Reinforcement Without Awareness: I. Voice Level

Although some studies have reported that reinforcement can strengthen people's behaviour without their awareness, most studies that have incorporated adequate procedures for assessing awareness have been unsuccessful. Using rigorous procedures, we report two studies designed to provide more scope for learning without awareness by making the reinforcement contingency as unobtrusive as possible. Subjects were told that the experiment was on ESP, and that they were to say which of two words the experimenter was thinking about. In fact, reinforcement was contingent on the loudness of the subject's voice when responding. Even though subjects reported no awareness of a relationship between trial outcomes and their behaviour, the probability of the reinforced responses increased significantly over trials in both experiments. These results support the view that reinforcement can occur without awareness.     

A motivated information processing perspective on the antecedents of empowering leadership

Empowering leadership is an important influence on team effectiveness. This makes the question of what the antecedents of team empowering leadership are an important issue to consider. To address this question, we propose a motivated information processing perspective that holds that engaging in empowering leadership is based on social information processing, and that there are individual differences in how elaborate that information processing is. We argue that a key consideration in shifting control from the leader to the team is the extent to which empowering leadership is driven by leaders’ consideration of their trust in the team (i.e., an instance of social information processing), and that leader need for closure (a trait capturing the disposition to carefully consider decisions and actions) moderates the relationship between leader trust in team and empowering leadership. A survey of N = 156 work teams supported these hypotheses.     

Parenting Surviving Children After the Death of a Child from Cancer: An Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis

Journal of Child and Family Studies - The death of a child is a tragic, devastating event with enormous emotional and relational impact on the family unit. Parental changes are significant,...     

Psychologists’ Leadership Roles and Leadership Training Needs in Academic Health Centers

Journal of Clinical Psychology in Medical Settings - Psychologists are increasingly called upon to become more involved in academic health centers (AHCs) as leaders across a range of leadership...     

Socioeconomic Status and Psychopathic Traits in a Community Sample of Youth

The current study aims to address socioeconomic status (SES) as a moderating variable between psychopathic traits and conduct problems in a sample of 2432 Dutch adolescents (M_age?=?14.50 years, SD?=?1.67, 56% male). Both family and neighborhood SES were measured, with income as a proxy for the level of SES. There were small but significant positive correlations between the behavioral and interpersonal dimensions of psychopathy and family SES, a small but significant negative correlation between the affective dimension and neighborhood SES, and a small and significant positive correlation between neighborhood SES and the behavioral dimension of psychopathy. Results further showed that the relations between youth psychopathic traits were moderated by neither family SES nor neighborhood SES. The results suggest that the relations between psychopathic traits and conduct problems are equally strong for lower and higher SES youth. Taken together, these findings warrant the conclusions that SES does not play a role as a moderator in the relation between psychopathy and conduct problems.     

An Evaluation of Resurgence During Functional Communication Training

The Psychological Record - Three children who displayed destructive behavior maintained by negative reinforcement received functional communication training (FCT). During FCT, the children were...