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The information and communication technology (ICT) sector within the Netherlands is a major driver of globalization, the country’s economic growth and innovation. The Dutch ICT sector’s performance is increasingly becoming dependent upon employee driven innovations in order to address the needs of the sectors they service. In other words, the ICT sector within the Netherlands is largely dependent upon the performance and innovative capacity of its employees; both of which are functions of employee engagement. Given the high demand, and low supply of talent within this sector, ICT organizations need to develop innovative ways to enhance the performance capacities of its people. Developing an engaged and highly innovative workforce seems to be an efficient way to activate employees’ performance. As such, the aim of this paper was to investigate the mediating function of employee driven innovative work behaviors in the relationship between work engagement and task performance within the a Dutch ICT consulting firm. A cross-sectional survey-based research design, employing a census-based sampling method, was employed to obtain data from a global ICT consulting firm within the Netherlands (n = 232). The Utrecht Work Engagement Scale, the Innovative Work Behavior Scale and the Task Performance Scale was used to assess the associative subjective experiences of ICT employees. The results showed that work engagement is a significant driver for innovative work behaviors, which in turn affects the task performance of employees. Further, innovative work behaviors are therefore important to translate the engaging energies of employees into performance. This paper discusses the theoretical and practical implications of these findings.
Problematisation: The credibility and transparency of industrial and organisational psychological (IOP) research within South Africa was recently challenged by Efendic and Van Zyl (2019). The authors briefly showed inconsistencies in statistical results reported by authors of the South African Journal of Industrial Psychology (SAJIP), that various studies were insufficiently powered, that best-practice guidelines for the reporting of results were mostly only partially followed and that no transparency exists with regard to the research process. They demonstrated that authors of the SAJIP may knowingly or unknowingly be engaging in questionable research practices, which directly affects the credibility of both the discipline and the journal. Furthermore, they suggested practical guidelines for both authors and the SAJIP on how this could be managed.
Implications: Based on these suggestions, the authors invited prominent members of the IOP scientific community to provide scholarly commentary on their paper in order to aid in the development of ‘a clear strategy on how [the confidence crisis in IOP] could be managed, what the role of SAJIP is in this process and how SAJIP and its contributors could proactively engage to address these issues’. Seven members of the editorial board and two international scholars provided commentaries in an attempt to further the debate about the nature, causes, consequences and management of the credibility crisis within the South African context.
Purpose: The purpose of this final rebuttal article was to summarise and critically reflect on the commentaries of the nine articles to advance the debate on the confidence crisis within the South African IOP discipline.
Recommendations: All SAJIP’s stakeholders (authors, editors, reviewers, the publication house, universities and the journal) can play an active role in enhancing the credibility of the discipline. It is suggested that SAJIP should develop a clear and structured strategy to promote credible, transparent and ethical research practices within South Africa.
Orientation: The purpose of this editorial was to provide an introduction and a general overview of the special issue on Open Science Practices: A Vision for the Future of SAJIP, as hosted in the 45th edition of the South African Journal of Industrial Psychology (SAJIP). Specifically, the aim was to provide a viable, practical and implementable strategy for enhancing the scientific credibility, transparency and international stature of SAJIP.
Objective: To determine whether the performance of multiple sclerosis (MS) patients in the sound-induced flash illusion (SiFi), a multisensory perceptual illusion, would reflect their cognitive impairment.
Methods: We performed the SiFi task as well as an extensive neuropsychological testing in 95 subjects [39 patients with relapse-remitting MS (RRMS), 16 subjects with progressive multiple sclerosis (PMS) and 40 healthy control subjects (HC)].
Results: MS patients reported more frequently the multisensory SiFi than HC. In contrast, there were no group differences in the control conditions. Essentially, patients with progressive type of MS continued to perceive the illusion at stimulus onset asynchronies (SOA) that were more than three times longer than the SOA at which the illusion was already disrupted for healthy controls. Furthermore, MS patients' degree of cognitive impairment measured with a broad neuropsychological battery encompassing tests for memory, attention, executive functions, and fluency was predicted by their performance in the SiFi task for the longest SOA of 500 ms.
