Measuring work styles: Towards an understanding of the dynamic components of the theory of work adjustment

Work styles are an important yet largely unexplored component of the theory of work adjustment (TWA), describing a dynamic component of how individuals maintain and adjust fit with their work environment. The active work style (AWS) scale is the first attempt to develop a specific self-report measure of work styles suitable for longitudinal research. Results from three studies support Dawis and Lofquist's (1984) proposed four factor structure, but these factors are related through a second-order factor describing a person's generalised level of work activity and effort across time. The AWS scale demonstrated good evidence for reliability and validity, and strong measurement invariance across time signifying its suitability for longitudinal research. In line with expectations, overall work style was positively related to conscientiousness and work engagement yet unrelated to stress. When controlling for these variables, AWS was positively related to demands–abilities fit, but not needs–supplies fit. Limitations and possibilities for future research are also discussed.     

The influence of prior knowledge and repeated questioning on children's long-term retention of the details of a pediatric examination

Children's recall of the details of pediatric examinations was examined over the course of a 6-month interval. Although the 83 4- to 7-year-old participants reported a substantial amount of information at each assessment, performance declined over time, dropping sharply over the course of 3 months but then remaining constant out to the final interview at 6 months. As expected, older children provided more total information than younger children did and reported a greater proportion of the event components in response to general rather than specific questions. However, comparable patterns of remembering and forgetting over time were observed at each age level. In addition, no effects of repeated questioning--in the form of an interview at 3 months for half of the children--were observed on performance at the 6-month assessment. Moreover, children's prior knowledge about routine doctor visits was assessed before the checkup for half of the participants at each age and was associated with initial but not delayed recall. Although knowledge increased with age as expected, it nonetheless affected recall over and above the influence of age.     

Stereotype Directionality and Attractiveness Stereotyping: Is Beauty Good or is Ugly Bad?

Dion, Berscheid, and Walster (1972), in their seminal article, labeled the attribution of positive characteristics to attractive people the "beauty-is-good" stereotype. The stereotyping literature since then provides extensive evidence for the differential judgment and treatment of attractive versus unattractive people, but does not indicate whether it is an advantage to be attractive or a disadvantage to be unattractive. Two studies investigated the direction of attractiveness stereotyping by comparing judgments of positive and negative attributes for medium vs. low and medium vs. high attractive faces. Taken together, results for adults (Experiment 1) and children (Experiment 2) suggest that most often, unattractiveness is a disadvantage, consistent with negativity bias (e.g., Rozin & Royzman, 2001) but contrary to the "beauty-is-good" aphorism.     

Speakers gaze at objects while preparing intentionally inaccurate labels for them

When describing scenes, speakers gaze at objects while preparing their names (Z. M. Griffin & K. Bock, 2000). In this study, the authors investigated whether gazes to referents occurred in the absence of a correspondence between visual features and word meaning. Speakers gazed significantly longer at objects before intentionally labeling them inaccurately with the names of similar things (e.g., calling a horse a dog) than when labeling them accurately. This held for grammatical subjects and objects as well as agents and patients. Moreover, the time spent gazing at a referent before labeling it with a novel word or accurate name was similar and decreased as speakers gained experience using the novel word. These results suggest that visual attention in speaking may be directed toward referents in the absence of any association between their visual forms and the words used to talk about them.     

A study of the lagged relationships among safety climate, safety motivation, safety behavior, and accidents at the individual and group levels

The authors measured perceptions of safety climate, motivation, and behavior at 2 time points and linked them to prior and subsequent levels of accidents over a 5-year period. A series of analyses examined the effects of top-down and bottom-up processes operating simultaneously over time. In terms of top-down effects, average levels of safety climate within groups at 1 point in time predicted subsequent changes in individual safety motivation. Individual safety motivation, in turn, was associated with subsequent changes in self-reported safety behavior. In terms of bottom-up effects, improvements in the average level of safety behavior within groups were associated with a subsequent reduction in accidents at the group level. The results contribute to an understanding of the factors influencing workplace safety and the levels and lags at which these effects operate.     

