Workplace ostracism And workplace behaviors: A moderated mediation model of perceived stress and psychological empowerment

Background and objectives: Workplace ostracism research has examined numerous underlying mechanisms to understand the link between workplace ostracism and behavioral outcomes. Ostracism has been suggested to be an interpersonal stressor; however, research has not investigated workplace ostracism from a stress perspective. Therefore, the study investigated the mediating effect of perceived stress for the relationships between workplace ostracism and helping behavior, voicing behavior, and task performance. The study also investigated the moderating effect of psychological empowerment for the relationships between perceived stress and behavioral outcomes.

Design: The study design was a three-wave self-reported questionnaire.

Method: The study sampled 225 full-time employees in South Korea and regression analyses with bootstrapping were conducted to test the moderated mediation models.

Results: The bootstrapped 95% CI around the indirect effects did not contain zero; therefore, perceived stress mediated the relationship between workplace ostracism and helping behavior (–.06), voicing behavior (–.07), and task performance (–.07). Further, the moderated mediation analyses found perceived stress mediated the relationships between workplace ostracism and behavioral outcomes only when individuals perceived low levels of psychological empowerment.

Conclusion: The findings suggest that workplace ostracism is a stressor and psychological empowerment can mitigate the negative effects of ostracism on behavioral outcomes.     

Reflecting on Participatory,Action‐Oriented Research Methods in Community Psychology: Progress,Problems, and Paths Forward

This paper provides a critical reflection on participatory action research (PAR) methods as they pertain to community psychology. Following a brief review of the fundamental aspects of PAR, key developments in the field are examined. These developments include the redefinition of the research enterprise among groups such as Indigenous and consumer/survivor communities, challenges that attend the “project” framing of PAR, academic and practice context challenges, and important domains in which PAR methods need to become more engaged (e.g., social media and disenfranchised youth). Three illustrative case studies of programs of work in the areas of youth homelessness, consumer/survivor engagement, and Indigenous research are provided to illustrate these contemporary challenges and opportunities in the field. The authors make the argument that without an effort to reconsider and redefine PAR, moving away from the stereotypical PAR “project” frame, these methods will continue to be poorly represented and underutilized in community psychology.     

Perceptual experience shapes our ability to categorize faces by national origin: A new other-race effect

People are better at recognizing own-race than other-race faces. This other-race effect has been argued to be the result of perceptual expertise, whereby face-specific perceptual mechanisms are tuned through experience. We designed new tasks to determine whether other-race effects extend to categorizing faces by national origin. We began by selecting sets of face stimuli for these tasks that are typical in appearance for each of six nations (three Caucasian, three Asian) according to people from those nations (Study 1). Caucasian and Asian participants then categorized these faces by national origin (Study 2). Own-race faces were categorized more accurately than other-race faces. In contrast, Asian American participants, with more extensive other-race experience than the first Asian group, categorized other-race faces better than own-race faces, demonstrating a reversal of the other-race effect. Therefore, other-race effects extend to the ability to categorize faces by national origin, but only if participants have greater perceptual experience with own-race, than other-race faces. Study 3 ruled out non-perceptual accounts by showing that Caucasian and Asian faces were sorted more accurately by own-race than other-race participants, even in a sorting task without any explicit labelling required. Together, our results demonstrate a new other-race effect in sensitivity to national origin of faces that is linked to perceptual expertise.     

In the grip of fear: Dissociations in attentional processing of animal fearful individuals

Using a modified attention paradigm we investigated specific attentional mechanisms in processing animal feared stimuli. In this paradigm arrays of four pictures were displayed and after its disappearance from view a probe (a letter, X or P) then followed unpredictably in the location of one of the four pictures. The results showed that discriminations of probes tended to be impeded by spider stimuli, compared to snake stimuli. This effect was potentiated by high anxiety but only for those individuals fearful of spiders, since no such effect was observed for snake fearful individuals. Moreover, the discrimination of the probes was not facilitated when presented after the feared stimuli. The implications of these findings are discussed as a function of the cognitive bias involved in specific fear.     

Central load reduces peripheral processing: Evidence from incidental memory of background speech

Is there a trade‐off between central (working memory) load and peripheral (perceptual) processing? To address this question, participants were requested to undertake an n‐back task in one of two levels of central/cognitive load (i.e., 1‐back or 2‐back) in the presence of a to‐be‐ignored story presented via headphones. Participants were told to ignore the background story, but they were given a surprise memory test of what had been said in the background story, immediately after the n‐back task was completed. Memory was poorer in the high central load (2‐back) condition in comparison with the low central load (1‐back) condition. Hence, when people compensate for higher central load, by increasing attentional engagement, peripheral processing is constrained. Moreover, participants with high working memory capacity (WMC) – with a superior ability for attentional engagement – remembered less of the background story, but only in the low central load condition. Taken together, peripheral processing – as indexed by incidental memory of background speech – is constrained when task engagement is high.     