Conclusions: These findings support the notion that MS patients exhibit an altered multisensory perception in the SiFi task and that their susceptibility to the perceptual illusion is negatively correlated with their neuropsychological test performance. Since MS lesions affect white matter tracts and cortical regions which seem to be involved in the transfer and processing of both crossmodal and cognitive information, this might be one possible explanation for our findings. SiFi might be considered as a brief, non-expensive, language- and education-independent screening test for cognitive deficits in MS patients.
In today’s "new world of work," knowledge workers are often given considerable flexibility regarding where and when to work (i.e., time-spatial flexibility) and this has become a popular approach to redesigning work. Whilst the adoption of such practices is mainly considered a top-down approach to work design, we argue that successful utilization of time-spatial flexibility requires proactivity on the part of the employee in the form of time-spatial job crafting. Previous research has demonstrated that time-spatial flexibility can have both positive and negative effects on well-being, performance, and work-life balance; yet remains mute about the underlying reasons for this and how employees can handle the given flexibility. Drawing on research from work design, we posit that in order for employees to stay well and productive in this context, they need to engage in time-spatial job crafting (i.e., a context-specific form of job crafting that entails reflection on time and place), which can be considered a future work skill. We propose a theoretical model of time-spatial job crafting in which we discuss its components, shed light on its antecedents, and explain how time-spatial job crafting is related to positive work outcomes through a time/spatial-demands fit.
Switching between reading tasks leads to phase-transitions in reading times in L1 and L2 readers
(2019)
Reading research uses different tasks to investigate different levels of the reading process, such as word recognition, syntactic parsing, or semantic integration. It seems to be tacitly assumed that the underlying cognitive process that constitute reading are stable across those tasks. However, nothing is known about what happens when readers switch from one reading task to another. The stability assumptions of the reading process suggest that the cognitive system resolves this switching between two tasks quickly. Here, we present an alternative language-game hypothesis (LGH) of reading that begins by treating reading as a softly-assembled process and that assumes, instead of stability, context-sensitive flexibility of the reading process. LGH predicts that switching between two reading tasks leads to longer lasting phase-transition like patterns in the reading process. Using the nonlinear-dynamical tool of recurrence quantification analysis, we test these predictions by examining series of individual word reading times in self-paced reading tasks where native (L1) and second language readers (L2) transition between random word and ordered text reading tasks. We find consistent evidence for phase-transitions in the reading times when readers switch from ordered text to random-word reading, but we find mixed evidence when readers transition from random-word to ordered-text reading. In the latter case, L2 readers show moderately stronger signs for phase-transitions compared to L1 readers, suggesting that familiarity with a language influences whether and how such transitions occur. The results provide evidence for LGH and suggest that the cognitive processes underlying reading are not fully stable across tasks but exhibit soft-assembly in the interaction between task and reader characteristics.
Background: A growing number of studies are questioning the validity of current DSM diagnoses, either as "discrete" or distinct mental disorders and/or as phenotypically homogeneous syndromes. In this study, we investigated how symptom domains in patients with a main diagnosis of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), panic disorder (PD) and social anxiety disorder (SAD) coaggregate. We predicted that symptom domains would be unrelated to DSM diagnostic categories and less likely to cluster with each other as severity increases.
Methods: One-hundred eight treatment seeking patients with a main diagnosis of OCD, SAD or PD were assessed with the Dimensional Obsessive-Compulsive Scale (DOCS), the Social Phobia Inventory (SPIN), the Panic and Agoraphobia Scale (PAS), the Anxiety Sensitivity Index-Revised (ASI-R), and the Beck Depression and Anxiety Inventories (BDI and BAI, respectively). Subscores generated by each scale (herein termed "symptom domains") were used to categorize individuals into mild, moderate and severe subgroups through K-means clusterization and subsequently analysed by means of multiple correspondence analysis.
Results: Broadly, we observed that symptom domains of OCD, SAD or PD tend to cluster on the basis of their severities rather than their DSM diagnostic labels. In particular, symptom domains and disorders were grouped into (1) a single mild "neurotic" syndrome characterized by multiple, closely related and co-occurring mild symptom domains; (2) two moderate (complicated and uncomplicated) "neurotic" syndromes (the former associated with panic disorder); and (3) severe but dispersed "neurotic" symptom domains.
Conlusion: Our findings suggest that symptoms domains of treatment seeking patients with OCD and anxiety disorders tend to be better conceptualized in terms of severity rather than rigid diagnostic boundaries.
