Daily playful work design: A trait activation perspective

We introduce the concept of daily playful work design (PWD) and test the factorial validity of a new instrument to assess PWD. Using trait activation theory, we hypothesize that employees who are more open to experiences and playful will be more engaged and creative in their work on the days they playfully design their work activities. We tested the factorial validity of the instrument and our hypotheses in a sample of 88 employees who answered questionnaires during five consecutive workdays (N = 391 observations). The multilevel analyses yielded evidence for the psychometric quality of the PWD instrument and generally supported the hypotheses. The traits openness and playfulness moderated the relationship of daily PWD behaviors with daily work engagement and creativity.     

Contributions of emotion understanding to narrative comprehension in children and adults

This study examined to what extent children and adults differ in how they process negative emotions during reading, and how they rate their own and protagonists’ emotional states. Results show that both children’s and adults’ processing of target sentences was facilitated when they described negative emotions. Processing of spill-over sentences was facilitated for adults but inhibited for children, suggesting children needed additional time to process protagonists’ emotional states and integrate them into coherent mental representations. Children and adults were similar in their valence and arousal ratings as they rated protagonists’ emotional states as more negative and more intense than their own emotional states. However, they differed in that children rated their own emotional states as relatively neutral, whereas adults’ ratings of their own emotional states more closely matched the negative emotional states of the protagonists. This suggests a possible difference between children and adults in the mechanism underlying emotional inferencing.     

Differentiation of self and trait anxiety: A cross‐cultural perspective

Cultural differences are likely to affect the ability to deal with anxiety. We investigated this issue among four cultural groups—Germans and Italians (Europeans living in South Tyrol, Italy), Jews and Arabs (Israelis)—in terms of their levels of differentiation of self, trait anxiety and somatic symptoms. We also examined the relationship of differentiation of self to trait anxiety and somatic symptoms. The sample consisted of 824 students: 387 Israelis (mean age 23.6) and 437 Europeans (mean age 22.3). Israeli participants reported lower levels of trait anxiety than European students. Jewish students reported lower trait anxiety than Arab students (mean difference = ?.14, p < .009), while there was no difference between German and Italian students (mean difference = .03, p > .99). Jews reported a significantly lower level of emotional cutoff than Arabs (mean difference = ?.45, p < .001), and Germans reported a significantly lower level of emotional reactivity than Italians (mean difference = .29, p < .001). Emotional reactivity and I‐position predicted all participants' trait anxiety. On the whole, results point to the importance of examining differentiation of self when trying to reduce trait anxiety, as well as some important cultural differences.     

Predicting anxious response to a social challenge: the predictive utility of the social interaction anxiety scale and the social phobia scale in a college population

Trait anxiety is believed to be a hierarchical construct composed of several lower-order factors (Adv. Behav. Res. Therapy, 15 (1993) 147; J. Anxiety Disorders, 9 (1995) 163). Assessment devices such as the Social Interaction Anxiety Scale, the Social Phobia Scale (SIAS and SPS; Behav. Res. Therapy, 36 (4) (1998) 455), and the Anxiety Sensitivity Index (ASI; Behav. Res. Therapy, 24 (1986) 1) are good measures of the presumably separate lower-order factors. This study compared the effectiveness of the SIAS, SPS, ASI-physical scale and STAI-T (State-Trait Anxiety Inventory. Palo Alto, CA: Consulting Psychologists Press (1970)) as predictors of anxious response to a social challenge (asking an aloof confederate out on a date). Consistent with the hierarchical model of anxiety, the measures of trait anxiety were moderately correlated with each other and each was a significant predictor of anxious response. The specific measures of trait social anxiety were slightly better predictors of anxious response to the social challenge than was either the ASI-physical scale or the STAI-T. The results provide evidence of the predictive validity of these social trait measures and some support for their specificity in the prediction of anxious response to a social challenge.     

Rational Inference of Beliefs and Desires From Emotional Expressions

We investigated people's ability to infer others’ mental states from their emotional reactions, manipulating whether agents wanted, expected, and caused an outcome. Participants recovered agents’ desires throughout. When the agent observed, but did not cause the outcome, participants’ ability to recover the agent's beliefs depended on the evidence they got (i.e., her reaction only to the actual outcome or to both the expected and actual outcomes; Experiments 1 and 2). When the agent caused the event, participants’ judgments also depended on the probability of the action (Experiments 3 and 4); when actions were improbable given the mental states, people failed to recover the agent's beliefs even when they saw her react to both the anticipated and actual outcomes. A Bayesian model captured human performance throughout (rs ≥ .95), consistent with the proposal that people rationally integrate information about others’ actions and emotional reactions to infer their unobservable mental states.     

