Profiles of commitment in standard and fixed-term employment arrangements: Implications for work outcomes

This paper develops and tests a framework for understanding the relative importance and predictive efficacy of commitment to one’s profession, organization, supervisor and job in both standard and fixed-term employment arrangements. Drawing from the commitment and employment arrangement literatures, we test a set of hypotheses identifying distinct patterns of commitments (i.e., commitment profiles) to these four targets that should yield desired work-related outcomes in standard and fixed-term employment arrangements. We test our hypotheses using latent profile analysis on data collected from two Finnish universities (N1 = 235, N2 = 233). A high macro profile, characterized by high commitment to profession, organization and job, and moderate commitment to supervisor, emerged for employees in standard employment relationships, and this profile was associated with significantly higher positive work behaviours and work effort and lower turnover intentions than the other profiles. For employees with fixed-term employment contracts, a high cosmopolitan profile emerged, characterized by high commitment to the profession and job and low commitment to the organization and supervisor. For these employees, this profile was associated with positive work behaviours and work effort comparable to the high macro profile. Implications for theory, research and practice are discussed.     

Self-affirmation and affective forecasting: Affirmation reduces the anticipated impact of negative events

When forecasting how they will feel in the future, people overestimate the impact that imagined negative events will have on their affective states, partly because they underestimate their own psychological resiliency. Because self-affirmation enhances resiliency, two studies examined whether self-affirmation prior to forecasting reduces the extremity of affective forecasts. Participants in self-affirmation conditions completed a values scale or wrote an essay asserting their most important value, whereas participants in the no-affirmation condition asserted a relatively unimportant value. Participants then predicted their affective reactions to a negative or positive imagined event. In both studies, self-affirmation reduced the unpleasant affect expected to result from a negative event, but had no impact on affective forecasts for a positive event. This pattern was mediated by participants’ cognitive appraisals of the imagined event, but not by differential focus on that event. Results are consistent with self-affirmation activating or enhancing psychological resiliency to counteract immune neglect during affective forecasting of a negative event.     

Information about foregone rewards impedes dynamic decision-making in older adults

“Making an informed decision” implies that more information leads to better decisions, yet it may be the case that additional information biases decisions in a systematic and sometimes detrimental manner. In the present study, we examined the effect of additional information on older adults’ decision-making using a task for which available rewards were dependent on the participant’s recent pattern of choices. The optimal strategy was to forego the immediately rewarding option in favor of the option that yielded larger delayed reward. We found that providing information about true foregone rewards – the reward that would have been received had the participant chosen the other option – significantly reduced older adults’ decision-making performance. However, false foregone rewards – foregone rewards manufactured to make the long-term option appear more immediately rewarding – led older adults to perform at a level equal to younger adults. We conclude that providing information about foregone rewards biases older adults toward immediate rewards at a greater rate than younger adults, leading to poorer older adult performance when immediate rewards and long-term rewards conflict, but intact performance when immediate rewards and long-term rewards appear to align.     

Ages of Mankind

As we move through life in the world, the quality of our participation changes. Initially, as newborns, we are not even aware of a difference between ourselves and everything, everyone else. In the small domestic world (“home”), we experience parental care and accept being taught how to behave, how to be. This process continues into school years and the adjustments that allow life with our peers. Ultimately, in adolescence there is felt a beginning need for independence of action and feeling. With adulthood, making a life in the bigger world requires the force of will against obstacles and for goals. At midlife, there comes another gradual shift to the question of meaning in life and of old age and death. All these changes reflect a procession of ways in which the ego or consciousness relates to inner and outer worlds.     

Personal Images of the Sacred

Jung’s works on religion focus on images of the divine, which people experience in various ways. Here, we consider a variety of such numinous experiences, ranging from childhood dreams to experiences of Christian saints and of 20th-century cult leaders, all of which can be described as images of God in the human psyche.     

“When Righteousness and Bliss Can Kiss”: Working with Our Inner Opposites

The problem of conflicting energies and desires is basic to human beings. Starting with earliest childhood, whenever some instinctual impulses and feelings are forbidden or unacceptable, they become unconscious. Thus, a part of the personality is lost to us, expressed only in projection onto others. Gaining psychological wholeness then requires the hard work of becoming conscious of these unconscious parts of oneself, and of accepting them.     

‘Resacralising’ secular space: new churches in a northern city, 1980–2012

This article explores the way new church congregations in a city in northern England, the city of York, are using religious and non-religious spaces in which to meet. These new congregations show a diverse approach to the material realm and especially to sacred space. Some use existing church buildings, some build their own structures. But many use a range of buildings: schools, community centres, a pub or the garage of a private house. An examination of these structures offers insights into ways in which faith engages with wider social realities and into contemporary religious history. This article will focus primarily on Britain, but casts an eye to developments elsewhere.     

Preschool children's control of action outcomes

Naturalistic goal‐directed behaviours require the engagement and maintenance of appropriate levels of cognitive control over relatively extended intervals of time. In two experiments, we examined preschool children's abilities to maintain top‐down control throughout the course of a sequential task. Both 3‐ and 5‐year‐olds demonstrated good abilities to access goals at the lowest level of the representational hierarchy. However, only 5‐year‐olds consistently aligned their response choices with goals at superordinate levels. These findings suggest that the ability to maintain top‐down control and adjust behavioural responses according to goals at multiple levels of abstraction undergoes a marked improvement throughout the preschool period. Results are discussed in relation to current accounts of cognitive control and the monitoring of conflict in sequential action.