Reuse and Recycle: The Development of Adaptive Expertise,Routine Expertise,and Novelty in a Large Research Team

Combining innovation and efficiency is ideal in many organizational settings. Adaptive expertise represents a cognitive explanation of how individuals and teams can learn to achieve simultaneous innovation and efficiency. In 2004, scientists led twin rovers on Mars in the search for historical water. The science team experienced a remarkable increase in efficiency, adapting with flexibility to unexpected events and dynamic, dwindling resources. After discussing the conceptual differences between adaptive expertise and related team learning and innovation concepts, we examine longitudinal behavioral data on novelty, routine and adaptive expertise. Sequential time series ARIMA analyses reveal that novelty fluctuated randomly, but both routine and adaptive expertise significantly increased over time. In addition, novelty, routine expertise, and adaptive expertise did not significantly predict each other directly or at a lag, suggesting that these are indeed three distinct constructs. Implications for theory and research on efficiency and innovation are discussed. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Psychological care demand in clinical practice: treatment and results

With the aim of describing the usual clinical context as opposed to the academic or research context, the characteristics of patients and psychological treatments applied in a sample of 856 patients from the Clinic of Psychology of the Complutense University is analyzed. The disorders that require attention, the characteristics of the therapists and their interventions are identified. Out of the total patients, 24.3% withdrew from treatment; 68.3% of the patients who started treatment completed it with therapeutic success. 83% of patients were assessed in 4 sessions or fewer (median=4). 75.3% of patients who finished the treatment received 18 or fewer treatment sessions (median=11). The generalization of the results and their implications for professional clinical practice and for training clinical psychologists are discussed.     

Spiritual Transcendence and Mental Health of Psychotherapists and Religious Professionals in a Hungarian Adult Sample

In this study we examine whether components of spiritual transcendence can explain individual differences in mental health in a Hungarian adult sample (N = 583), with a special focus on the associations in two subsamples, religious professionals and psychotherapists. Using the Spiritual Transcendence Scale (STS), we found that religious professionals presented higher Prayer Fulfillment and Universality than psychotherapists; however, members of both professional groups scored higher than other professionals on these dimensions. By contrast, psychotherapists were superior to religious professionals in Connectedness. Moreover, higher Universality predicted better mental health, even after controlling for gender, age, profession, and basic personality traits. No interaction effects were found between profession and the subscales of the STS. Results suggest that the potential mental health benefits of spirituality, especially in form of a universal view of existence, are equally present in both specific professions and in the general sample, whereas the professions themselves still reflect differences both in spirituality and in well-being.     

Priming of popout: III. A short-term implicit memory system beneficial for rapid target selection

The priming of popout (PoP) (Maljkovic & Nakayama, 1994, 1996) increases the speed of attentional deployment to subsequent targets having the same feature characteristic and relative position, it lasts for approximately 5-8 trials, and is cumulative. Here we establish PoP as an example of short-term implicit memory by showing that it is qualitatively different from explicit memory. Using a post-cued recall procedure embedded in the stream of search task trials, we show that explicit memory is not selective as is PoP and is of much shorter duration. As such we argue that explicit memory is unlikely to account for the properties of PoP. In examining the decay of PoP, we find that: PoP is not evident after a 90sec delay, it does not show passive decay over much shorter intervals (1-3sec), and it gets decremented by attentional deployments to visually dissimilar stimuli, the size of the decrement being related to task difficulty. The results, taken together, suggest that PoP reflects a functionally beneficial memory system, specialized for the rapid and automatic selection of items for focal attention and saccadic eye movements.     

IDENTITIES IN HARMONY: GENDER–WORK IDENTITY INTEGRATION MODERATES FRAME SWITCHING IN COGNITIVE PROCESSING

Professional women's identity integration—the perceived compatibility between work and gender identities—plays a role in how task or relationship information is processed. Seventy female business school students were primed with either their professional or their gender identity. Business women with higher identity integration showed an assimilation effect to the primed cue. Specifically, they showed higher task orientation than relationship orientation in a recognition task when primed with their professional identity, but less so when primed with their gender identity. Business women with lower identity integration showed a contrast effect to the primed cue: Their recognition reflected a task-relationship orientation opposite to the primed cue. We discuss the implications of these findings for understanding women's performance at work.     

Subjective well-being in urban adolescents of color

Relationships among predictors and criteria of subjective well-being were examined in a sample of 151 urban adolescents of color, ages 12-15. The relative strengths of family, peer, and school-related support and esteem in predicting three measures of subjective well-being (life satisfaction, positive affect, and negative affect) were explored. Results suggested that sense of worth in one's family explained a significant amount of variance in subjective well-being variables, above and beyond the contributions of individual, school, and peer-related variables. Implications for prevention and mental health promotion with urban adolescents of color are discussed based on these findings.     

Needs and Cognition/Behavior Patterns at Work and the Big Five: An assessment of the Personality and Preference Inventory‐Normative (PAPI‐N) from the perspective of the five‐factor model

This study examined the relationship between psychological needs and cognition/behavior patterns at work as measured by the Personality and Preference Inventory – Normative (PAPI‐N) and the five‐factor model of personality as measured by the NEO Five Factor Inventory (NEO‐FFI) in a sample of 91 working adults and 71 psychology undergraduates who worked or had some work experience. Our results showed significant and theoretically congruent correlations between the PAPI‐N scales and the measures of the five‐factor model. These correlations were similar to those found using alternative instruments to measure Murray's needs. Despite the differences in the conceptual origins of the PAPI‐N and the NEO‐FFI and divergences in the aspects of personality measured by the two inventories, joint and interbattery factor analyses showed that most of the needs and cognition/behavior patterns measured by the PAPI‐N can be meaningfully organized within the framework of the five‐factor model. These results provide further empirical evidence for the validity of the five‐factor model and the PAPI‐N, although they also point out personality aspects that are not encompassed by the five‐factor model.     

The secure-base hypothesis: Global attachment, attachment to counselor, and session exploration in psychotherapy

This study explored J. Bowlby's (1988) secure-base hypothesis, which predicts that a client's secure attachment to the therapist, as well as the client's and the therapist's global attachment security, will facilitate in-session exploration. Volunteer clients (N = 59) and trainee counselors (N = 59) in short-term therapy completed the Experiences in Close Relationship Scale (K. A. Brennan, C. L. Clark, & P. R. Shaver, 1998) as a measure of adult global romantic and peer attachment orientations; the Client Attachment to Therapist Scale (B. Mallinckrodt, D. L. Gantt, & H. M. Coble, 1995) as a measure of attachment to counselor; the Working Alliance Inventory (A. O. Horvath & L. Greenberg, 1989) as a measure of working alliance; and the Session Evaluation Questionnaire-Depth Subscale (W. B. Stiles & J. S. Snow, 1984) as a measure of session depth. In line with Bowlby's hypothesis, the findings suggest that session depth is related to the client's experience of attachment security with the counselor and that counselor global attachment moderates the relationship between client global attachment and session exploration. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved).