How help during pregnancy can undermine self-efficacy and increase postpartum intentions to quit

Pregnancy reflects a common experience for women in today's workforce, yet recent data suggest that some women scale back or leave the workforce following childbirth. Considering these effects on women's careers, researchers have sought to understand the underlying dynamics of these decisions. Here, we explore a paradoxical reason for weakened postpartum career attitudes: help that women receive during pregnancy. We integrate stereotype threat and benevolent sexism theories to explain how the effects of help on postpartum intentions to quit may be transmitted through reductions in work self-efficacy. In doing so, we consider the role of perceived impact—or the extent to which help interferes with versus enables women's perceived ability to continue performing their work role. Results of a weekly diary study of 105 pregnant employees suggest that work-interfering help led to decreased self-efficacy for work during the following week. Furthermore, there was an indirect effect of average help received at work during pregnancy on postpartum intentions to quit the workforce through reductions in work self-efficacy that was stronger insofar as help was work-interfering versus work-enabling. Taken together, our results highlight unintended negative consequences that occur when others provide ineffective support to women at work during pregnancy.     

Giving Credit Where Credit Is Due: A Case of No Sex Bias in Attribution1

This study examines the effects of informational cues on the attribution of success in a masculine task. Israeli managers (subjects) first evaluated the performance of a fictitious male/female manager and then attributed a cause to his/her success in attaining the managerial position. As predicted, performance evaluation affected the attribution and manager sex did not. An unexpected association between leadership style and attribution was found. Implications of these findings for female managers and for further research are considered.     

INDUSTRIALIZATION AS A SELF-FULFILLING PROPHECY: THE ROLE OF EXPECTATIONS IN DEVELOPMENT

A self-fulfilling prophecy (SFP) occurs when the expectation of an event induces the behavior that increases the likelihood of the event's occurrence. Work organizations can be more or less effective as a result of SFP effects, whether naturally-occurring or deliberately induced by managers or consultants. Evidence for SFP at the individual level and at the collective level in work organizations is reviewed, including the Pygmalion, Galatea, Golem, and Messiah effects. Next, the SFP concept is extended beyond the single organization to the industrialization process at the national level. This leads to the novel hypothesis that, to the extent that persons in a developing nation expect industrialization to progress rapidly and successfully, the development process is facilitated. Several examples of SFP on Israel's path to industrialization are described, and emulation of these examples by other newly industrialized countries is proposed.     

Model for a three-dimensional optical illusion

A homogeneous coordinate system is used to describe the transformation from a real three-dimensional stimulus to an illusory three-dimensional perceptual object. The model comprises a series of transformations of which one acts as an illusion operator. The illusion operator is specified by a single parameter whose value determines whether the real or the illusory object is perceived. An experiment to test one prediction derived from the model was performed. The results confirm the prediction.     

The experience requirement on well-being

Philosophical Studies - According to the experience requirement on well-being, differences in subjects’ levels of welfare or well-being require differences in the phenomenology of their...     

Curiosity Is Contagious: A Social Influence Intervention to Induce Curiosity

Our actions and decisions are regularly influenced by the social environment around us. Can social cues be leveraged to induce curiosity and affect subsequent behavior? Across two experiments, we show that curiosity is contagious: The social environment can influence people's curiosity about the answers to scientific questions. Participants were presented with everyday questions about science from a popular on-line forum, and these were shown with a high or low number of up-votes as a social cue to popularity. Participants indicated their curiosity about the answers, and they were given an opportunity to reveal a subset of those answers. Participants reported greater curiosity about the answers to questions when the questions were presented with a high (vs. low) number of up-votes, and they were also more likely to choose to reveal the answers to questions with a high (vs. low) number of up-votes. These effects were partially mediated by surprise and by the inferred usefulness of knowledge, with a more dramatic effect of low up-votes in reducing curiosity than of high up-votes in boosting curiosity. Taken together, these results highlight the important role social information plays in shaping our curiosity.     

Hippocampal damage and exploratory preferences in rats: memory for objects, places, and contexts

Rats have a natural tendency to spend more time exploring novel objects than familiar objects, and this preference can be used as an index of object recognition. Rats also show an exploratory preference for objects in locations where they have not previously encountered objects (an index of place memory) and for familiar objects in contexts different from those in which the objects were originally encountered (an index of context memory). In this experiment, rats with cytotoxic lesions of the hippocampal formation were tested on all three versions of the novelty-preference paradigm, with a 5-min retention interval between the familiarization and test phases. Rats with sham lesions displayed a novelty preference on all three trial types, whereas the rats with hippocampal lesions displayed a novelty preference on Object trials but did not discriminate between the objects on Place trials or Context trials. The findings indicate that hippocampal damage impairs memory for contextual or spatial aspects of an experience, whereas memory for objects that were part of the same experience are left relatively intact.     

Changes in the neuropsychological correlates of clinical dimensions between the acute and stable phase of schizophrenia

This study was designed to investigate whether the neuropsychological correlates of the symptom dimensions of schizophrenia vary with the clinical state in patients followed from the acute to stable the phase of the illness. Fifteen patients were assessed for symptoms (SAPS-SANS) and undergone a complete neuropsychological assessment at two sessions. The first session (S1) was carried out within six days after admission, i.e., acute phase and the second (S2) at least two month after hospitalization, i.e., stable phase. The data were analyzed using stepwise regression models in which neuropsychological scores were in entered to predict each dimensional score. This analysis was applied on the S1 and S2 data as well as on the S2-S1 difference to assess the neuropsychological predictors of clinical changes. Generally, the results replicate the previous associations between neuropsychological and dimensional measures found in stable patients. In addition, this study shows if each dimension appears to rely on a key structure, symptom variations seems to involve changes in the spread of the dysfunction and/or changes in the connectivity between the key and other regions. The results also suggest that functional changes related to some symptoms dimensions occur to compensate for the dysfunction associated with other symptoms.     

Semantic processing of words, cognitive resources and N400: an event-related potentials study

The specificity of the right hemisphere (RH) contribution to the semantic processing of words is still debated. Indeed, the semantic impairments of right hemisphere damaged (RHD) subjects may be the expression of limited general cognitive resources rather than a specific impairment of semantic processing ([Monetta et al., 2001]; [Murray, 2000]). The purpose of this study was to evaluate the possibility that the N400 reflect the availability of cognitive resources through an analysis of its different amplitudes according to different semantic complexity level. Ten young adults without any history of neurological damage participated in a semantic categorization task with two different levels of difficulty based on prototypicality. Event related potential (ERP) signals from 64 electrodes were recorded. An N400 was observed during the processing of difficult words and distractors. The results show that the greatest N400 activation was observed during the processing of difficult words, thus reflecting a possible increase in the amount of required cognitive resources.