Meeting the need or falling in line? The effect of laissez-faire formal leaders on informal leadership

We consider the utility of two contrasting theoretical perspectives in explaining how laissez-faire formal leaders and team member motivation to lead (MTL) influences informal leadership and team task performance. The first perspective, functional leadership theory, is the dominant lens used currently to understand informal leadership. However, we suggest that social learning theory offers a compelling alternative account. In a multiwave survey study of 344 members of 72 work teams, we find support for the social learning theory predictions that laissez-faire formal leaders are perceived by team members to engage in less modeling of effective leadership and as a result are negatively associated with informal leadership and team task performance. We do not find support for the functional leadership theory predictions that laissez-faire formal leaders are positively associated with team members’ informal leadership and team task performance, which would be due to an increased perceived need for leadership. The social learning effects are stronger for teams that are lower in member MTL and weaker for teams that are higher in member MTL. These results suggest social learning theory may be preferable to functional leadership theory for understanding informal leadership in teams.     

The Impact of Election Outcome on the Display of Political Posters: A Field Study During Communal Elections in Flanders

The present field study was designed to test the relationship between the election outcomes of political parties and the post-election display of posters in favor of those parties. Two days before the Flemish communal elections on 8 October 2000, addresses of private houses in the community of Zele were registered that displayed at least one poster in support of a political party (N = 388). On the day after the elections, two observers checked whether the registered houses still displayed their poster(s). A strongly and positively linear relation was found between the proportional win/loss of each political party (compared with the previous elections) and the percentage of houses that continued to exhibit poster(s) in support of that party: The better the election result, the higher the proportion of houses that still displayed their poster(s).     

From Working Through the Holocaust to Current Ethnic Conflicts: Evaluating the TRT Group Workshop in Hamburg

The TRT (To Reflect and Trust) approach of bringing together descendants of Holocaust survivors and descendants of Nazi perpetrators relies on group dialogues in which participants share their personal life stories, thereby enabling them to reflect on their personal and collective histories as victims and victimizers. This process was initiated and led by the second author—an Israeli psychologist and a specialist in group processes—in the context of the socially and historically contextualized approach to group interventions that he has developed. The present study describes a new phase of the TRT group that brought together, in the framework of a workshop, professionals from South Africa, Northern Ireland, and Israel and the Palestinian Authority—all of whom were working with victims and victimizers in current conflicts. Our question was whether the TRT process, using methods of storytelling to address a past catastrophe of human making, could help the professionals who try to help other people move out of current conflicts into peace-building. We found that the TRT storytelling approach facilitates the working through of current ethnic conflicts. Participants' responses to the workshop indicated the importance of the storytelling process and of the emotional support provided by the TRT group members. We focus here on the special significance of the group process between Germans, Jews, and Palestinians, which emerged as highly significant for the Jewish participants in their efforts to reconcile being both victims and victimizers (within two separate historical contexts: German/Jewish and Israeli/Palestinian).     

Electrophysiological response during source memory decisions in older and younger adults

We recorded event-related potentials (ERPs) as individuals made source monitoring decisions in a paradigm in which the influence of item familiarity and goal relevance could be separately evaluated. Younger and older adults read a list of words and subsequently distinguished these words from foils in a running recognition test in which some foils were repeated after a lag of 6 items, creating familiar lures. Behaviorally, older and younger adults performed equally well in the recognition of study words and the rejection of singly presented foils. However, older adults were more likely to respond to the familiar lures as though they had come from the study list, thus producing the expected group difference in source-monitoring error. For younger adults the ERPs elicited by the targeted study words were maximal at posterior sites and significantly greater than those elicited by either familiar lures or foils. Older adults generated far less differentiated ERP waveforms but with a markedly greater amplitude at frontal sites. We interpret this frontal maximum in the context of poorer source monitoring as suggesting that older adults are more dependent on controlled processes to make discriminations that seem to occur much earlier and more automatically for younger adults.     

