Public Responses to Community Compensation: The Importance of Prior Consultations with Local Residents

A company that wants to implement an industrial project with adverse local impacts can offer the members of the affected community compensation for bearing the burdens associated with the project. In the current study, participants evaluated such a situation from the perspective of observer. Depending on experimental condition, they learned that a company either had or had not consulted members of the affected community prior to deciding on the compensation offer. The compensation offer was either public goods compensation or individual monetary compensation. We hypothesized and found that the decision‐making process was considered fairer and the company was perceived as more concerned with the local public interest when the company had consulted local residents prior to deciding on the compensation offer. Also, the company was believed to be more concerned with the local public interest when it offered public goods compensation instead of individual monetary compensation. Perceived concern and perceived fairness predicted the perceived trustworthiness of the company, and this, in turn, predicted how participants anticipated the members of the affected community to react to the compensation offered by the company. The study thus demonstrates the importance of consultations with local residents in the process of deciding on compensation measures. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Updating working memory in aircraft noise and speech noise causes different fMRI activations

The present study used fMRI/BOLD neuroimaging to investigate how visual‐verbal working memory is updated when exposed to three different background‐noise conditions: speech noise, aircraft noise and silence. The number‐updating task that was used can distinguish between “substitution processes,” which involve adding new items to the working memory representation and suppressing old items, and “exclusion processes,” which involve rejecting new items and maintaining an intact memory set. The current findings supported the findings of a previous study by showing that substitution activated the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the posterior medial frontal cortex and the parietal lobes, whereas exclusion activated the anterior medial frontal cortex. Moreover, the prefrontal cortex was activated more by substitution processes when exposed to background speech than when exposed to aircraft noise. These results indicate that (a) the prefrontal cortex plays a special role when task‐irrelevant materials should be denied access to working memory and (b) that, when compensating for different types of noise, either different cognitive mechanisms are involved or those cognitive mechanisms that are involved are involved to different degrees.     

Being engaged when resources are low: A multi-source study of selective optimization with compensation at work

This study examined self-regulation in the form of selective optimization with compensation (SOC) at work as a moderator of the relationships of job control (as a job resource) and feeling recovered and energized in the morning (as a personal energy resource) with self- and coworker-rated work engagement. SOC was hypothesized to offset low levels of job control and low levels of personal energy. Based on a sample of 405 public-service employees in Germany, including a multi-source subsample of 141 employees and their respective coworkers, the results showed that SOC use moderated the relationship between the level of personal energy and self-ratings as well as coworker ratings of work engagement such that SOC mitigated low levels of personal energy. SOC at work did not offset low job control. The results suggest that using SOC is particularly important when employees lack energy. SOC strategies should, therefore, be fostered by managers and organizations.     

Are support and social comparison compatible? Individual differences in the multiplexity of career‐related social networks

Social networks are crucial for helping people in their careers. Moreover, social identity is reflected in and influenced by individuals’ networks. To date, there is little knowledge on how these different functions of networks might interact. A survey in which 450 individuals provided information on 2,499 contacts in their social networks indicated both multiplexity and segmentation in networks. Contacts tended either to provide psychosocial support only or to provide instrumental support and serve as a standard for social comparison. The segmentation was stronger for individuals with an independent career orientation than for promotion‐oriented individuals. These findings contribute to the literature on social networks and careers by providing insights into how career orientation affects the multiplexity in career‐related social networks.     

When the poor excel: Poverty facilitates procedural learning

Recent research has shown that poverty directly impeded cognitive functions because the poor could be easily distracted by monetary concerns. We argue that this effect may be limited to functions relying on working memory. For functions that rely on proceduralized processes however, monetary concerns elicited by reminding of financial demands would be conducive rather than harmful. Our results supported this hypothesis by showing that participants with lower income reached the learning criterion of the information‐integration categorization task faster than their more affluent counterparts after reminding of financial demands.     

