Person–organization fit effects on organizational attraction: A test of an expectations-based model

This study investigates the mechanisms that explain why person–organization (PO) fit impacts organizational attraction. Adopting Edwards and Cable’s (2009) approach, an integrative model is developed around the idea that experiencing value congruence during the recruitment process perpetuates certain expectations about future work environments and employer relationships. These expectations in turn have a positive impact on organizational attraction. Evidence from a longitudinal study on a sample of job seekers suggests that expected opportunities for value expression and need fulfillment offered the most viable explanations of value congruence effects. The implications of important observed differences in the experience of PO fit between job seekers and full-time employees are discussed.     

Epistemic supererogation and its implications

Supererogatory acts, those which are praiseworthy but not obligatory, have become a significant topic in contemporary moral philosophy, primarily because morally supererogatory acts have proven difficult to reconcile with other important aspects of normative ethics. However, despite the similarities between ethics and epistemology, epistemic supererogation has received very little attention. In this paper, I aim to further the discussion of supererogation by arguing for the existence of epistemically supererogatory acts and considering the potential implications of their existence. First, I offer a brief account of moral supererogation and how morally supererogatory acts generate a strong intuition that a similar phenomenon should exist in epistemology. Afterward, I argue for the existence of epistemically supererogatory acts by examining five cases where an epistemic activity appears to be epistemically supererogatory. Epistemic supererogation appears to provide the best explanation for our considered judgments about the individuals’ behavior in these different cases. Finally, I consider how epistemic supererogation might impact the contemporary study of epistemology, particularly with regard to how we appraise certain epistemic duties.     

Revisiting the effects of Parkinson's disease and frontal lobe lesions on task switching: The role of rule reconfiguration

This study investigated the hypothesis that rule reconfiguration in task switching can isolate aspects of intact and impaired control at different stages of Parkinson's disease (PD) by comparing switches between concrete naming rules pertaining to stimulus selection, to switches between abstract rules which allocate categorization responses to these stimuli. Based on previous findings, it was hypothesized that attentional switches, where task set competition emerges at the stimulus but not response set level, highlights striatal dopaminergic function. Conversely, increasing the degree of task set competition to encompass reconfiguration of response set when switching between abstract rules, represents a condition which engages the prefrontal cortex (PFC) and renders this manipulation sensitive to frontal damage. To this end, we investigated task switching with concrete and abstract rules in unilaterally (Hoehn & Yahr stage I) and bilaterally (Hoehn & Yahr stage II) affected PD patients, as well as striatally intact frontal lesion patients. As predicted, frontal lesion patients demonstrated switching deficits only with abstract categorization rules, where switching engendered complete task set reconfiguration and a new response, as did stage II PD patients with presumed frontal cortical pathology. Replicating previous findings, stage I PD patients with relatively circumscribed striatal pathology demonstrated no such impairment. Disease severity also impacted on attentional switching indexed by naming rules, since medicated stage II but not stage I patients demonstrated switching deficits emerging from stimulus set reconfiguration, suggesting that the ameliorative efficacy of dopaminergic medication is inversely related to the severity of the striatal deficit. These findings illustrate that the nature of the rules that are switched, and its implication in terms of reconfiguring different task set elements, highlights different neural characters of cognitive flexibility. These manipulations may help decipher the differential effects of progressive neurodegeneration on parkinsonian cognition, and provide a framework in which to conceptualize the contributions of cortical and subcortical regions to cognitive control.     

Birth Defects,Causal Attributions,and Ethnicity in the National Birth Defects Prevention Study

In order to translate research findings into effective prevention strategies, it is important to understand people's beliefs about the causes of poor health outcomes. However, with the exception of knowledge and beliefs about folic acid supplementation, little is known regarding women's causal attributions women regarding birth defects. We employed Attribution Theory constructs to analyze open-text interview responses from 2,672 control mothers in the National Birth Defects Prevention Study who gave birth in 1997–2005. Common themes included use of alcohol, tobacco, illicit drugs, and medications during pregnancy. Stress and emotional upset were also suggested as possible causes of birth defects. Genetic- and heredity-related responses were more likely to be mentioned by Asian/Pacific Islander women compared to non-Hispanic Whites. Hispanic women were less likely to suggest several specific possible teratogens, such as paint, pesticides, or other chemicals, but were more likely to suggest events occurring during childbirth. Differences also emerged among ethnic groups for theoretical constructs, although most responses were categorized as controllable, changeable over time, and with an internal locus of causality.     

Relational dynamics of charismatic organization: The complementarity of love and power

Abstract: This paper outlines a new theory of structural transformation in charismatic systems by postulating a complementary relationship between love and power. Radical reorganization of social organization, the function of charismatic systems, requires mobilizing and realigning enormous amounts of social energy. The source of this social energy is love. When patterned as communion, love fuses the group into an undifferentiated whole and releases the social energy previously locked up as institutionalized structure.

Released from structure or form, however, social energy is highly volatile and produces immense pressures towards instability. Counterbalancing the pressure from communion, a strong, collective order of power functions to harness and align the energy, thereby promoting group stability and enhancing the prospects for structural transformation. Data from a national study of sixty urban communal organizations are used to ground key aspects of the theory.     

Comment on “Nudges and Cultural Variance”

In this brief commentary, I suggest Selinger and Whyte are essentially correct in their criticism of the Nudge approach advocated by Thaler and Sunstein. I use some examples from road behavior and traffic planning to amplify the criticism that the simple behavioral economics approach fails to take account of the embedding of humans and technology in the wider social and cultural context.     

Zinc transporter 3 is involved in learned fear and extinction, but not in innate fear

Synaptically released Zn2+ is a potential modulator of neurotransmission and synaptic plasticity in fear-conditioning pathways. Zinc transporter 3 (ZnT3) knock-out (KO) mice are well suited to test the role of zinc in learned fear, because ZnT3 is colocalized with synaptic zinc, responsible for its transport to synaptic vesicles, highly enriched in the amygdala-associated neural circuitry, and ZnT3 KO mice lack Zn2+ in synaptic vesicles. However, earlier work reported no deficiency in fear memory in ZnT3 KO mice, which is surprising based on the effects of Zn2+ on amygdala synaptic plasticity. We therefore reexamined ZnT3 KO mice in various tasks for learned and innate fear. The mutants were deficient in a weak fear-conditioning protocol using single tone-shock pairing but showed normal memory when a stronger, five-pairing protocol was used. ZnT3 KO mice were deficient in memory when a tone was presented as complex auditory information in a discontinuous fashion. Moreover, ZnT3 KO mice showed abnormality in trace fear conditioning and in fear extinction. By contrast, ZnT3 KO mice had normal anxiety. Thus, ZnT3 is involved in associative fear memory and extinction, but not in innate fear, consistent with the role of synaptic zinc in amygdala synaptic plasticity.     

The motor theory of speech perception revisited

Galantucci, Fowler, and Turvey (2006) have claimed that perceiving speech is perceiving gestures and that the motor system is recruited for perceiving speech. We make the counter argument that perceiving speech is not perceiving gestures, that the motor system is not recruitedfor perceiving speech, and that speech perception can be adequately described by a prototypical pattern recognition model, the fuzzy logical model of perception (FLMP). Empirical evidence taken as support for gesture and motor theory is reconsidered in more detail and in the framework of the FLMR Additional theoretical and logical arguments are made to challenge gesture and motor theory.