Organizational reward systems: Implications for climate

This study investigated the role of systematically different organizational reward structures upon individual perceptions of the reward climate. Nurses in a naval hospital worked for the same supervisors but were subject to either tenure-contingent (N=73) or behavior-contingent (N=50) reward systems. No differences in perceived reward climate were found between the two groups. In the tenure-contingent group, job attitudes reflected individual characteristics rather than perceived climate. The opposite relationship was found for the behavior-contingent group.Support for this research was provided under Office of Naval Research Contract RR942-08-01 NR 170-915. Opinions expressed are those of the author. No endorsement by the Department of the Navy has been given, nor should it be inferred. Portions of the study were conducted while the author was at the Naval Health Research Center in San Diego. The author would like to thank R. J. Bullock, Mark C. Butler, L. R. James, and R. D. Pritchard for their helpful comments and assistance.     

Some effects of rhythmic context on melody recognition

The effects of rhythmic context on the ability of listeners to recognize slightly altered versions of 10-tone melodies were examined in three experiments. Listeners judged the melodic equivalence of two auditory patterns when their rhythms were either the same or different. Rhythmic variations produced large effects on a bias measure, indicating that listeners judged melodies to be alike if their rhythms were identical. However, neither rhythm nor pattern rate affected discriminability measures in the first study, in which rhythm was treated as a within subjects variable. The other two studies examined rhythmic context as a between subjects variable. In these, significant effects of temporal uncertainty due to the number and type of rhythms involved in a block of trials, as well as their assignment to standard and comparison melodies on a given trial, were apparent on both discriminability and bias measures. Results were interpreted in terms of the effect of temporal context on the rhythmic targeting of attention.     

Rational-emotive therapy and the reduction of interpersonal anxiety in junior high school students

This study evaluated the effectiveness of rational-emotive therapy and rational-emotive imagery. Fifty-nine junior high school students who volunteered to participate in treatment for interpersonal anxiety were randomly assigned to rational-emotive therapy without imagery (RET), rational-emotive therapy with imagery (REI), relationship-oriented counseling (ROC), and waiting-list control (WLC) groups. Groups met for seven 50-minute treatment sessions during a three-week period. Assessments were conducted at pretreatment, posttreatment, and three-week follow-up. Both self-report and sociometric measures were used to evaluate treatment outcome. At postassessment, both the RET and REI groups were rated on sociometric measures as significantly less interpersonally anxious than the WLC group. Mean scores favored the RET and REI groups, but no significant differences between these groups and the ROC group were obtained. The self-report measure did not significantly differentiate between groups, but the REI group demonstrated significant pre- to follow-up changes. Both the RET and REI groups yielded greater reductions in irrational thinking than did the ROC and WLC groups. In addition, the pattern of the results supported the use of rational-emotive imagery as a component of rational-emotive therapy. The practical implications of these findings are discussed.     

Probability Distortions and Outcome Desirability: Experimental Verification of Medical Folklore1

A belief common among medical personnel is that in conveying diagnoses or prognoses to patients, it is always best to emphasize the positive. In order to see if emphasis on the positive does make a difference in one's expectation of the more desirable of two alternative outcomes actually occurring, this laboratory experiment was conducted. College students were led to believe they had a low, moderate, or high probability of being assigned to one of two tasks, which differed in desirability. For some students the instructions focused on the probability of being assigned to the desirable task, whereas for others the instructions focused on the probability of being assigned to the undesirable. The two probabilities were always complementary; that is, the probability of being assigned to the desirable task was equal to one minus the probability of being assigned to the undesirable task. Following an interpolated activity, each subject's expectation of being assigned to the desirable or undesirable task was measured. Across all probability levels, subjects for whom the instructions had focused on the probability of being assigned to the desirable task viewed that assignment as significantly more likely than did subjects for whom the instructions had focused on the complementary probability of being assigned to the undesirable task. The implications of this for communicating with patients, for preventive medicine, and for coping with serious illness are briefly discussed.     

The role of central and peripheral vision in perceiving the direction of self-motion

Three experiments were performed to examine the role that central and peripheral vision play in the perception of the direction of translational self-motion, or heading, from optical flow. When the focus of radial outflow was in central vision, heading accuracy was slightly higher with central circular displays (10°–25° diameter) than with peripheral annular displays (40° diameter), indicating that central vision is somewhat more sensitive to this information. Performance dropped rapidly as the eccentricity of the focus of outflow increased, indicating that the periphery does not accurately extract radial flow patterns. Together with recent research on vection and postural adjustments, these results contradict theperipheral dominance hypothesis that peripheral vision is specialized for perception of self-motion. We propose afunctional sensitivity hypothesis—that. self-motion is perceived on the basis of optical information rather than the retinal locus of stimulation, but that central and peripheral vision are differentially sensitive to the information characteristic of each retinal region.     

Exploring self-forgiveness

This article presents the results of a phenomenological study of the experience of self-forgiveness. On the basis of in-depth interviews with seven subjects, self-forgiveness is described not as an achievement but rather as a gift where one moves from estrangement and brokenness to a sense of at-homeness.This article is based in part on a paper presented at the Eighth International Human Science Research Conference at the University of Aarhus, Denmark, in August 1989. The authors thank their colleagues Carolyn Grissom and Jodi Kelly for their helpful suggestions.     

Intensity and direction as dimensions of competitive state anxiety and relationships with competitiveness.

This study examined differences in intensity and direction of symptoms of competitive state anxiety in high and low competitive subjects from the sports of rugby union, basketball, soccer, and field hockey. The 69 men were dichotomized via a median-split into high and low competitive groups based on their scores on the Sport Orientation Questionnaire. All subjects completed a modified version of the Competitive State Anxiety Inventory-2 30 minutes prior to competition. This inventory included the original intensity scale plus a direction scale on which subjects rated the extent the experienced intensity of each symptom was either facilitative or debilitative to subsequent performance. There were no significant group differences on intensity of cognitive anxiety or of somatic anxiety or on direction of somatic anxiety; however, the highly competitive group of 34 subjects reported their anxiety as more facilitative and less debilitative than the low competitive group (n = 35). This supports the proposal that sports performers' directional perceptions of their anxiety symptoms may provide further understanding of the competitive state-anxiety response.