授权的测量及其与员工工作态度的关系

首先，对Spreitzer的授权量表在中国文化背景下的适用性进行了检验，3家企业395份调查问卷的探索性因素分析和内部一致性分析表明，授权量表具有较好的效度和信度；20家企业942份调查问卷的验证性因素分析和内部一致性分析进一步验证了授权量表的效度和信度，这表明Spreitzer的授权四维模型在中国得到了验证，其编制的授权量表在中国具有较强的适用性。然后，利用20家企业942份调查问卷的结果，采用结构方程模型技术对授权与员工满意度、组织承诺、离职意向与工作倦怠等员工工作态度变量之间的关系进行了交叉验证分析，结果表明，工作意义对员工满意度与组织承诺有正向的影响，对离职意向与工作倦怠有负向的影响；自主性对员工满意度与组织承诺有正向的影响；自我效能对组织承诺有正向的影响     

Social evaluation research: the evaluation of two police patrolling strategies

In most social evaluation research it is difficult to achieve the degree of experimental rigor possible in an applied behavioral study. This study illustrates how the evaluation researcher can increase experimental rigor in the analysis of social interventions. In the first evaluation, a variation of the time-series design that offered maximum experimental control given the limitations of the situation, was employed to evaluate the effects of a specialized home-burglary police patrol. This design revealed that no effects could be attributed to the patrol. In the second evaluation, a multiple baseline-like design was possible in determining the effects of a police walking patrol. This design revealed that the patrol produced an increase in crime reporting but not in arrests. Social interventions often occur in a manner that allows varying degrees of experimental analysis. The evaluation researcher must attain optimal experimental analysis given the limitations of each social intervention.     

Recognition and Reform in Nordic Fiction: Jonas Gardell and Jussi Valtonen

While contemporary Scandinavian literature continues to discuss the problems of welfare state and social justice, it increasingly turns its attention to minority issues, multiculturalism, and the impact of digitalization. Jonas Gardell's HIV/AIDS trilogy Torka aldrig tårar utan handskar (Never wipe tears without gloves) highlights the family relations in the Swedish gay community. Jussi Valtonen's He eivät tiedä mitä tekevät (They do not know what they do) deals with the dystopias of social media and the power of global software companies. Religion and theology play a significant role in the works of both Gardell and Valtonen.     

The flip side of the other‐race coin: They all look different to me

Poorer recognition of other‐race faces than own‐races faces has been attributed to a problem of discrimination (i.e., telling faces apart). The conclusion that ‘they all look the same to me' is based on studies measuring the perception/memory of highly controlled stimuli, typically involving only one or two images of each identity. We hypothesized that such studies underestimate the challenge involved in recognizing other‐race faces because in the real world, an individual's appearance varies in a number of ways (e.g., lighting, expression, hairstyle), reducing the utility of relying on pictorial cues to identity. In two experiments, Caucasian and East Asian participants completed a perceptual sorting task in which they were asked to sort 40 photographs of two unfamiliar identities into piles such that each pile contained all photographs of a single identity. Participants perceived more identities when sorting other‐race faces than own‐race faces, both when sorting celebrity (Experiment 1) and non‐celebrity (Experiment 2) faces, suggesting that in the real world, ‘they all look different to me'. We discuss these results in the light of models in which each identity is represented as a region in a multidimensional face space; we argue that this region is smaller for other‐race than own‐race faces.     

Family Environments and Children's Executive Function: The Mediating Role of Children's Affective State and Stress

There is increasing evidence that inadequate family environments (family material environment and family psychosocial environment) are not only social problems but also factors contributing to adverse neurocognitive outcomes. In the present study, the authors investigated the relationship among family environments, children's naturalistic affective state, self-reported stress, and executive functions in a sample of 157 Chinese families. These findings revealed that in inadequate family material environments, reduced children's cognitive flexibility is associated with increased naturalistic negative affectivity and self-reported stress. In addition, naturalistic negative affectivity mediated the association between family expressiveness and children's cognitive flexibility. The authors used a structural equation model to examine the mediation model hypothesis, and the results confirmed the mediating roles of naturalistic negative affectivity and self-reported stress between family environments and the cognitive flexibility of Chinese children. These findings indicate the importance of reducing stress and negative emotional state for improving cognitive functions in children of low socioeconomic status.     

Examining Individual Differences in Interpersonal Influence: On the Psychometric Properties of the Generalized Opinion Leadership Scale (GOLS)

Opinion leadership describes an individual's tendency to informally influence others’ attitudes and overt behaviors. In contrast to contemporary views of opinion leadership as a highly domain-specific trait, this paper introduces a multi-faceted personality trait, generalized opinion leadership (GOL) that characterizes exceptionally influential individuals independent of a specific subject area. Two studies report on the psychometric properties of a scale to assess GOL. Study 1 is based on three independent samples (N = 1,575, N = 1,275, and N = 231) and demonstrates the factorial structure of the instrument and its measurement invariance across sex, age, and educational levels. Study 2 (N = 310) analyzes multitrait-multiinformant data to highlight the scale's discriminant validity with regard to innovativeness and trendsetting.     

Mother–Child Conversation and Children's Social Understanding During Middle Childhood

The authors investigated the relationship between mother–child conversation and children's social understanding during middle childhood. Thirty-eight mother–child pairs participated, including a younger group (5–7 years old) and an older group (8–10 years old). Children completed 2 measures of social understanding and mothers and children discussed 4 stories involving social dilemmas. Results indicated that compared to the younger group, the older group (a) performed better on both measures of social understanding and (b) produced more basic mental talk (i.e., talk about beliefs, emotions, personality traits, and desires), and more advanced mental talk (i.e., talk about contrasting perspectives, recursion and relationship between mental states, and advanced emotions). Mothers of older children also produced more basic and advanced mental talk. Mothers' advanced mental talk predicted both children's social understanding and children's advanced mental talk.