A necessity illusion for modal inferences from conditionals

Three experiments examined how people reason about what is possible or necessary when a conditional is true. Participants were asked to indicate whether it was necessary, possible or impossible for a specific instance to conform to one of the truth-table cases (pq, p¬q, ¬pq and ¬p¬q) (¬ = not), given the truth of the conditional. It was found that most participants, inconsistently, judged the pq case as necessary but the ¬pq or ¬p¬q cases as possible. Logically, these two kinds of judgments are contradictory. Moreover, a true conditional doesn’t imply that a specific instance under the conditional must be pq . Therefore, people demonstrate a necessity illusion for pq cases which contradicts their commitment to the possibility of ¬pq or ¬p¬q cases. Existing accounts of conditionals are unable to explain the contradiction and the necessity illusion. We propose an inference dissociation account and explore the theoretical implications of this necessity illusion.     

Assessing the associations among trait and state levels of deliberate and spontaneous mind wandering

Recent research has demonstrated that mind wandering can be subdivided into spontaneous and deliberate types, and this distinction has been found to hold at both the trait and state levels. However, to date, no attempts have been made to link trait-level spontaneous and deliberate mind wandering with state-level assessments of these two subtypes of mind wandering. Here we evaluated whether trait-level deliberate and spontaneous mind wandering map onto state levels of these subtypes of mind wandering. Results showed correspondence between trait-level reports of spontaneous and deliberate mind wandering and their state-level counterparts, indicating that people’s reports on the intentionality of their mind wandering in the laboratory correspond to their reports of the intentionality of mind wandering in everyday life. Thus, the trait- and state-level scales of mind wandering were found to validate each other: Whereas the state-level measures provided some construct validity for the trait-level measures, the trait-level measures indicated that the state-level measures may be generalizable to everyday situations.     

Structural differentiation of disgust from trait anxiety in the prediction of specific anxiety disorder symptoms

Research has begun to implicate the role of disgust in the etiology of specific phobias and obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD). However, it remains unclear if the association between disgust and specific anxiety disorder symptoms is an artifact of trait anxiety or a potential mechanism through which trait anxiety effects specific anxiety disorder symptoms. The present study employed structural equation modeling to differentiate disgust from trait anxiety in the prediction of four types of specific anxiety disorder symptoms in a non-clinical sample (N=352). Results indicate that disgust and trait anxiety latent factors were independently related to spider fears, blood-injection-injury (BII) fears, general OCD symptoms, and OCD washing concerns. However, when both variables were simultaneously modeled as predictors, latent disgust remained significantly associated with the anxiety disorder symptoms, whereas the association between latent trait anxiety and the anxiety disorder symptoms became non-significant or was substantially reduced. Statistical tests of intervening variable effects converged in support of disgust as a significant intervening variable between trait anxiety and spider fears, BII fears, and OCD symptoms (particularly washing concerns). The relevance of these findings for future research investigating the role of disgust in specific anxiety disorders is discussed.     

Examining the relationship between trait self-control and stress: Evidence on generalizability and outcome variability

Trait self-control has in several studies been found negatively linked to stress. These studies have, however, mostly relied on student and/or one-country samples. Study 1 investigated the generalizability of the relationship between trait self-control and stress through a four-country survey (N = 4097). The results showed consistently strong and negative relationships between trait self-control and stress across the four countries. Study 2 investigated the relationship between trait self-control and daily stress through a two-week diary study (N = 594; n_obs = 7880), showing that trait self-control was negatively related to daily stress and stress variability. Together, the two studies show that trait self-control’s negative link to stress generalizes beyond students and the United States.     

Trait aggression is primarily a facet of antagonism: Evidence from dominance,latent correlational,and item-level analyses

Trait aggression has been studied for decades and yet remains adrift from broader frameworks of personality such as the Five Factor Model. Across two datasets from undergraduate participants (Study 1: N = 359; Study 2; N = 620), we observed strong manifest and latent correlations between trait aggression and lower agreeableness (i.e., greater antagonism). Trait aggression was also linked to greater neuroticism and lower conscientiousness, but their effect sizes fell beneath our preregistered threshold. Subsequent item-level analyses were unable to articulate trait aggression and agreeableness items into separate factors using the IPIP-NEO, but not the Big Five Inventory. Our findings suggest that trait aggression is accurately characterized as primarily a facet of antagonism, while also reflecting other personality dimensions.