A hypothesis regarding the development of imitation learning is presented that is rooted in intrinsic motivations. It is derived from a recently proposed form of intrinsically motivated learning (IML) for efficient coding in active perception, wherein an agent learns to perform actions with its sense organs to facilitate efficient encoding of the sensory data. To this end, actions of the sense organs that improve the encoding of the sensory data trigger an internally generated reinforcement signal. Here it is argued that the same IML mechanism might also support the development of imitation when general actions beyond those of the sense organs are considered: The learner first observes a tutor performing a behavior and learns a model of the the behavior's sensory consequences. The learner then acts itself and receives an internally generated reinforcement signal reflecting how well the sensory consequences of its own behavior are encoded by the sensory model. Actions that are more similar to those of the tutor will lead to sensory signals that are easier to encode and produce a higher reinforcement signal. Through this, the learner's behavior is progressively tuned to make the sensory consequences of its actions match the learned sensory model. I discuss this mechanism in the context of human language acquisition and bird song learning where similar ideas have been proposed. The suggested mechanism also offers an account for the development of mirror neurons and makes a number of predictions. Overall, it establishes a connection between principles of efficient coding, intrinsic motivations and imitation.
To prepare for an impending event of unknown temporal distribution, humans internally increase the perceived probability of event onset as time elapses. This effect is termed the hazard rate of events. We tested how the neural encoding of hazard rate changes by providing human participants with prior information on temporal event probability. We recorded behavioral and electroencephalographic (EEG) data while participants listened to continuously repeating five-tone sequences, composed of four standard tones followed by a non-target deviant tone, delivered at slow (1.6 Hz) or fast (4 Hz) rates. The task was to detect a rare target tone, which equiprobably appeared at either position two, three or four of the repeating sequence. In this design, potential target position acts as a proxy for elapsed time. For participants uninformed about the target’s distribution, elapsed time to uncertain target onset increased response speed, displaying a significant hazard rate effect at both slow and fast stimulus rates. However, only in fast sequences did prior information about the target’s temporal distribution interact with elapsed time, suppressing the hazard rate. Importantly, in the fast, uninformed condition pre-stimulus power synchronization in the beta band (Beta 1, 15–19 Hz) predicted the hazard rate of response times. Prior information suppressed pre-stimulus power synchronization in the same band, while still significantly predicting response times. We conclude that Beta 1 power does not simply encode the hazard rate, but—more generally—internal estimates of temporal event probability based upon contextual information.
Background: Prolonged Grief Disorder (PGD) is a distinct syndrome that follows bereavement. It is different from other mental disorders and is characterized by symptoms such as yearning for the bereaved, or intense emotional pain or distress. Violent loss is one major risk factor for the development of PGD.
Objectives: PGD has been studied in different populations, mostly in small samples, with only a few of them being representative. Although research highlighted that traumatic experiences paired with challenges related to migration make refugees particularly vulnerable to PGD, PGD has only rarely been studied in refugees. Thus, this article a) examines the prevalence of PGD in female refugees in Germany according to the criteria proposed by Prigerson and colleagues in 2009, and b) associates PGD with other common psychopathology (e.g. anxiety, depression, somatization and trauma).
Method: A total of 106 female refugees were assessed for bereavement and PGD. Of these 106 individuals, 85 were interviewed using the Prolonged Grief Disorder Scale (PG-13). Symptoms of anxiety and depression were assessed by the Hopkins Symptom Checklist-25 (HSCL-25), somatization was assessed by the Somatization Subscale of the Symptom-Checklist-90 (SCL-90), and the number of witnessed and experienced trauma was assessed by the Posttraumatic Diagnostic Scale (PDS/HTQ).
Results: Ninety of the 106 participants had experienced bereavement, and among those, 9.41% met criteria for PGD. The most frequent PGD symptoms were bitterness, longing or yearning for the bereaved, and lack of acceptance of the loss. Furthermore, grief symptoms were significantly associated with symptoms of depression, anxiety, somatization, and the number of experienced traumatic events.
Conclusion: The PGD prevalence rate found corresponds with previous studies, demonstrating that prevalence rates for PGD are especially high in refugees. High prevalence rates of bereavement as well as PGD highlight the need for assessment and specifically tailored treatment of PGD in refugees. PGD goes along with significant psychopathology, which further emphasizes the need for treatment.