Turning the tables: language and spatial reasoning

This paper investigates possible influences of the lexical resources of individual languages on the spatial organization and reasoning styles of their users. That there are such powerful and pervasive influences of language on thought is the thesis of the Whorf-Sapir linguistic relativity hypothesis which, after a lengthy period in intellectual limbo, has recently returned to prominence in the anthropological, linguistic, and psycholinguistic literatures. Our point of departure is an influential group of cross-linguistic studies that appear to show that spatial reasoning is strongly affected by the spatial lexicon in everyday use in a community (e.g. Brown, P., & Levinson, S. C. (1993). Linguistic and nonlinguistic coding of spatial arrays: explorations in Mayan cognition (Working Paper No. 24). Nijmegen: Cognitive Anthropology Research Group, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics; Cognitive Linguistics 6 (1995) 33). Specifically, certain groups customarily use an externally referenced spatial-coordinate system to refer to nearby directions and positions ("to the north") whereas English speakers usually employ a viewer-perspective system ("to the left"). Prior findings and interpretations have been to the effect that users of these two types of spatial system solve rotation problems in different ways, reasoning strategies imposed by habitual use of the language-particular lexicons themselves. The present studies reproduce these different problem-solving strategies in speakers of a single language (English) by manipulating landmark cues, suggesting that language itself may not be the key causal factor in choice of spatial perspective. Prior evidence on rotation problem solution from infants (e.g. Acredolo, L.P. (1979). Laboratory versus home: the effect of environment on the 9-month-old infant's choice of spatial reference system. Developmental Psychology, 15 (6), 666-667) and from laboratory animals (e.g. Restle, F. (1975). Discrimination of cues in mazes: a resolution of the place-vs.-response question. Psychological Review, 64, 217-228) suggests a unified interpretation of the findings: creatures approach spatial problems differently depending on the availability and suitability of local landmark cues. The results are discussed in terms of the current debate on the relation of language to thought, with particular emphasis on the question of why different cultural communities favor different perspectives in talking about space.     

Are transitions in human gait determined by mechanical,kinetic or energetic factors?

It is currently unclear whether it is the need to maintain metabolic efficiency, the need to keep skeletal loading below critical force levels, or simple mechanical factors that drive the walk-to-run (W-R) and run-to-walk (R-W) transitions in human gait. Eighteen adults (9 males and 9 females) locomoted on an instrumented treadmill using their preferred gait. Each completed 2 ascending (W-R) and 2 descending (R-W) series of trials under three levels of loading (0%, 15% and 30% body weight). For each trial, participants locomoted for 60 s at each of 9 different speeds--4 speeds both above and below their preferred transition speed (PTS) plus their PTS. Evidence was sought for critical levels of key kinetic (maximum vertical force, impulse, first peak force, time to first peak force and maximum loading rate), energetic (oxygen consumption, transport cost) and mechanical variables (limb lengths, strength) predictive of the gait transition. Analyses suggested the kinetic variables of time to first peak force and loading rate as the most likely determinants of the W-R and R-W transitions.     

从丘浚的科学观看儒学与科学的可容性

丘浚是我国古代自觉提倡并积极探讨自然科学的儒家学者。他将儒学的研究对象分为“性理之学”(相当于“哲学”)与“物理之学”(相当于“科学”)两个部分 ,并对当时儒者重“性理之学”而轻“物理之学”的现象提出了批评。他不仅揭示了研究“物理之学”的必要性 ,而且还提出了研究“物理之学”的方法与要求。丘浚对研究“物理之学”的积极提倡 ,使我们看到了儒学与科学之间可容性的一面。     

A high-field functional MRI study of quadri-lingual subjects

We assessed six multilingual subjects by functional MRI using a Noun Verb Generation task in four different languages. We hypothesised that the degree of proficiency in each language would be related to the extent of functional activity measured in a region of interest analysis. Proficiency in each language was quantified using two neuropsychological tests. All four languages activated overlapping brain areas, corresponding to the major language regions. The number of activated voxels correlated with proficiency, so that the activated volume increased for languages in which a subject had poorer proficiency. Activation did not appear to be dependent on the age at which the language was learnt.     

Dissociable patterns of brain activity during comprehension of rapid and syntactically complex speech: evidence from fMRI

Sentence comprehension is a complex task that involves both language-specific processing components and general cognitive resources. Comprehension can be made more difficult by increasing the syntactic complexity or the presentation rate of a sentence, but it is unclear whether the same neural mechanism underlies both of these effects. In the current study, we used event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to monitor neural activity while participants heard sentences containing a subject-relative or object-relative center-embedded clause presented at three different speech rates. Syntactically complex object-relative sentences activated left inferior frontal cortex across presentation rates, whereas sentences presented at a rapid rate recruited frontal brain regions such as anterior cingulate and premotor cortex, regardless of syntactic complexity. These results suggest that dissociable components of a large-scale neural network support the processing of syntactic complexity and speech presented at a rapid rate during auditory sentence processing.     

Rhythm typology of Korean speech

According to their rhythmic properties, spoken languages have been classified by linguists into three categories, i.e. stress-timed, syllable-timed and mora-timed. Recently, this intuitive classification has been confirmed valid with perceptual studies. These studies have shown that both newborn infants and adults, upon hearing the pure rhythms of certain languages, are only able to discriminate between languages of the different categories mentioned above. These results indicate that the capacity of the categorization of the human cognitive system makes possible the classification of language that is not yet explored rhythmically. Here, we investigate the Korean spoken language through the adults discrimination tasks with resynthesized speech. Experimental results indicate that the Korean language is, like Japanese, one of the mora-timed languages.