Orientation categories used in guidance of attention in visual search can differ in strength

We investigated orientation categories in the guidance of attention in visual search. In the first two experiments, participants had a limited amount of time to find a target line among distractors lines. We systematically varied the orientation of the target and the angular difference between the target and distractors. We find vertical, horizontal, and 45° targets require the least target/distractor angular difference to be found reliably and that the rate at which increases in target/distractor difference decrease search difficulty to be independent of target identity. Unexpectedly, even when the angular difference between the target and distractors was large, search performance was never optimal when the target orientation was 45°. A third experiment investigates this unexpected finding by correlating target/distractor difference and error rate with performance on tasks that measure a specific perceptual or cognitive ability. We find that the elevated error rate is correlated with performance on stimulus recognition and identification tasks, while the amount of target/distractor difference needed to detect the target reliably is correlated with performance on a stimulus reproduction task. We conclude that the target/distractor difference reveals the number of orientation categories in visual search, and, accordingly, that there are four such categories: two strong ones centred on 0° and 90° and two weak ones centred on 45° and 135°.     

Child Characteristics,Parent Education and Depressive Symptoms,and Marital Conflict Predicting Trajectories of Parenting Behavior from Childhood Through Early Adolescence in Taiwan

The study examined how child and parent characteristics, and contextual sources of stress, such as marital conflict predict initial status and trajectories of parent involvement, support, and harsh control, over a 4‐year period in families in Taiwan (n = 4,754). Based on Belsky's (1984) ecological model of parenting, three domains predicting parenting were tested, child characteristics (age cohort and gender), father and mother characteristics (education and depressive symptoms), and contextual sources of stress (marital conflict). The study followed two cohorts of children; the younger cohort was followed from first to fourth grade and the older cohort from fourth to seventh grade. Initially, fourth graders reported more parental involvement, support, and harsh control than first graders. However, involvement, support, and harsh control decreased across the 4 years for the older cohort as they transitioned to early adolescence. In the first year, girls reported more parental involvement and support and less harsh control than boys. Across the 4 years, involvement and support increased, and harsh control decreased for boys; whereas involvement stayed the same, support slightly decreased, and harsh control slightly increased for girls. Children whose parents were more educated reported more parent involvement, support, and harsh control in the first year. Children whose fathers were chronically depressed and whose parents were experiencing marital conflict reported decreasing parent involvement and support over the years.     

Testing the Situationism Scale in Europe: Scale validation,self‐regulation and regional differences

The term situationism refers to an individual's belief about the importance of a behaviour's context. This study tested whether the degree of situationism expressed by individuals in various regions of Europe was consistent with self‐regulation and cross‐cultural theories. The English version of a Situationism Scale (measuring beliefs about the relation between the environment and one's own behaviour) was translated into five additional languages: Dutch, German, Hungarian, Italian and Slovenian. Young adults (N = 1106, M_Age = 22.9 years, 79% female) across Europe responded to one of the six language versions of the scale as part of a larger survey. Results indicated that: new language versions were psychometrically valid; there was a positive relation between situationism and the use of situation‐control strategies; and situationism was higher for individuals from regions that are Eastern European and relatively more interdependent, compared with individuals from regions that are Western European and relatively less interdependent. As the first evaluation of the Situationism Scale outside America, this study supports the Scale's validity and suggests not only may some effects of situationism be universal, but between‐ and within‐culture differences in situationism exist. Overall, when making judgments and decisions about the self, cultural background and individual differences in situationism may come into play.     

Gender and leadership aspiration: Interpersonal and collective elements of cooperative climate differentially influence women and men

Female leaders remain a minority. Because leadership aspiration is a predictor of advancement, understanding stimulating conditions is important. A neglected perspective is the impact of organizational climate. We propose that cooperative climate can engender individuals’ motivation to contribute to the organization through leadership, and that leadership aspiration of women and men is differentially sensitive to interpersonal and collective aspects of cooperative climate. We argue that women are more disposed toward relational self‐construal and men toward collective self‐construal, and hence women's leadership aspiration is more influenced by the interpersonal element of cooperative climate whereas men's leadership aspiration by the collective element of cooperative climate. Results of a survey of N = 404 employed men and women supported both hypotheses.     

So close and yet so far away: A psychological distance account of the effectiveness of leader appeals

Contradictory recommendations persist on how leaders best communicate goals to followers. Whereas scholars of visionary leadership recommend emphasizing the desirability of preferred end‐states, scholars of goal setting argue that the perceived feasibility of a goal determines motivation. This paper proposes and tests a synthesis based on construal level theory. Under relatively high (i.e., abstract) levels of construal, such as when leader–follower distance is relatively large, leader appeals that emphasize desirability (i.e., desirable appeals) are more likely to be effective than appeals that emphasize feasibility (i.e., feasible appeals). Under relatively low (i.e., concrete) levels of construal, such as when leader–follower distance is relatively small, feasible appeals are more likely to be effective. Two experimental studies in two different countries provide support for our predictions.     

The Interplay of Implicit Causality,Structural Heuristics,and Anaphor Type in Ambiguous Pronoun Resolution

Two visual-world eye-tracking experiments investigating pronoun resolution in Finnish examined the time course of implicit causality information relative to both grammatical role and order-of-mention information. Experiment 1 showed an effect of implicit causality that appeared at the same time as the first-mention preference. Furthermore, when we counterbalanced the semantic roles of the verbs, we found no effect of grammatical role, suggesting the standard observed subject preference has a large semantic component. Experiment 2 showed that both the personal pronoun hän and the demonstrative tämä preferred the antecedent consistent with the implicit causality bias; tämä was not interpreted as referring to the semantically non-prominent entity. In contrast, structural prominence affected hän and tämä differently: we found a first-mention preference for hän, but a second-mention preference for tämä. The results suggest that semantic implicit causality information has an immediate effect on pronoun resolution and its use is not delayed relative to order-of-mention information. Furthermore, they show that order-of-mention differentially affects different types of anaphoric expressions, but semantic information has the same effect.     

Bridging the Dialectic: Diversity,Psychological Sense of Community,and Inclusion

Although, there are many times when P/SOC and diversity appear in opposition, I argue that this conflict is not inherent to the concepts or their joint value, but to social contexts in which they are enacted in real life. The primary values of community psychology—building and supporting positive communities, social change, and social justice within a framework that recognizes the centrality of diversity, culture, inclusion, power, and privilege—actually bind diversity and community together. Thus, we can bridge this seeming dialectic through deeper reflection about the real and intended meaning, operationalization, and application of these two terms, and a reliance on the central values of our field.