Source of recruitment and employee attitudes: An analysis of job involvement,organizational commitment,and job satisfaction

This study empirically investigated the relationship between recruiting methods and the work attitudes of job involvement, organizational commitment, and job satisfaction. Multivariate and follow-up univariate analyses showed strong recruitment source effects, with employee referrals emerging as a better source of recruitment than newspaper advertisements. The results of the study are discussed and directions for future research elucidated.     

Spontaneous speech in aphasia: a correlational study

Seventeen spontaneous speech measures and scores on a naming test, employed to characterize the expressive performance of 121 aphasics, were subjected to a factor analysis. Five factors were obtained: (1) Syntactic ability, (2) Phonological paraphasia, (3) Neologistic paraphasia, (4) Articulatory impairment, and (5) Vocabulary. Relationships of the factors to naming error types were examined in order to elucidate the nature of some of the factors. Also, the relationships of the expressive factors to auditory comprehension tests were explored, such an exploration being relevant to the issue of the overlap between expressive and receptive functions.     

AN ANALYSIS OF SOME VARIABLES INFLUENCING THE EFFECTIVENESS OF REPRIMANDS

Although several studies have shown that social reprimands can function as punishers, no study reported to date has isolated any of the factors influencing reprimand efficacy. Three experiments were conducted to investigate several factors. Experiment 1 used an alternating treatments design and was conducted on two elementary school boys, one of whom was in a special education class. Results showed that verbal reprimands delivered with eye contact and firm grasp of the student's shoulders reduced disruptive behavior to a greater extent than did verbal reprimands delivered without eye contact and grasp. Both types of reprimand were more effective than a baseline condition during which disruptive behavior was ignored. Experiment 2 also used an alternating treatments design and was conducted on one elementary school boy. Results demonstrated that reprimands delivered from one meter away were considerably more effective than reprimands delivered from seven meters away. Experiment 3 used a reversal design and was conducted on two pairs of elementary school children, one a pair of boys and the other a pair of girls. Results demonstrated that reprimands delivered to just one member of the pair reduced the disruptive behavior of both members of the pair. Thus, the effects of reprimands “spilled” over to nonreprimanded students.     

The perceived tempi of coherent and streaming tone sequences

Previous research has demonstrated that a sequence of tones that is alternated between ears is stretched out in echoic memory, as compared with monaural sequences. Although the stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs) were the same in the interaural and monaural conditions, the perceptual onset asynchronies (POAs) differed by 24 msec. The present study investigated whether an analogous perceptual phenomenon exists for frequency-alternating tone sequences. It turned out that the POAs of coherent and even of streaming tone sequences were precisely the same as with nonalternating tone sequences.     

The analysis of slalom-ski type movement using a ski-simulator apparatus

The research reported in this paper was designed to assess the feasibility of using a novel apparatus (a so-called ski-movement simulator) in the study of the acquisition of gross cyclical motor skills and further to develop analytic techniques appropriate to the movements involved. Three such methods are discussed: (1) the mean absolute deviation from the middle position as a measure of the ‘amplitude’ of the movement; (2) an auto-correlation coefficient as a measure of the ‘timing’ of the movement; (3) a cross-correlation coefficient as a measure of the ‘smoothness’ of the movement.Progress in learning - as shown by the measures of amplitude and smoothness- showed the expected trend, in that performance improved throughout the whole of the duration of the experiment (four consecutive days), but the rate of improvement gradually decreased. The largest effects were found for the ‘amplitude’ measure, which had the drawback that the ultimate level of performance was constrained by the body weight of the subject. The ‘smoothness’ measure did not suffer from this disadvantage and its suitability as a measure designed to evaluate gross skill acquisition in a laboratory situation is discussed.The ‘timing’ measure did not follow the same trend and reasons for this finding are proposed. Overall, it would seem that the different measures have varying usefulness in the study of skill acquisition and it is therefore advisable to study them separately.     

Olfactory dysfunction in man: anatomical and behavioral aspects

We reviewed studies examining the olfaction of patients with brain damage for the purpose of discerning correlations between disordered structure and function. Patient samples included those with neurological disorders and neurosurgical interventions and recording of spontaneous or elicited neuronal activity. Brain areas involved in olfaction include the olfactory bulbs, the orbitofrontal and medial temporal cortices, the thalamus, and the amygdala. Despite recent advances in olfactory anatomy, understanding of how these structures are related to olfactory detection, discrimination, and recognition continues to be limited. Inadequate localization of brain lesions and lack of comprehensive behavioral assessment have thus far prevented a detailed account of the organization of olfaction in the human brain.     

Does reticence mean just talking less? Qualitative differences in the language of talkative and reticent preschoolers

In our recent efforts to understand individual variation in the language acquisition process, the existence and nature of the communicative behaviors that differentiate reticent from talkative children have been virtually ignored. This study provides a preliminary investigation of this issue by analyzing the spontaneous language produced by four children who varied in degree of talkativeness in free-play dyadic interactions with a total of 28 different adults. Both structural complexity and discourse features analyses of the children's language revealed significant, difference between the talkative and reticent children. A further question considered the influence of the children's degree of talkativeness on their adult conversational partners. While the structural complexity of the adults' language was not influenced by child talkativeness, several discourse parameters did reveal significant adjustments. Implications for the concept of reticence and for language acquisition theory are explored.     

Conditioning of counter-empathetic emotional responses

The present research tested the hypothesis that the quality of an observer's vicarious emotional response, as measured by autonomic, expressive, and self-report indexes, is a function of the observer's conditioning history with particular facial expressive displays of emotion. It was predicted that conditions of congruence (Symmetry) between the affective expression of a model and the outcome (shock or reward) presented to an observer would enhance initial empathetic responses, but that conditions of incongruence (Asymmetry) between the model's displays and observer's outcomes would lead to counter-empathetic responses. These changes in the quality of observers' vicarious emotional responses should generalize to a test phase when no rewards or punishments are presented to observers. The results for all measures were consistent and indicate that asymmetric conditioning modified the initial empathetic responses of observers to either counter-empathetic responses or indifference. On the other hand, symmetric conditioning enhanced observers' initial empathetic responses. These effects were evident in the test phase when no reinforcements were administered to the subject. The results are consistent with the theoretical assumption that facial expressions of emotion can acquire meaning and hedonic valence because of their predictive significance and thus can function as conditioned stimuli capable of evoking empathetic and counter-empathetic emotional responses.     

Psychophysiological aspects of systematic desensitization: some outstanding issues

Nine psychophysiological propositions generated by systematic desensitization theory were examined in the light of recent research. Four propositions were substantially confirmed, four partially confirmed and one was not confirmed. Facts reviewed did no agree with the prediction from desensitization theory that less threatening stimuli decondition faster than more threatening stimuli. With the exception noted above, desensitization theory was generally supported. A scheme for distinguishing four types of autonomic response change (habituation, reciprocal inhibition, counterconditioning and extinction) was presented.