Young managers’ drive to thrive: A personal work goal approach to burnout and work engagement

This study approaches young managers’ occupational well-being through their work-related goal pursuit. The main aim was to identify content categories of personal work goals and investigate their associations with background factors, goal appraisals, burnout, and work engagement. The questionnaire data consisted of 747 young Finnish managers (23-35 years; M = 31 years) who were mostly men (85.5%). Seven work-related content categories were found on the basis of qualitative data analysis: (1) competence goals (30.5%), (2) progression goals (23.7%), (3) well-being goals (15.2%), (4) job change goals (13.7%), (5) job security goals (7.4%), (6) organizational goals (5.6%), and (7) financial goals (3.9%). ANCOVA analyses, where goal appraisals and significant background factors were controlled for, indicated that organizational goals were related to low burnout and the highest level of work engagement, whereas well-being and job change goals were related to higher burnout and lower work engagement. The study shows that the contents of young managers’ work-related goals can contribute to the understanding of individual differences in occupational well-being.     

Change and stability of masculinity-femininity from adolescence to adulthood in a sample of Swedish women

A female sample (N = 349) was administered the Attitude Interest Schedule (AIS) and the Cesarec-Marke Personality Schedule (CMPS) at the ages of 15 and 25. It was found that during adolescence subjects change towards a more conservative feminine self-image. Differential stability, based on the AIS scores, was substantial. Masculinity-femininity appeared to be related to needs as measured by the CMPS. Masculinity was related positively to instrumental needs and negatively to expressive needs.     

APPROACH AND WITHDRAWAL IN YOUNG OF TILAPIA MOSSAMBICA (CICHLIDAE, PISCES) AS A FUNCTION OF AGE AND SOCIAL EXPERIENCE

G oude G., E dlund B., E ngqvist -E dlund U. & A nderson M. Approach and withdrawal in young of Tilapia mossambica (Cichlidae, Pisces) as a function of age and Social experience. Scand. J. Psychol ., 1972, 13 , 89–97.—In an experiment with eight groups of young of Tilapia mossambica , approach and withdrawal behavior was registered during brief (5 min) periods of stimulation with a moving dummy; the experiment lasted twelwe days (towards the end and immediately after the sensitive period). Four of the groups comprised young which had been isolated from each other until the first stimulation period; in the other four groups the young had been kept together in the experimental tanks. The age of the young when first stimulated was varied experimentally. Changes in approach and withdrawal behavior over time were studied along with e.g. changes in group strength. Age at first stimulation was found to be of some consequence but no clear differences were obtained between groups with different environmental experiences.     

Pupillary Stroop effects

We recorded the pupil diameters of participants performing the words’ color-naming Stroop task (i.e., naming the color of a word that names a color). Non-color words were used as baseline to firmly establish the effects of semantic relatedness induced by color word distractors. We replicated the classic Stroop effects of color congruency and color incongruency with pupillary diameter recordings: relative to non-color words, pupil diameters increased for color distractors that differed from color responses, while they reduced for color distractors that were identical to color responses. Analyses of the time courses of pupil responses revealed further differences between color-congruent and color-incongruent distractors, with the latter inducing a steep increase of pupil size and the former a relatively lower increase. Consistent with previous findings that have demonstrated that pupil size increases as task demands rise, the present results indicate that pupillometry is a robust measure of Stroop interference, and it represents a valuable addition to the cognitive scientist’s toolbox.     

Phonological similarity neighborhoods and children’s short-term memory: Typical development and dyslexia

In this article, we explore whether structural characteristics of the phonological lexicon affect serial recall in typically developing and dyslexic children. Recent work has emphasized the importance of long-term phonological representations in supporting short-term memory performance. This occurs via redintegration (reconstruction) processes, which show significant neighborhood density effects in adults. We assessed whether serial recall in children was affected by neighborhood density in word and nonword tasks. Furthermore, we compared dyslexic children with typically developing children of the same age or reading level. Dyslexic children are held to have impaired phonological representations of lexical items. These impaired representations may impair or prevent the use of long-term phonological representations to redintegrate short-term memory traces. We report significant rime neighborhood density effects for serial recall of both words and nonwords, for both dyslexic and typically developing children.     

