Psychological mobility and career success in the ‘New’ career climate

We examined the influence of two types of psychological mobility, i.e. boundaryless mindset and organizational mobility preference, on career success. We hypothesized that this relationship would be partially mediated by physical mobility. In addition, we expected the direction of the influence to depend on the type of psychological mobility. We tested our hypotheses using data of 357 business alumni. Results showed that a boundaryless mindset related positively to wage and promotions, while organizational mobility preference led to less promotions, lower job satisfaction and lower career satisfaction. The relationship between boundaryless mindset and career success was partially mediated by functional mobility whereas organizational mobility preference impacted career success via organizational mobility. Implications and limitations of the study are discussed.     

Residential mental health assessment within Dutch criminal cases: a discussion

In Dutch criminal cases in which doubts arise about the defendant's mental health, a forensic assessment will be requested. This is provided either by the multidisciplinary staff of residential clinics who conduct forensic evaluations for the court, or by mental health professionals contracted on a part-time basis by district courts. This article discusses the procedures applied in such cases as well as the relevant legal provisions. It focuses particularly on the clinical observation, evaluation, and reporting that is carried out over a number of weeks in the residential setting of the Pieter Baan Centrum. Specific attention is paid to procedures applied in this clinic. It is suggested that Dutch procedures for the use of mental health expertise can best be characterized by three aspects: multidisciplinary observation and reporting, the use of a sliding scale for indicating degree of responsibility, and, finally, the involvement and payment of experts by the state as such, rather than by the prosecution and/or the defense. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The effect of interference in the early processing stages on response inhibition in the stop signal task

In the present study, the relation between interference at the early processing stages and response inhibition was investigated. In previous studies, response stopping appeared to be slowed down when irrelevant distracting information was presented. The purpose of the present study was to further explore the relationship between interference control and response inhibition. In Experiment 1, a stop signal paradigm was combined with a global/local task. The typical global-to-local interference effect is generally attributed to early processing stages, such as stimulus perception and identification. Results of this experiment demonstrated a congruency effect for both reaction time data and zstopping performance. In Experiment 2, these results were replicated with a flanker task that used stimulus-incongruent but response-congruent flankers. Results of both experiments suggest that response inhibition and interference at the early processing stages interact.     

Voluntary task switching under load: Contribution of top-down and bottom-up factors in goal-directed behavior

The present study investigated the relative contribution of bottom-up and top-down control to task selection in the voluntary task-switching (VTS) procedure. In order to manipulate the efficiency of top-down control, a concurrent working memory load was imposed during VTS. In three experiments, bottom-up factors, such as stimulus repetitions, repetition of irrelevant information, and stimulus-task associations, were introduced in order to investigate their influence on task selection. We observed that the tendency to repeat tasks was stronger under load, suggesting that top-down control counteracts the automatic tendency to repeat tasks. The results also indicated that task selection can be guided by several elements in the environment, but that only the influence of stimulus repetitions depends on the efficiency of top-down control. The theoretical implications of these findings are discussed within the interplay between top-down and bottom-up control that underlies the voluntary selection of tasks.     

Automatic and controlled response inhibition: associative learning in the go/no-go and stop-signal paradigms

In 5 experiments, the authors examined the development of automatic response inhibition in the go/no-go paradigm and a modified version of the stop-signal paradigm. They hypothesized that automatic response inhibition may develop over practice when stimuli are consistently associated with stopping. All 5 experiments consisted of a training phase and a test phase in which the stimulus mapping was reversed for a subset of the stimuli. Consistent with the automatic-inhibition hypothesis, the authors found that responding in the test phase was slowed when the stimulus had been consistently associated with stopping in the training phase. In addition, they found that response inhibition benefited from consistent stimulus-stop associations. These findings suggest that response inhibition may rely on the retrieval of stimulus-stop associations after practice with consistent stimulus-stop mappings. Stimulus-stop mapping is typically consistent in the go/no-go paradigm, so automatic inhibition is likely to occur. However, stimulus-stop mapping is typically inconsistent in the stop-signal paradigm, so automatic inhibition is unlikely to occur. Thus, the results suggest that the two paradigms are not equivalent because they allow different kinds of response inhibition.     

Graded effects of number of inserted letters in superset priming

Three masked priming experiments investigated the effects of target word length and number of inserted letters on superset priming, where irrelevant letters are added to targets to form prime stimuli (e.g., tanble-table). Effects of one, two, three, and four-letter insertions were measured relative to an unrelated prime condition, the identity prime condition, and a condition where the order of letters of the superset primes was reversed. Superset primes facilitated performance compared with unrelated primes and reversed primes, and the overall pattern showed a small cost of letter insertion that was independent of target word length and that increased linearly as a function of the number of inserted letters. A meta-analysis incorporating data from the present study and two other studies investigating superset priming, showed an average estimated processing cost of 11 ms per letter insertion. Models of letter position coding are examined in the light of this result.     

After-effects of goal shifting and response inhibition: a comparison of the stop-change and dual-task paradigms

In the present study, we tested three hypotheses that account for after-effects of response inhibition and goal shifting: the goal-shifting hypothesis, the reaction time (RT) adjustment hypothesis, and the stimulus-goal association hypothesis. To distinguish between the hypotheses, we examined performance in the stop-change paradigm and the dual-task paradigm. In the stop-change paradigm, we found that responding on no-signal trials slowed down when a stop-change signal was presented on the previous trial. Similarly, in the dual-task paradigm, we found that responding on no-signal trials slowed down when a dual-task signal was presented on the previous trial. However, aftereffects of unsuccessful inhibition or dual-task performance were observed only when the stimulus of the previous trial was repeated. These results are consistent with stimulus--goal association hypothesis, which assumes that the stimulus is associated with the different task goals on signal trials; when the stimulus is repeated, the tasks goal are retrieved, and interference occurs.     

STOP-IT: Windows executable software for the stop-signal paradigm

The stop-signal paradigm is a useful tool for the investigation of response inhibition. In this paradigm, subjects are instructed to respond as fast as possible to a stimulus unless a stop signal is presented after a variable delay. However, programming the stop-signal task is typically considered to be difficult. To overcome this issue, we present software called STOP-IT, for running the stop-signal task, as well as an additional analyzing program called ANALYZE-IT. The main advantage of both programs is that they are a precompiled executable, and for basic use there is no need for additional programming. STOP-IT and ANALYZE-IT are completely based on free software, are distributed under the GNU General Public License, and are available at the personal Web sites of the first two authors or at expsy.ugent.be/tscope/stop.html.