Practice effects on intra-team synergies in football teams

Developing synchronised player movements for fluent competitive match play is a common goal for coaches of team games. An ecological dynamics approach advocates that intra-team synchronization is governed by locally created information, which specifies shared affordances responsible for synergy formation. To verify this claim we evaluated coordination tendencies in two newly-formed teams of recreational players during association football practice games, weekly, for fifteen weeks (thirteen matches). We investigated practice effects on two central features of synergies in sports teams – dimensional compression and reciprocal compensation here captured through near in-phase modes of coordination and time delays between coupled players during forward and backwards movements on field while attacking and defending. Results verified that synergies were formed and dissolved rapidly as a result of the dynamic creation of informational properties, perceived as shared affordances among performers. Practising once a week led to small improvements in the readjustment delays between co-positioning team members, enabling faster regulation of coordinated team actions. Mean values of the number of player and team synergies displayed only limited improvements, possibly due to the timescales of practice. No relationship between improvements in dimensional compression and reciprocal compensation were found for number of shots, amount of ball possession and number of ball recoveries made. Findings open up new perspectives for monitoring team coordination processes in sport.     

Acting for the Greater Good: Identification with Group Determines Choices in Sequential Contribution Dilemmas

In mixed‐motive interactions, defection is the rational and common response to the defection of others. In some cases, however, group members not only cooperate in the face of defection but also compensate for the shortfalls caused by others' defection. In one field and two lab studies, we examined when group members were willing to compensate for versus match defection using sequential dilemmas. We found that the level of identification with the broader group increased willingness to compensate for intragroup defection, even when it was personally costly. Compensating for a defecting partner's actions, however, is not an act of unconditional cooperation: It is accompanied by a lack of trust in the errant group member and a desire to be perceived as more ethical. Cooperation by others, on the other hand, is matched independent of whether the cooperator was an in‐group or out‐group member. We find similar patterns of compensation and matching when the personal cost involved contributing money or effort. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The protective role of long-term meditation on the decline of the executive component of attention in aging: a preliminary cross-sectional study

Life expectancy is constantly increasing. However, a longer life not always corresponds to a healthier life. Indeed, even normal aging is associated with a decline in different cognitive functions. It has been proposed that a central mechanism that could contribute to this widespread cognitive decline is an ineffective inhibitory attentional control. Meditation, to the other hand, has been associated, in young adults, to enhancement of several attentional processes. Nevertheless, attention is not a unitary construct. An influent model proposed the distinction of three subsystems: the alerting (the ability to reach and maintain a vigilance state), the orienting (the capacity of focusing attention on a subset of stimuli), and the conflict resolution or executive component (the ability to resolve conflict or allocate limited resources between competing stimuli). Here, we investigated, employing the Attentional Network Task (ANT), the specific impact of age on these three subcomponents, and the protective role of long-term meditation testing a group of older adults naïve to meditation, a group of age-matched adults with long-term practice of meditation, and a group of young adults with no previous meditation experience. We reported a specific decline of the efficiency of the executive component in elderly that was not observed in age-matched meditators. Our results are encouraging for the investigation of the potential beneficial impact of meditation on other cognitive processes that decline in aging such as memory. Moreover, they could inform geriatric healthcare prevention and intervention strategies, proposing a new approach for cognitive remediation in elderly populations.     

Exploitative,irresistible, and coercive offers: why research participants should be paid well or not at all

This paper begins with the assumption that it is morally problematic when people in need are offered money in exchange for research participation if the amount offered is unfair. Such offers are called ‘coercive’, and the degree of coerciveness is determined by the offer's potential to cause exploitation and its irresistibility. Depending on what view we take on the possibility to compensate for the sacrifices made by research participants, a wish to avoid ‘coercive offers’ leads to policy recommendations concerning payment for participation. For sacrifices considered compensable, we ought to offer either no payment or payment at a level deemed fair, while for sacrifices deemed incompensable, we always ought to offer no payment because as compensation appears and increases, so too does coercion. This article provides a model for thinking of the way in which degrees of exploitativeness, irresistibility, and coerciveness interact with the size of the reward for compensable and incompensable cases. The conclusions are of particular relevance in contexts where potential research participants are poor or in other ways lack reasonably good options, as is often the case when international pharmaceutical companies or researchers based in the Global North place clinical trials in the Global South.