Asymmetric cultural effects on perceptual expertise underlie an own-race bias for voices

The own-race bias in memory for faces has been a rich source of empirical work on the mechanisms of person perception. This effect is thought to arise because the face-perception system differentially encodes the relevant structural dimensions of features and their configuration based on experiences with different groups of faces. However, the effects of sociocultural experiences on person perception abilities in other identity-conveying modalities like audition have not been explored. Investigating an own-race bias in the auditory domain provides a unique opportunity for studying whether person identification is a modality-independent construct and how it is sensitive to asymmetric cultural experiences. Here we show that an own-race bias in talker identification arises from asymmetric experience with different spoken dialects. When listeners categorized voices by race (White or Black), a subset of the Black voices were categorized as sounding White, while the opposite case was unattested. Acoustic analyses indicated listeners’ perceptions about race were consistent with differences in specific phonetic and phonological features. In a subsequent person-identification experiment, the Black voices initially categorized as sounding White elicited an own-race bias from White listeners, but not from Black listeners. These effects are inconsistent with person-perception models that strictly analogize faces and voices based on recognition from only structural features. Our results demonstrate that asymmetric exposure to spoken dialect, independent from talkers’ physical characteristics, affects auditory perceptual expertise for talker identification. Person perception thus additionally relies on socioculturally-acquired dynamic information, which may be represented by different mechanisms in different sensory modalities.     

Bifactor models and rotations: exploring the extent to which multidimensional data yield univocal scale scores

The application of psychological measures often results in item response data that arguably are consistent with both unidimensional (a single common factor) and multidimensional latent structures (typically caused by parcels of items that tap similar content domains). As such, structural ambiguity leads to seemingly endless "confirmatory" factor analytic studies in which the research question is whether scale scores can be interpreted as reflecting variation on a single trait. An alternative to the more commonly observed unidimensional, correlated traits, or second-order representations of a measure's latent structure is a bifactor model. Bifactor structures, however, are not well understood in the personality assessment community and thus rarely are applied. To address this, herein we (a) describe issues that arise in conceptualizing and modeling multidimensionality, (b) describe exploratory (including Schmid-Leiman [Schmid & Leiman, 1957] and target bifactor rotations) and confirmatory bifactor modeling, (c) differentiate between bifactor and second-order models, and (d) suggest contexts where bifactor analysis is particularly valuable (e.g., for evaluating the plausibility of subscales, determining the extent to which scores reflect a single variable even when the data are multidimensional, and evaluating the feasibility of applying a unidimensional item response theory (IRT) measurement model). We emphasize that the determination of dimensionality is a related but distinct question from either determining the extent to which scores reflect a single individual difference variable or determining the effect of multidimensionality on IRT item parameter estimates. Indeed, we suggest that in many contexts, multidimensional data can yield interpretable scale scores and be appropriately fitted to unidimensional IRT models.     

Why Leibniz thinks Descartes was wrong and the Scholastics were right

The bundle theory is a theory about the internal constitution of individuals. It asserts that individuals are entirely composed of universals. Typically, bundle theorists augment their theory with a constitutional approach to individuation entailing the thesis ‘identity of constituents is a sufficient ground for numerical identity’ (CIT). But then the bundle theory runs afoul of Black’s duplication case—a world containing two indiscernible spheres. Here I propose and defend a new version of the bundle theory that denies ‘CIT’, and which instead conjoins it with a structural diversity thesis, according to which being separated by distance is a sufficient ground for numerical diversity. This version accommodates Black’s world as well as the three-spheres world—a world containing three indiscernible spheres, arranged as the vertices of an equilateral triangle. In this paper, I also criticize Rodriguez-Pereyra’s alternative attempt to defend the bundle theory against Black’s case and the case of the three-spheres world.