Pain perception across the menstrual cycle phases in women with chronic pain

The menstrual cycle has been reported to alter pain perception but the patterns differ among studies. It has been reported that estrogens may influence somatic sensory processes. The present aim was to investigate whether the perception of pain varies by phases of the menstrual cycle. 20 women with chronic low pain volunteered to participate and were asked to rate their pain each day during three successive menstrual cycles. The menstrual cycle was divided into four and five phases to be able to compare results. Analysis showed there were phase differences in pain ratings during the menstrual cycle. Regardless of whether the menstrual cycle was divided into four or five phases, women rated pain significantly higher in the menstrual and premenstrual phases than in the midmenstrual and ovulatory phases. This is consistent with other studies showing less pain sensitivity during phases of the menstrual cycle associated with high estrogen. Women with high pain frequency reported more frequently a passive coping style and catastrophizing thoughts.     

Personality traits in women with Turner syndrome

Turner syndrome is caused by the total or partial absence of, or structural abnormalities in, one sex chromosome. A personality style characterized by traits related to low neuroticism and high extroversion has been reported for females with Turner syndrome, indicating possible genetic factors related to personality development. This study examines personality traits in 37 Swedish women with Turner syndrome using the Karolinska Scales of Personality Inventory. Compared to reference data, the subjects rated themselves as more sensation seeking, less detached, less verbally aggressive and less irritated. These results partially support previous findings. The subjects were divided into three karyotype groups: 45,X (n = 13), 45,X/46,XX or 45,X/45,XY (n = 13), and structural abnormalities (n = 11). Contrary to some previous findings, no differences in personality were found between the karyotype groups.     

Written threat: Electrophysiological evidence for an attention bias to affective words in social anxiety disorder

Social anxiety disorder (SAD) is associated with heightened sensitivity to threat cues, typically represented by emotional facial expressions. To examine if this bias can be transferred to a general hypersensitivity or whether it is specific to disorder relevant cues, we investigated electrophysiological correlates of emotional word processing (alpha activity and event-related potentials) in 20 healthy participants and 20 participants with SAD. The experimental task was a silent reading of neutral, positive, physically threatening and socially threatening words (the latter were abusive swear words) while responding to a randomly presented dot. Subsequently, all participants were asked to recall as many words as possible during an unexpected recall test. Participants with SAD showed blunted sensory processing followed by a rapid processing of emotional words during early stages (early posterior negativity – EPN). At later stages, all participants showed enhanced processing of negative (physically and socially threatening) compared to neutral and positive words (N400). Moreover, at later processing stages alpha activity was increased specifically for negative words in participants with SAD but not in healthy controls. Recall of emotional words for all subjects was best for socially threatening words, followed by negative and positive words irrespective of social anxiety. The present findings indicate that SAD is associated with abnormalities in emotional word processing characterised by early hypervigilance to emotional cues followed by cognitive avoidance at later processing stages. Most importantly, the specificity of these attentional biases seems to change as a function of time with a general emotional bias at early and a more specific bias at later processing stages.     

Investigating occupational well-being and leadership from a person-centred longitudinal approach: congruence of well-being and perceived leadership

The overall objective of this longitudinal study was to investigate the association between perceived leadership and employee well-being from a person-centred approach utilizing the principles of the conservation of resources theory (Hobfoll, S. E. (1989). Conservation of resources: A new attempt at conceptualizing stress. American Psychologist, 44, 513–524; Hobfoll, S. E. (2002). Social and psychological resources and adaptation. Review of General Psychology, 6, 307–324). First, we aimed to identify latent classes (i.e., subgroups) of employees that demonstrated similar mean levels of stability and change in occupational well-being (i.e., vigour and emotional exhaustion) across a mean time-lag of 14 months. Second, we ascertained whether employees in the latent well-being classes differed in their ratings of transformational, authentic, and abusive leadership behaviours across time. Self-report data were obtained from Finnish employees (N = 262, 88% women) working in a variety of municipal jobs. Using factor mixture modelling, four latent well-being classes were identified, indicating good (79%), low (10%), improving (8%), and deteriorating (3%) well-being. Congruence in both level and change of well-being and perceived leadership was found. That is, employees with better well-being across time reported more favourable leadership behaviours at both time points, and changes in employee well-being were reflected as changes in perceived leadership. The close relationship between perceived leadership and well-being is discussed from both a leader-centric (leadership as a resource) and a follower-centric (well-being as a resource) perspective.     

Psychiatric Symptoms,Posttraumatic Growth,and Life Satisfaction Among Parents of Seriously Ill Infants: A Prospective Case-Controlled Study

Journal of Clinical Psychology in Medical Settings - We evaluated psychiatric symptoms, posttraumatic growth, and life satisfaction among the parents (n?=?34) of newborns...