Employment counseling and organizational ethical values

Employment counseling is commonly used in companies to assist employees with various personal and professional challenges that are confronted in the workplace. Such guidance could affect the degree to which employees believe a company proactively supports an ethical orientation; the purpose of this study was to explore this issue. A self‐report survey was used to collect data from 105 working students who were attending business classes at the University of Wyoming. Results suggested that perceptions of organizational ethical values were higher among students who were employed in companies that offered employment counseling than were the perceptions of those working in companies that did not offer employment counseling.     

Mortality salience and prejudice towards ethno-religion minorities: Results and implications of a Nigerian study

The present study examined mortality salience (MS) effect on prejudice towards an ethno-religion minority group of Northern Nigeria. Participants were 120 undergraduate students (females = 41.67%) with an age range between 17 and 38 years. The students completed a Distance-(relationship)-Situation (DS) measure under alternative conditions: with MS priming and a control condition. Following a three-way mixed model ANOVA, results showed MS to predict prejudice across relationship situations of secret disclosure, business partnership, and cooperating to get a task done. Consistent with terror management theory, MS effects on ethno-cultural prejudice expression apply across relationship situations.     

The effects of the age of eyewitnesses on the accuracy and suggestibility of their testimony

Previous studies have compared the performance of young adult eyewitnesses with that of children or elderly eyewitnesses, but few studies have allowed direct comparison of the performance of all three age groups. The accuracy and suggestibility of accounts of a video recording of a kidnapping were investigated using an experimental eyewitness paradigm. Subjects were drawn from three age groups: children (aged 7–9 years); young adults (aged 16–18 years) and elderly subjects (aged 60–85 years). Subjects' accuracy in answering non-misleading questions and their susceptibility to misleading information was measured. Both the elderly and child subjects gave fewer correct answers and more incorrect answers to non-misleading questions than did young adults. The elderly subjects gave fewer correct responses but also fewer incorrect responses to non-misleading questions than did child subjects. Children were more suggestible than either elderly or young adults. No significant difference was found in the suggestibility of elderly and young adults. Contrary to the trace strength hypothesis no relationship was found between accuracy of recall and suggestibility. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Competitor effects in naming objects and famous faces

The prior production of an alternative name increases the time taken to name a famous face. For example, naming a picture of the comedy actor “John Cleese” by the name of the character he played in the TV series Fawlty Towers (Basil Fawlty) increases the time required to subsequently produce the name “John Cleese”. This effect has been termed the “nominal competitor effect”. In contrast prior production of a property associated with a famous person has no effect on naming speed. For example, prior production of the name of the TV series Fawlty Towers does not slow subsequent production of “John Cleese”. The experiments reported explored analogous effects in object naming. Experiment 1 examined the effects of prior production of an alternative name (e.g., from American English or British English) and a semantic associate on the time taken to name line drawings of objects. It was found that prior production of an alternative name slowed object naming, but prior production of the name of a semantic associate did not. Experiment 2 demonstrated that cueing a specific name (e.g., the British English name) was not a necessary condition for the nominal competitor effect on object naming. Experiment 3 demonstrated that the nominal competitor effect on naming famous faces was also observed under both cued and uncued naming instructions. The data from both object and face naming are interpreted within the terms of current models of speech production.     

Aging and the Deletion Function of Inhibition

The present study was adapted from the sentence completion task of Hartman and Hasher (1991). We addressed the question raised by Burke (1997): are the age-related differences in priming effects found in that task better explained by deficits in explicit memory or by inefficient inhibitory mechanisms? In the study phase, older and younger adults read high cloze sentences ending with an expected or an unexpected final word. In the second phase, participants were asked to complete sentence frames with either the final word presented during the study phase (inclusion condition) or with another, new word (exclusion condition). The third phase was an indirect memory test of perceptual identification. Finally, we compared explicit memory for recalled and inhibited words in a recognition test. In perceptual identification by older adults, priming was equivalent for recalled and inhibited words, whereas in younger adults priming was higher for recalled than for inhibited words. In the explicit memory test, recognition scores were lower for inhibited words in both age groups. These results are consistent with the view of Hasher and Zacks (1988), who assume an age-related decline in the ability to suppress no-longer-relevant information     

