Organizational trust among job seekers: The role of information‐seeking and reciprocation wariness

This study explores job seekers’ information‐seeking and pre‐hire trust, and the role of reciprocation wariness in the development of pre‐hire trust. Individuals seeking a job with a technology company (N = 192) reported their perceptions of the organization’s website usability and perceived similarity to their recruiter, organizational trustworthiness and trust, and intent to accept a job offer. Wariness moderated the relationship between website usability perceptions and trustworthiness. Unexpectedly, the interaction was in the opposite direction of what we predicted. In addition, job seekers’ perceived similarity to their recruiter related to trustworthiness, and trust related to intent to accept a job offer. Our findings suggest that to some extent, recruiting organizations can encourage trust perceptions in the pre‐hire context.     

Accountability Forces in Performance Appraisal: Effects of Self-Appraisal Information, Normative Information, and Task Performance

This study investigated the effects of self-appraisal information, normative information, and task performance on performance appraisal ratings. Participants rated a fictitious subordinate's performance on a clerical task (which was either very good or moderately poor) subsequent to receiving self-assessment information (high or low) and normative information (present or absent). Self-appraisals affected performance ratings for poor performers but not for good performers, suggesting that judges are more motivated to please ratees than they are merely to adopt the subordinate's view of their own performance. Furthermore, objective normative information had greater influence than self-appraisals on performance ratings, suggesting that information source credibility has more influence than felt accountability on performance appraisals. Implications of the findings for organizations were discussed.     

Effects of Stimulant Medication Treatment on Mothers' and Children's Attributions for the Behavior of Children with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder

Participants were 55 children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) who were receiving ongoing treatment with stimulant medications and their mothers, and 31 children with ADHD who were beginning stimulant medication and their mothers. Mothers and children offered attributions for child behaviors that occurred when the child was medicated and not medicated. Mothers rated child compliance and prosocial behavior as more global and stable when the child was medicated and rated noncompliance, ADHD symptoms, and oppositional behavior as more externally caused, less global and stable, but more controllable by the child when the child was medicated. Children rated both their compliance and noncompliance as more controllable in the medicated condition. On a forced-choice measure, both mothers and children selected ability, effort, and task attributions for compliance more in the not-medicated condition, and pill-taking attributions more in the medicated condition. This was reversed for noncompliance, which was attributed more to effort, task, or ability in the medicated condition and more to not taking a pill in the not-medicated condition. The potential risks and benefits for parent–child interactions and children's self-perceptions of these medication-related differences in attributions are discussed.     

Neural mechanisms of affective interference in schizotypy

Negatively valenced stimuli foster cognitive impairment in schizotypy and schizophrenia. To identify relevant brain mechanisms, the authors had 16 positive-schizotypy and 16 control participants perform an emotional Stroop task, judging the ink color of negative and neutral words during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of regional brain activity. Schizotypy individuals showed increased right and decreased left activity in dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, indicating a deficit in maintenance of attentional set in the presence of negative emotional distractors. They also showed abnormal activity in ventral limbic areas, including decreased activity in nucleus accumbens and increased activity in hippocampus and amygdala, a circuit involved in the integration of cognitive and affective processes. These results indicate that aspects of emotion-cognition processes and the brain mechanisms that implement them are similar in schizotypy and schizophrenia.     

The relationship between employee job change and job satisfaction: the honeymoon-hangover effect

Recent research suggests that the turnover process is not fully captured by the traditional sequential model relating job dissatisfaction to subsequent turnover. The present study contributes to this research by modeling within-individual job satisfaction as a function of job change patterns to determine if individual work attitudes change systematically with the temporal turnover process. Specifically, the authors hypothesized that low satisfaction would precede a voluntary job change, with an increase in job satisfaction immediately following a job change (the honeymoon effect), followed by a decline in job satisfaction (the hangover effect). Though this pattern is suggested in the literature, no prior research has integrated and tested this complete temporal model within individuals. Findings based on a sample of managers supported the proposed honeymoon-hangover effect.     

Audio-visual simultaneity judgments

The relative spatiotemporal correspondence between sensory events affects multisensory integration across a variety of species; integration is maximal when stimuli in different sensory modalities are presented from approximately the same position at about the same time. In the present study, we investigated the influence of spatial and temporal factors on audio-visual simultaneity perception in humans. Participants made unspeeded simultaneous versus successive discrimination responses to pairs of auditory and visual stimuli presented at varying stimulus onset asynchronies from either the same or different spatial positions using either the method of constant stimuli (Experiments 1 and 2) or psychophysical staircases (Experiment 3). The participants in all three experiments were more likely to report the stimuli as being simultaneous when they originated from the same spatial position than when they came from different positions, demonstrating that the apparent perception of multisensory simultaneity is dependent on the relative spatial position from which stimuli are presented.     

Intervention Groups for Adolescents With Conduct Problems: Is Aggregation Harmful or Helpful?

Past research has suggested that the aggregation of deviant peers during treatment may cause harmful effects (T. J. Dishion, J. McCord, & F. Poulin, 1999). This study compared the effectiveness of problem-solving skills training groups in which all members had conduct problems (pure group condition) with groups that consisted of adolescents with and without behavior problems (mixed group condition). Participants were 139 sixth- and seventh-graders (mean age = 12.7; 63% male; 55% White) enrolled at public middle schools. Pre-, post-, and 6-month follow-up data were collected, along with intervention process variables. Results showed that, contrary to the deviancy training hypothesis, adolescents in the pure-group condition engaged in more adaptive in-session behavior and received lower scores on the parent and teacher ratings of externalizing behavior at postintervention than those in the mixed-group condition. Mediation analyses showed that the deviancy training that occurred in the mixed-group condition accounted for their worse postintervention scores, findings consistent with the deviancy training hypothesis.     

To stay or to go, to speak or stay silent, to act or not to act: moral distress as experienced by psychologists

The moral distress of psychologists working in psychiatric and mental health care settings was explored in an interdisciplinary, hermeneutic phenomenological study situated at the University of Alberta, Canada. Moral distress is the state experienced when moral choices and actions are thwarted by constraints. Psychologists described specific incidents in which they felt their integrity had been compromised by such factors as institutional and interinstitutional demands, team conflicts, and interdisciplinary disputes. They described dealing with the resulting moral distress by such means as silence, taking a stance, acting secretively, sustaining themselves through work with clients, seeking support from colleagues, and exiting. Recognizing moral distress can lead to a significant shift in the way we perceive moral choices and understand the moral context of practice.     

Partial Knowledge of Word Meanings: Thematic and Taxonomic Representations

The type of information (taxonomic or thematic) available at different levels of knowledge was investigated. Following extensive norming to identify taxonomic and thematic associates of low-frequency nouns, participants determined if taxonomic or thematic associates were meaningfully related to target words at three levels of knowledge: target words they correctly defined (known), recognized as familiar (frontier), or mistakenly denied as part of the language (unknown). In another experiment, participants reported which type of relationship (taxonomic or thematic) was preferred. Results indicated that both types of information were available at all levels of knowledge. However, accuracy and preference were greater for taxonomic associates across word levels. A differential increase in available thematic information relative to taxonomic information was found. Implications for the acquisition and representation of word meanings are discussed.