Transportation and Need for Affect in Narrative Persuasion: A Mediated Moderation Model

Two experiments investigated the idea that individual differences in need for affect are critical for narrative persuasion. Need for affect, that is, the disposition to approach emotions, was assumed to facilitate the experience of being transported into the mental world of the narrative. An intense experience of transportation, in turn, should enhance the persuasive impact of narrative information on readers' beliefs. A mediated moderation analysis was used to test these assumptions. In both experiments (N = 314), need for affect (approach) and transportation moderated the persuasive effects of a fictional narrative compared to a belief-irrelevant control story (Experiment 1) and the persuasive effects of a story with high emotional content compared to a story with low emotional content (Experiment 2). The moderator effects of need for affect were shown to be mediated by the moderator effects of transportation. In sum, the magnitude of a person's need for affect determines whether and to what extent the person experiences transportation into the story world and is persuaded by the information presented in the narrative.     

What's in a name? access to information from people's names

Abstract

The processing of people's names is contrasted with face recognition and word recognition. The effects of the familiarity of initial and surnames and frequency of surnames (the number of people with the same surname) were investigated in several tasks. It was found that the effects of name familiarity and surname frequency were analogous to the effects of word frequency in tasks which did not require access to memory for individuals (a nationality decision and naming latency). In tasks which do require access to memory for individuals (familiarity decision and a semantic classification), the effect of surname frequency was analogous to the effect of distinctive-ness in face recognition. The results are discussed in terms of a functional model of name processing in which name recognition units mediate between the output of word recognition units and access to identity-specific semantics.     

The Transportation Scale–Short Form (TS–SF)

One popular concept to capture the experience of being immersed into the world of a story is that of transportation. This article examines the factorial validity of the Transportation Scale (TS) and introduces a short and psychometrically sound alternative for the assessment of transportation. Exploratory bifactor modeling in Study 1 (N = 179) provided support for the hypothesized factor structure of the original TS with three facets and a general transportation factor. Based on these analyses, a six-item short version of the scale, the Transportation Scale–Short Form (TS–SF), was developed. Study 2 (N = 131 and N = 246) as well as Study 3 (N = 301) corroborated the short form's factorial structure, reliability, and validity.     

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.     

Men and Women Supervisors' Job Responsibility,Job Satisfaction,and Employee Monitoring

A gender-based job responsibility framework emphasizing job satisfaction and employee monitoring is presented in this study and is tested using a national sample of 2,607 supervisors representing a variety of industries. Overall, the path analysis indicated that male managers reported greater perceived responsibility than did female managers. Findings also indicated that perceived responsibility was positively related to both job satisfaction and employee monitoring. The limitations of the study are highlighted, and the managerial implications of the results and suggestions for future research are presented.     

<Emphasis Type="Italic">Revolutionary Becomings</Emphasis>: Negritude's Anti-Humanist Humanism

In this paper I establish an alliance between the thought of Frantz Fanon and Gilles Deleuze's Philosophy of Difference. In light of Fanon's critique of Sartre's characterization of the place of the Negritude movement in terms of dialectic, I point to the inherent limitations of modern humanism's dialectical accounts for enabling genuine historical change. Alternatively, I appeal to Deleuze's distinction between history and becoming, and his concomitant idea of intensive becoming-revolutionary. I conclude that such an alliance with Deleuzian metaphysics holds far greater promises for effecting Fanon's revolutionary project of the creation of a new humanity (and therefore, of a new ethics and a new politics) than his traditional assimilation to Phenomenology and Existentialism.     

Perceived organizational ethics and skepticism of women's employment

Using a national sample of business professionals, the relationship between two measures of perceived organizational ethics and individuals' overall skepticism about women's employment were examined. After controlling for several demographic factors, analysis of responses from a 9% return suggested that persons working for companies believed to have strong ethical practices are less likely to have negative perceptions of women's employment.     

Stimulus generation, ratings, phoneme counts, and group classifications for 696 famous people by British adults over 40 years of age

Matching stimuli across a range of influencing variables is no less important for studies of face recognition than it is for those of word processing. Whereas a number of corpora exist to allow experimenters to select a carefully controlled set of word stimuli, similar databases for famous faces do not exist. This article, therefore, provides researchers in the area of face recognition with a useful resource on which to base their stimulus selection. In the first phase of the investigation, British adults over 40 years of age were requested to generate the names of famous people (or celebrities) that they thought they would recognize and to write these down. The most frequently named celebrities were then rated by adults from the same age population for familiarity, distinctiveness, and age of acquisition. The result is a database of 696 famous people, with an indication of their relative eminence in the public consciousness and rated for these important variables. Phoneme counts are also provided for each famous person, together with family name frequency counts in the general population, where available. Materials and links may be accessed at www.psychonomic.org/archive.