HR Interventions that Go Viral

What causes one Human Resource (HR) intervention to thrive while another dies? The purpose of this paper is to explore the characteristics of HR interventions that are not only self-sustaining, but adapt and gain momentum over time. Based on a review of the literature, a case study, and 16 critical incident interviews with senior Industrial-Organizational (I–O) and HR professionals, several characteristics of the organization, the intervention, and the leader consistently emerged as important in creating sustainable HR programs, suggesting several new directions for future research.     

Neurodevelopmental differences in emotional prosody in normal children and children with left and right temporal lobe epilepsy

Emotional prosody, which has been defined as the emotional aspects of speech which communicate pleasure, fear, sorrow, anger, etc., has been demonstrated to be primarily a function of the nondominant hemisphere (typically, the right hemisphere) in adult populations. However, few researchers have addressed the developmental or lateralized nature of emotional prosody in children. In this study, an instrument was developed to measure the receptive aspects of emotional prosody in pediatric populations and administered to normal children ages 6 to 11 years old. An analysis of variance revealed significant age-related differences. Additionally, the instrument was administered to 12 children with right temporal lobe epilepsy and 11 children with left temporal lobe epilepsy. Analysis of variance indicated that there was no significant difference in scores between the left temporal and right temporal lobe groups. However, right temporal epileptic patients scored significantly lower than normal children on all sections of the instrument, suggesting that in children like adults, the right temporal lobe may be dominant with respect to the receptive aspects of emotional prosody.     

Psychological skills and mindfulness training effects on the psychological wellbeing of undergraduate music students: An exploratory study

This study explored the efficacy of psychological skills and mindfulness training intervention on the psychological wellbeing of undergraduate music students. Participants were undergraduate music students (n = 36) from the Department of Music at a South African university, 21 of whom were elected to take the psychological skills and mindfulness training intervention. Data on their self-reported psychological wellbeing, psychological skills, mindfulness and performance anxiety levels were collected pre-and post-intervention. The analysis applied non-parametric procedures to determine changes in students’ psychological wellbeing after the seven-week intervention programme. Findings suggest improvements in psychological wellbeing, psychological skills, mindfulness and performance anxiety with training. Psychological skills and mindfulness training may have benefits to the psychological wellbeing of music students.