Mutuality and Reciprocity in the Psychological Contracts of Employees and Employers.

The authors assessed the joint perceptions of the employee and his or her employer to examine mutuality and reciprocity in the employment relationship. Paired psychological contract reports were obtained from 80 employee-employer dyads in 16 university-based research centers. On the basis of in-depth study of the research setting, research directors were identified as primary agents for the university (employer) in shaping the terms of employment of staff scientists (employees). By assessing the extent of consistency between employee and employer beliefs regarding their exchange agreement, the present study mapped the variation and consequences of mutuality and reciprocity in psychological contracts. Results indicate that both mutuality and reciprocity are positively related to archival indicators of research productivity and career advancement, in addition to self-reported measures of Met Expectations and intention to continue working with the employer. Implications for psychological contract theory are presented. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Conducting Psychological Research in Medical Settings: Challenges, Limitations, and Recommendations for Effectiveness Research.

Efficacy research is insufficient and ineffective in changing practice, despite a large supporting psychotherapy efficacy literature. Concurrently, demand for supporting data and the burden on everyday practice for generating these data is increasing. The disconnect between efficacy and effectiveness is due to a lack of conceptual and methodological tools for testing efficacious procedures in real-world settings, particularly medical contexts. This article articulates the position that effectiveness studies pose more complex questions that require an alteration of conceptual and methodological frames of reference in order to make behavioral services available to the broadest patient base. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The Dark Side of Relational Pursuit: From Attraction to Obsession and Stalking,.

Review declaring pleasant surprise with this relatively short book on stalking. It contains 164 pages of text, and provides a thorough context for understanding and treating stalking behavior, including a focus on both victim and perpetrator. The book is divided into five chapters. The first of these defines the nature of stalking behavior. Stalking is defined as harmful conduct, which involves unwanted communication and repeated unwanted intrusion by one individual upon another. The review notes that stalking behavior has three defining characteristics--(a) relentless and persistent contact, which is (b) unwanted and (c) adverse to the recipient. It is further observed that there is no single motive for stalking, nor any specific psychological profile for the personality of stalkers. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

An agent-based debiasing framework for investment decision-support systems

Though researchers agree on the role of psychological forces on individuals' decision-making and emphasise the need for developing decision-support systems (DSS) that make individuals aware of these forces, a framework that can guide us in building such systems is still non-existent. In this article, we attempt to bridge this gap by proposing an agent-based debiasing framework for developing investment DSS. Identifying the primary characteristics of major biases influencing investment decisions through a thorough literature review, we propose a taxonomy to categorise them as cognitive, affective or conative. Cognitive biases are information-processing biases. Affective biases involve general moods and emotions. Conative biases are relatively stable personality traits such as overconfidence and inertia. We then outline debiasing strategies for each of these bias categories and identify decision-support characteristics necessary in software agents to carry out the appropriate debiasing tasks. An agent-based DSS architecture is then proposed, and a detailed trading example triggering a sample bias detection and debiasing algorithm is discussed to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed system.     

Vehicle guidance by delineation systems at night

Abstract

Car and road designs are considered to be better when they require less driver attention and allow drivers to behave more as a supervisory controller in coping with normal, multi-task driving. In this paper an example is presented with respect to road design and, more specifically, with respect to various configurations of delineation on wet roads at night. The criteria for supervisory control are focused on drivers' observation strategy in terms of ‘free times’ available for tasks beyond lateral vehicle control, on drivers' control strategy in terms of amplitudes and frequencies of steering-wheel movements, and on the overall driving performance in terms of variations in lateral position and yaw rate.

The research findings on straight and curved roads recommend the necessity of using delineation devices at both sides of the traffic lane by the implementation of profiled stripes, raised pavement markers at the location of the centre and/or lane boundaries, or post-mounted delineators just beside the boundary. Post-mounted delineators on larger cross distances are less effective. The longitudinal spacing between the raised pavement markers has to be restricted up to 12 m for curves with radii for 200 m and up to 24 m for straight roads.     

Psychological work characteristics,psychological workload and associated psychological and cognitive requirements of train drivers

This study aimed to assess the psychological work characteristics and psychological workload of train drivers and to define the psychological and cognitive requirements of their work. A systematic literature search was performed, and expert interviews were conducted. The following work demands were specific to train drivers: high emotional and mental demands, small amount of autonomy and skill discretion. No evidence of a high emotional workload, a high mental workload or short-term stress reactivity was found. In general, the drivers' fatigue complaints and recovery needs after work were comparable to that of other workers. However, severe sleepiness and high need for recovery did affect a substantial proportion of train drivers. The ability to stay aware, to anticipate, to remain attentive and to cope with fatigue are psychological and cognitive skills that are required to adequately and safely perform the train drivers' job. Including these requirements in periodic assessments of train drivers is recommended.     

Understanding forced adoption of self-service technology: the impacts of users’ psychological reactance

ABSTRACT

With the rapid development of artificial intelligence, information system, and mobile technologies, some companies (e.g. airlines) consider fully replacing service employees with self-service technologies (SSTs) to cut down costs and to increase efficiency. However, replacing full services with SSTs sometimes fail to deliver the benefits companies have hoped for: users may feel that they are being forced to use SSTs and show resistance to the new technologies. To investigate why users show resistance, we draw inferences from psychological reactance theory and argue that users may perceive the forced adoption as a threat, which leads to resistance of SSTs. A conceptual model was developed and an empirical study was conducted. The results show that, under a forced situation, users are likely to perceive the forced adoption as a threat to their freedom, causing them to have negative emotions and perceptions towards the SSTs, and, in turn, their adoption intention decreases and switch intention increases. The findings provide insights on why users show resistance to SSTs and highlight the impacts of the motivational state of psychological reactance.     

Photography in the Szondi Test: ‘The Analysis of Fate’

Léopold Szondi invented a projective test using photographs of people with mental pathologies to determine the unconscious, ancestral illnesses (or aptitudes) of his subjects. Szondi’s images were garnered from psychiatric textbooks published around 1900. Such photographs presumably revealed unconscious thoughts, desires, and destinies in the course of a test session. If a patient responded positively to a photo-portrait of a diagnosed ‘hysteric’, for instance, this indicated that the subject herself had unconscious, inherited hysterical traits. Szondi’s reasoning was predicated upon two commonly held fallacies: first that an individual’s physical appearance is the external marker of mental life, and second that photography is a transparent means of revealing true facts. In spite of (or maybe even because of) such problematic assumptions, Szondi’s use of photographs can be located historically in a tradition of reading human character from portraiture. The test was widespread, and was even administered to Adolf Eichmann at the time of his trial in Jerusalem – an ironic cultural development as Szondi himself would have been among the thousands of Jews deported from Hungary directly to Auschwitz by Eichmann had the Szondi family not been rescued by the Kastner train of 1944.     

试论安全管理中的心理隐患

据统计,90%的安全事故由行为隐患引起,减少安全事故的重点是减少行为隐患。而行为隐患由心理隐患引起,因此,减少心理隐患才是减少安全事故的关键。但现行法规中对心理隐患并未明确规定,使事故隐患排查失去了方向。心理隐患作为类别应在法规层面得到确认,并明确排查要求以促进心理隐患的辨识和心理隐患排查机制建立,提高企业安全管理水平。