The Wished‐For Always Wins Until the Winner Was Inevitable All Along: Motivated Reasoning and Belief Bias Regulate Emotion During Elections

How do biases affect political information processing? A variant of the Wason selection task, which tests for confirmation bias, was used to characterize how the dynamics of the recent U.S. presidential election affected how people reasoned about political information. Participants were asked to evaluate pundit‐style conditional claims like “The incumbent always wins in a year when unemployment drops” either immediately before or immediately after the 2012 presidential election. A three‐way interaction between ideology, predicted winner (whether the proposition predicted that Obama or Romney would win), and the time of test indicated complex effects of bias on reasoning. Before the election, there was partial evidence of motivated reasoning—liberals performed especially well at looking for falsifying information when the pundit's claim predicted Romney would win. After the election, once the outcome was known, there was evidence of a belief bias—people sought to falsify claims that were inconsistent with the real‐world outcome rather than their ideology. These results suggest that people seek to implicitly regulate emotion when reasoning about political predictions. Before elections, people like to think their preferred candidate will win. After elections, people like to think the winner was inevitable all along.     

Embodiment Effects and Language Comprehension in Alzheimer's Disease

It has been shown that when participants are asked to make sensibility judgments on sentences that describe a transfer of an object toward or away from their body, they are faster to respond when the response requires a movement in the same direction as the transfer described in the sentence. This phenomenon is known as the action compatibility effect (ACE). This study investigates whether the ACE exists for volunteers with Alzheimer's disease (AD), whether the ACE can facilitate language comprehension, and also whether the ACE can still be produced if the order of the two events is inverted, that is, whether overt movement can prime comprehension of transfer sentences. In Study 1, participants with AD, younger, and older adults were tested on an adaptation of the ACE Paradigm. In Study 2, the same paradigm was modified to include an arm movement that participants had to perform prior to sentence exposure on screen. In Study 1, young, older adults, and individuals with AD were faster to respond when the direction of the response movement matched the directionality implied by the sentence (ACE). In Study 2, no traditional ACE was found; participants were faster when the direction of the movement immediately preceding the sentence matched the directionality of the sentence. It was found that compatibility effects generated a relative advantage, that transfer schemata are easier to process, and that an ACE‐like effect can be the result of mutual priming between language and movement. Results suggested preservation in AD of the neural systems for action engaged during language comprehension, and conditions under which comprehension in AD can be facilitated in real life may be identified.     

Making Probabilistic Relational Categories Learnable

Theories of relational concept acquisition (e.g., schema induction) based on structured intersection discovery predict that relational concepts with a probabilistic (i.e., family resemblance) structure ought to be extremely difficult to learn. We report four experiments testing this prediction by investigating conditions hypothesized to facilitate the learning of such categories. Experiment 1 showed that changing the task from a category‐learning task to choosing the “winning” object in each stimulus greatly facilitated participants' ability to learn probabilistic relational categories. Experiments 2 and 3 further investigated the mechanisms underlying this “who's winning” effect. Experiment 4 replicated and generalized the “who's winning” effect with more natural stimuli. Together, our findings suggest that people learn relational concepts by a process of intersection discovery akin to schema induction, and that any task that encourages people to discover a higher order relation that remains invariant over members of a category will facilitate the learning of putatively probabilistic relational concepts.     

Understanding intentions from actions: Direct perception,inference, and the roles of mirror and mentalizing systems

This review asks whether observers can obtain information about others’ intentions from observation of their actions; and if so, whether this process is performed using direct perceptual or inferential processes (prominent examples of each being the intention understanding theory of mirror neuron function, and mentalizing accounts of intention understanding, respectively). I propose four conditions that should be fulfilled in order to support a direct perception account, and suggest that only two of these conditions are supported by the existing data. I then propose and review three further sources of evidence which have the potential to inform this debate, concluding that the data do not support the direct perception account. In particular, mirror neurons may be involved in lower-level processes of action perception, but there is no evidence to support their involvement in the type of higher-level intention understanding that is proposed by the direct perception account.     

Examining the relationship between skilled music training and attention

While many aspects of cognition have been investigated in relation to skilled music training, surprisingly little work has examined the connection between music training and attentional abilities. The present study investigated the performance of skilled musicians on cognitively demanding sustained attention tasks, measuring both temporal and visual discrimination over a prolonged duration. Participants with extensive formal music training were found to have superior performance on a temporal discrimination task, but not a visual discrimination task, compared to participants with no music training. In addition, no differences were found between groups in vigilance decrement in either type of task. Although no differences were evident in vigilance per se, the results indicate that performance in an attention-demanding temporal discrimination task was superior in individuals with extensive music training. We speculate that this basic cognitive ability may contribute to advantages that musicians show in other cognitive measures.