Sources of motivation, interpersonal conflict management styles, and leadership effectiveness: a structural model

126 leaders and 624 employees were sampled to test the relationship between sources of motivation and conflict management styles of leaders and how these variables influence effectiveness of leadership. Five sources of motivation measured by the Motivation Sources Inventory were tested-intrinsic process, instrumental, self-concept external, self-concept internal, and goal internalization. These sources of work motivation were associated with Rahim's modes of interpersonal conflict management-dominating, avoiding, obliging, complying, and integrating-and to perceived leadership effectiveness. A structural equation model tested leaders' conflict management styles and leadership effectiveness based upon different sources of work motivation. The model explained variance for obliging (65%), dominating (79%), avoiding (76%), and compromising (68%), but explained little variance for integrating (7%). The model explained only 28% of the variance in leader effectiveness.     

Goal orientation, motivational climate, and dispositional flow of high school students engaged in extracurricular physical activity

The purpose of this study was to examine the role of goal orientation, motivational climate, and dispositional flow in physical education lessons on extracurricular involvement in physical activity. Questionnaires were administered to 1,103 (792 athletes; 311 nonathletes) secondary school students (M age = 14.3 yr., SD = 0.7). Analysis showed significant mean differences between groups on goal orientation and dispositional flow in physical education lessons, but none for perception of motivational climate. These findings suggest that dispositional variables are related to extracurricular involvement in physical activity.     

Eighteen month test-retest stability of the youth self report in a sample of Catalonian adolescents

The aim of this study is to assess the test-retest stability of the Spanish version of Youth Self Report after 18 mo. for a sample of 357 Catalonian high school students (158 boys and 199 girls). At Time 2 the girls' scores increased on Delinquent and Aggressive Behavior scales and, therefore on Externalizing scores. At Time 2 the boys' scores increased on Attention Problems and Delinquent Behavior and decreased on Anxious/Depressed, Social Problems, and Internalizing scales. Significant differences in the remaining scales were not observed. The test-retest intraclass correlations for the broad-band scales ranged between .62 (Internalizing) and .68 (Externalizing) and for the narrow-band scales between .37 and .67. The correlations for girls and boys were similar but slightly higher for girls on Anxious/Depressed and Thought Problems.     

Understanding the object benefit in visual short-term memory: the roles of feature proximity and connectedness

Past research has identified visual objects as the units of information processing in visual short-term memory (VSTM) and has shown that two features from the same object can be remembered in VSTM as well (or almost as well) as one feature of that object and are much better remembered than the same two features from two spatially separated objects. It is not clear, however, what drives this object benefit in VSTM. Is it the shared spatial location (proximity), the connectedness among features of an object, or both? In six change detection experiments, both location/proximity and connectedness were found to be crucial in determining the magnitude of the object benefit in VSTM. Together, these results indicate that location/proximity and connectedness are essential elements in defining a coherent visual object representation in VSTM.     

Assigning Grammatical Gender During Word Production

The present study was designed to examine the processes by which grammatical gender is assigned during word production. French words varied in strength of sublexical cues, based on whether the word ending was typical for one gender rather than neutral about gender, and lexical cues, derived from the associated definite article being uninformative about gender for words beginning with a vowel, but informative for words beginning with a consonant. In Experiment 1, when native French speakers classified the gender of mentally evoked names of pictures, no effects of these cues were obtained. Experiment 2 used an improved methodology, with participants classifying the gender of words translated from English. English-speaking learners of French were influenced strongly by lexical and sublexical cues, while French speakers showed a weaker influence. However, for both speaker groups, words whose gender was classified slowly during recognition were also classified slowly during production, and error rates were similarly correlated across tasks. The conclusion was that gender is not equally available for all words once the associated “lemma” is accessed. Current models of language production may have to incorporate mechanisms allowing differential speed of access to gender information depending on a word’s formal properties.     

The development of executive functioning and theory of mind. A comparison of Chinese and U.S. preschoolers

Preschoolers' theory-of-mind development follows a similar age trajectory across many cultures. To determine whether these similarities are related to similar underlying ontogenetic processes, we examined whether the relation between theory of mind and executive function commonly found among U.S. preschoolers is also present among Chinese preschoolers. Preschoolers from Beijing, China (N= 109), were administered theory-of-mind and executive-functioning tasks, and their performance was compared with that of a previously studied sample of U.S. preschoolers (N= 107). The Chinese preschoolers outperformed their U.S. counterparts on all measures of executive functioning, but were not similarly advanced in theory-of-mind reasoning. Nonetheless, individual differences in executive functioning predicted theory of mind for children in both cultures. Thus, the relation between executive functioning and theory of mind is robust across two disparate cultures. These findings shed light on why executive functioning is important for theory-of-mind development.     

Trait emotional intelligence profiles of students from different university faculties

This study investigated the trait emotional intelligence (trait EI or trait emotional self‐efficacy) profiles of 512 students from five university faculties: technical studies, natural sciences, social sciences, arts, and humanities. Using the Trait Emotional Intelligence Questionnaire, it was hypothesised that (a) social sciences would score higher than technical studies in Emotionality, (b) arts would score higher than technical studies in Emotionality, (c) arts would score lower than technical studies in Self‐control, and (d) there would be an interaction between gender and faculty, whereby female students would score higher than male students within the social sciences only. Several other exploratory comparisons were also performed. Results supported hypotheses (a), (b), and (d), but not hypothesis (c), although the differences were in the predicted direction.     

Sustained vs. transient cognitive control: Evidence of a behavioral dissociation

This study assessed whether two well known effects associated with cognitive control, conflict adaptation (the Gratton effect) and conflict context (proportion congruent effects), reflect a single common or separate control systems. To test this we examined if these two effects generalized from one kind of conflict to another by using a combined-conflict paradigm (involving the Simon and Spatial Stroop tasks) and manipulating the proportion of congruent to incongruent trials for one conflict (Simon) but not the other (Spatial Stroop). We found that conflict adaptation effects did not generalize, but the effect of conflict context did. This contrasting pattern of results strongly suggests the existence of two separate attentional control systems, one transient and responsible of online regulation of performance (conflict adaptation), the other sustained and responsible for conflict context effects.