Distinctions between emotion and mood

Most academics agree that emotions and moods are related but distinct phenomena. The present study assessed emotion-mood distinctions among a non-academic population and compared these views with distinctions proposed in the literature. Content analysis of responses from 106 participants identified 16 themes, with cause (65% of respondents), duration (40%), control (25%), experience (15%), and consequences (14%) the most frequently cited distinctions. Among 65 contributions to the academic literature, eight themes were proposed, with duration (62% of authors), intentionality (41%), cause (31percnt;), consequences (31%), and function (18%) the most frequently cited. When the eight themes cited by both academics and non-academics were rank ordered, approximately 60% overlap in opinion was evident. A data-derived summary of emotion-mood distinctions is provided. These data should prove useful to investigators interested in developing a clearer scientific distinction between emotion and mood than is currently available.     

BOOKS Review

Life's Dominion: An Argument about Abortion, Euthanasia, and Individual Freedom. By Ronald Dworkin.
Thought's Ego in Augustine and Descartse . By Gareth B. Matthews.     

Recognition of vector patterns under transformations: Local and global determinants

The extent to which combined local position and orientation information contributes to the recognition of patterns under transformation was investigated. Vector patterns, which consist of arrays of line segments composed according to specific rules, were presented in pairs. Discrimination performance was measured both as a function of the degree of local perturbation in one member of an otherwise identical pair, and in terms of a global rotation of one pattern with respect to the other. Differences were found between vector-pattern types on this task that point to a two-component process for pattern recognition under transformation. One component involves the comparison of local orientation/position information in the original pattern with that in its transform. The second component is global and is related to the degree to which the vector pattern is invariant under certain whole-field (1-parameter) transformations.     

THELMA GWINN THURSTONE

This paper examines the life and career of Thelma Gwinn Thurstone—her career strategies and her contributions to psychological testing, intelligence theory, and instruction—based on her publications and a series of personal interviews with her and her colleagues. Thurstone's contributions, with her husband, L. L. Thurstone, included the development of the American Council on Education's Psychological Examinations and the Primary Mental Abilities test batteries. Her own work included the development of instructional materials using the common factor theory of intelligence. Thurstone, wife of a preeminent scholar and mother of three sons, pursued career strategies that facilitated her continued professional activity for six decades. Further research on measurement history and also on women's career strategies are suggested.     

Causal Attributions of Male and Female Performance by Young Children

Males and females in kindergarten and third grade predicted whether a boy or a girl would succeed on a masculine or a feminine task. Some predictions were confirmed; others were not. The children were asked to explain the winner's success by choosing among four determinants of achievement: ability, effort, task ease, and luck. For third graders, luck was more important in determining the success of an unpredicted winner than a predicted winner. For both ages, female success on a masculine task was attributed more to effort than to ability. These findings support attribution theory and indicate that differential perceptions of male and female performance exist in young children.     

Job crafting mediates how empowering leadership and employees’ core self-evaluations predict favourable and unfavourable outcomes

ABSTRACT

Based on job crafting theory and workplace resources theories, the present study develops a model of both antecedents and consequences of job crafting. We hypothesized subordinates’ perceptions of empowering leadership and core self-evaluations influence employee job crafting behaviours, which subsequently influence four outcomes: improving three employee well-being outcomes, (a) work-family enrichment, (b) flourishing, and (c) life satisfaction; and simultaneously reducing the organizational outcome of (d) deviant behaviours. Three-waves of data over nine months were collected from U.S. full-time employees (n = 276). Results showed empowering leadership and core self-evaluations positively related to expansive/approach forms of job crafting behaviours, which in turn related to the three different well-being outcomes. However, job crafting did not affect employee deviant behaviour. Instead, empowering leadership and core self-evaluations directly predicted less deviant behaviour. With the imputed data, we also found job crafting had a significant but weak relationship with deviant behaviour. These findings provide an integrated understanding of how and why employees engage in job crafting, and the important influence that job crafting has on employees’ subjective well-being. The present study advances leadership and job crafting theories, providing practical recommendations for promoting employee well-being and decreasing undesirable behaviours in the form of workplace deviance.