Mental rotation of faces

The effect of orientation upon face recognition was explored in two experiments, which used a procedure adapted from the mental rotation literature. In the first experiment, a linear increase in the RT of same-different judgments was found as the second of a pair of sequentially presented faces was rotated away from the vertical. Also, it was found that the effect of changing facial expression did not interact with orientation. In the second experiment, a linear relationship between RT and orientation was found in a task involving the recognition of famous faces. This recognition task was found to be more affected by inversion than was an expression classification task. These results are interpreted as evidence against the view that inverted faces are processed in a qualitatively different manner from upright faces, and are also inconsistent with the hypothesis that inversion makes faces difficult to recognize because facial expression cannot be extracted from an inverted face.     

On the relationship between reading, listening, and speaking: It’s different for people’s names

Two experiments are reported that tested predictions derived from the framework of face, object, and word recognition proposed by Valentine, Brennen, and Brédart (1996). The findings were as follows: (1) Production of a celebrity’s name in response to seeing the celebrity’s face primed a subsequent familiarity decision to the celebrity’s printed name. The degree of repetition priming observed was as great as that observed when a familiarity decision to the printed name was repeated in the prime and test phases of the experiment. (2) Making a familiarity decision to an auditory presentation of a celebrity’s name primed a familiarity decision to the same celebrity’s name presented visually. The magnitude of cross-modality priming was as great as the magnitude of within-modality repetition priming. This result for people’s names contrasted with the effects observed in lexical decision tasks, in which no reliable cross-modality priming was observed. The results cannot be accounted for by previous models of face and name processing. They show a marked contrast between processing people’s names and processing words. The results support the framework proposed by Valentine et al. (1996). The implications for models of speech production, perception, and reading are discussed, together with the potential of the methodology to elucidate our understanding of proper name processing.     

The Effect of Age of Acquisition on Speed and Accuracy of Naming Famous Faces

Three experiments examined whether famous faces would be affected by the age at which knowledge of the face was first acquired (AoA). Using a multiple regression design, Experiment 1 showed that rated familiarity and AoAwere significant predictors of the time required to name pictures of celebrities' faces and the accuracy of producing their names. Experiment 2 replicated an effect of AoA using a factorial design in which other attributes of the celebrities were matched. In both Experiments 1 and 2, several ratings had been collected from participants before naming latency data were collected. Experiment 3 investigated the accuracy and latency of naming celebrities without any prior exposure to the stimuli. An advantage for naming early acquired celebrities was observed even on the first presentation. The participants named the same celebrities in three subsequent presentations of the stimuli. The effect of AoA was not significant on the fourth presentation. The implications of these results for models of face naming and directions for future research are discussed.     

Towards an exemplar model of face processing: the effects of race and distinctiveness.

Valentine (1991a, 1991b) described a theoretical framework for face recognition in which faces are encoded as locations in a multidimensional space. It was argued that this approach could provide a unified account of the effects of distinctiveness, inversion, and race on face recognition. In this paper we evaluate the ability of this theoretical framework to account for the effects of distinctiveness and race in four experiments in which white British and Japanese faces served as stimuli and both white British and Japanese students acted as subjects. In a recognition memory experiment the expected "own-race bias" was observed as a Race of Subject x Race of Face interaction. Distinctive faces were recognized more accurately than typical faces, but the effect of distinctiveness did not interact with the race of face or the race of subject. Typical faces were classified faster than distinctive faces in a task in which intact faces had to be distinguished from jumbled faces, as found in earlier work, and the effect of distinctiveness did not interact with the race of face or race of subject. In contrast, a task in which subjects classified faces according to their race did show a greater effect of distinctiveness for own-race faces. The results are discussed in relation to the two specific models within the multidimensional space framework identified by Valentine (1991a): a purely exemplar-based model and a norm-based coding model. It is argued that these results are more easily accommodated in terms of a purely exemplar-based model. Some conceptual problems in applying the norm-based coding model to the effect of race are discussed.