aged 15–49 years from the 2003 Nigeria Demographic and Health Survey and included 6,029 children. Results show that mother’s affiliation to Traditional indigenous religion is significantly associated with increased under-five mortality. Multivariable modelling demonstrated that this association is explained by differential use of maternal and child health services, specifically attendance to prenatal care. To reduce child health inequity, these results need to be incorporated in the formulation of child health policies geared towards achieving a high degree of attendance to prenatal care, irrespective of religious affiliation.     

Correlations between intelligence and components of serial timing variability

Psychometric intelligence correlates with reaction time in elementary cognitive tasks, as well as with performance in time discrimination and judgment tasks. It has remained unclear, however, to what extent these correlations are due to top–down mechanisms, such as attention, and bottom–up mechanisms, i.e. basic neural properties that influence both temporal accuracy and cognitive processes. Here, we assessed correlations between intelligence (Raven SPM Plus) and performance in isochronous serial interval production, a simple, automatic timing task where participants first make movements in synchrony with an isochronous sequence of sounds and then continue with self-paced production to produce a sequence of intervals with the same inter-onset interval (IOI). The target IOI varied across trials. A number of different measures of timing variability were considered, all negatively correlated with intelligence. Across all stimulus IOIs, local interval-to-interval variability correlated more strongly with intelligence than drift, i.e. gradual changes in response IOI. The strongest correlations with intelligence were found for IOIs between 400 and 900 ms, rather than above 1 s, which is typically considered a lower limit for cognitive timing. Furthermore, poor trials, i.e. trials arguably most affected by lapses in attention, did not predict intelligence better than the most accurate trials. We discuss these results in relation to the human timing literature, and argue that they support a bottom–up model of the relation between temporal variability of neural activity and intelligence.     

Gesture and metaphor comprehension: Electrophysiological evidence of cross-modal coordination by audiovisual stimulation

In recent years, studies have suggested that gestures influence comprehension of linguistic expressions, for example, eliciting an N400 component in response to a speech/gesture mismatch. In this paper, we investigate the role of gestural information in the understanding of metaphors. Event related potentials (ERPs) were recorded while participants viewed video clips of an actor uttering metaphorical expressions and producing bodily gestures that were congruent or incongruent with the metaphorical meaning of such expressions. This modality of stimuli presentation allows a more ecological approach to meaning integration. When ERPs were calculated using gesture stroke as time-lock event, gesture incongruity with metaphorical expression modulated the amplitude of the N400 and of the late positive complex (LPC). This suggests that gestural and speech information are combined online to make sense of the interlocutor’s linguistic production in an early stage of metaphor comprehension. Our data favor the idea that meaning construction is globally integrative and highly context-sensitive.     

Gender Differences in the Representation of Violence on Spanish Television: Should Women be More Violent?

Gender differences in the representation of aggressors and victims are an important issue in the study of television violence in order to ascertain whether television contributes (and how) to reproduce or transform the traditional gender regime. Eighty-four hours of Spanish main TV broadcasting stations were randomly recorded during years 2000 and 2005. Variables related to the presentation of aggressors and victims and to the normative context of aggression were selected through content analysis. The results show the minimal presence of women in violent scenes. But women are also the victims of more serious violence. Paradoxically, women’s aggressions appear to have more positive consequences and to be less legitimized. The implications of these findings are discussed from a gender studies perspective.     

Fragmentation or Differentiation: Questioning the Crisis in Psychology

There is a recurrent discourse about the fragmentation of psychology and its crises as a science, which often leads to a disenchanted view about its future. To this discourse we oppose a developmental one, in which crises can be occasions for development, and in which development might imply differentiation. We first review why psychology can be said to be in crisis. We then situate the crisis in the pragmatics of doing psychology. Crises occur when psychologists have problems either working with other psychologists or with communities. We argue that collaborative research is a way to overcome these crises. Specifically we suggest three specific scientific activities that can lead to the development of psychology: collaborative research methods, the identification of nodal concepts that enable the bringing together of different approaches and disciplines, and the creation and maintenance of institutional spaces that enable creative, collaborative work.

Effects of contrast polarity in paracontrast masking

The visibility of a target stimulus can be suppressed (inhibition) or increased (facilitation) during paracontrast masking. Three processes have been proposed to be involved in paracontrast masking: brief inhibition, facilitation, and prolonged inhibition (Breitmeyer et al., 2006). Brief inhibition is observed when the mask precedes the target at short stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs) ranging from -10 to -30 msec, whereas prolonged inhibition is effective up to very large SOAs of -450 msec. Facilitation, enhancement in target visibility, can be observed at SOA values between -20 and -110 msec. We further investigated these processes by changing target-mask spatial separation and the contrast polarity of the mask. Our results show that (1) facilitation weakens when spatial separation between the target and mask is increased or when they have opposite contrast polarity, and (2) brief inhibition turns into facilitation for the opposite-polarity mask, whereas prolonged inhibition does not change significantly. These results suggest a fast inhibition mechanism realized in the contrast-specific center-surround antagonism of classical receptive fields for brief inhibition and a slower, higher level cortical processing that is indifferent to contrast polarity for prolonged inhibition.     

Mapping across Domains Without Feedback: A Neural Network Model of Transfer of Implicit Knowledge

This paper shows how a neural network can model the way people who have acquired knowledge of an artificial grammar in one perceptual domain (e.g., sequences of tones differing in pitch) can apply the knowledge to a quite different perceptual domain (e.g., sequences of letters). It is shown that a version of the Simple Recurrent Network (SRN) can transfer its knowledge of artificial grammars across domains without feedback. The performance of the model is sensitive to at least some of the same variables that affect subjects' performance—for example, the model is responsive to both the grammaticality of test sequences and their similarity to training sequences, to the cover task used during training, and to whether training is on bigrams or larger sequences.     

Impact of artificial fissioning and social networks on levels of aggression and affiliation in primates

Levels of aggression may be affected by stability of social relationships or by population density. A number of studies of nonhuman primates have indicated that spatial density influences agonistic activity levels less than does social density. Artificial fissioning of a captive troop of rhesus macaques was undertaken and the resultant differences in patterns of aggression and affiliation were examined. If population density has a major effect on levels of aggression, then fissioning will result in a decrease in aggression; if social stability has a major effect on levels of aggression, then fissioning is likely to be accompanied by an increase in aggression. An increase in rates of both aggressive and affiliative behavior resulted from artificial troop fissioning. These findings concur with other studies that have concluded that social stability is a more important determinant of primate aggression than is population density. Nonhuman primates use affiliative mechanisms to adjust their behavior when population density increases such that potentially adverse consequences of crowding are avoided.