Strategies of accommodation: Development of a coding system for conversational interaction

This study describes a coding system developed to operationalize the sociolinguistic strategies proposed by communication accommodation theory (CAT) in an academic context. Fifty interactions between two students (of Australian or Chinese ethnic background) or a student and faculty member were videotaped. A turn- and episode-based coding system was developed, focusing on verbal and nonverbal behavior. The development of this system is described in detail, before results are presented. Results indicated that status was the main influence on choice of strategies, particularly the extent and type of discourse management and interpersonal control. Participants' sew and ethnicity also played a role: Male participants made more use of interpretability (largely questions), whereas female participants used discourse management to develop a shared perspective. The results make clear that there is no automatic correspondence between behaviors and the strategies they constitute, and they point to the appropriateness of conceptualizing behavior and strategies separately in CAT.

Maintenance of cooperative and helping behaviors in reconstituted groups

The authors conducted a 1-year investigation of whether children, who had been trained in the previous school gear to cooperate, were able to use the skills they had been taught in reconstituted groups without additional training. Sixty-four 4th graders, who had participated in training in cooperative group behaviors in the previous gear, were assigned to the trained condition; 84 4th graders, who had not received any training, were assigned to the untrained condition. The children worked in mixed-ability (high, medium, low) gender-balanced groups (2 boys, 2 girls). Results indicate that the children in the trained groups were consistently more cooperative and helpful than their peers in the untrained groups, although they had not received refresher training in cooperative group behaviors.

Conversational influences on young children's responses to misleading questions

The present study investigated the degree to which young children's suggestible responses were related to their pragmatic language ability. In Experiment 1, forty-seven 5- and 6-year-olds were read a short picture story followed the next day by a postevent synopsis that included both consistent and misleading details about the original story. Six days later, a suggestibility effect was evident with responses to questions about the details that had been misled being less accurate than to those about details not misled. Although age significantly correlated with this effect, the relationship was not significant after controlling for the children's pragmatic language ability. The procedure in Experiment 2 was identical with the exception that the thirty-nine 5- and 6-year-olds were questioned in a format that made explicit the intended reference point of the interrogation. A suggestibility effect was now not evident nor was accuracy related to age. Taken together, these results support the position that young children's suggestibility requires a consideration not only in terms of suggestible memories but also in terms of suggestible responses that can result from incorrectly interpreting the intended message of an experimenter's questions. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved.

Replacing prelinguistic behaviors with functional communication

This study evaluated the effectiveness of a teacher-implemented intervention package designed to replace prelinguistic behaviors with functional communication. Four young children with autism participated in a multiple-probe design across three communicative functions. Initially, three existing communication functions were selected for each child. Next, the existing prelinguistic behaviors that the children used to achieve these functions were identified. Replacement forms that were considered more recognizable and symbolic were defined to achieve these same functions. After a baseline phase, teachers received inservice training, consultation, and feedback on how to encourage, acknowledge, and respond to the replacement forms. During intervention, the replacement forms increased and prelinguistic behaviors decreased in most cases. The results suggested that the teacher-implemented intervention was effective in replacing prelinguistic behaviors with alternative forms of functional communication.

Adolescent risk behaviors and communication research - Current directions

Examples of recent research into adolescent risk behaviors from a variety of disciplines and methodologies, denoting the range of researchers interested in this area and whose interest in communication and language articulates and exemplifies the extent of the field, are surveyed in this article.

Workplace conflict, bullying, and counterproductive behaviors

Using a multi-method approach, this paper presents both a qualitative and quantitative examination of workplace conflict, the emotional reactions to bullying and counterproductive behaviors. Three studies were undertaken for the present research. Data for Study 1 emerged from semi-structured interviews conducted with 50 group leaders and members from six workgroups in two large organizations. Interviews were transcribed and analyzed using systematic interpretative techniques. Findings from Study 1 showed that conflict induced a variety of emotional and behavioral responses. Data from Study 2 were collected from 660 employees from 7 public sector organizations using a structured open-ended survey. Results from Study 2 revealed that the majority of respondents perceived their managers as bullies. Study 3 surveyed 510 staff in 122 workgroups from five organizations. Regression analysis revealed that differing conflict events were associated with bullying, emotional reactions and counterproductive behaviors. In particular, prolonged conflict increased incidents of bullying. Higher levels of bullying were predictive of workplace counterproductive behaviors such as purposely wasting company material and supplies, purposely doing one's work incorrectly and purposely damaging a valuable piece of property belonging to the employer.

Self-regulatory behaviors in children with Down syndrome and typically developing children measured using the Goodman Lock Box

Self-regulation has been identified as an area of difficulty for those with mental retardation. The Goodman Lock Box provides measures of two critical aspects of self-regulation-planfulness and maintenance of goal-directed behavior. In this study, the Lock Box performance of 25 children with Down syndrome was compared with that of 43 typically developing children, matched for mental age (24-36 months). Children in both groups showed similar levels of competence, planfulness and distractibility. However, children with Down syndrome displayed more task-avoidant behavior. Some issues related to the measurements obtained from the Lock Box are raised. (C) 2003 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

A study of organizational citizenship behaviors in a retail setting

This study investigates the potential antecedents of organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs) in a retail setting. Much remains unknown about the factors affecting OCBs in retail settings. Several characteristics of retail jobs, as compared with other organizational behavior contexts, suggest the need to examine antecedents of OCBs. Job attitudes (job satisfaction and organizational commitment) are proposed as direct predictors of OCBs. Leadership support, professional development, and empowerment are posited as indirect predictors of OCBs and direct predictors of job attitudes. The possible moderating impacts of employee demographics and job types on the modeled relationships are also examined. The research hypotheses are tested using data collected from 211 frontline employees who work in a retail setting. The employees have customer-contact roles in the upscale food and grocery retailer that participated in the study. The pattern of results is more complex than hypothesized. Job attitudes are related to OCBs but the mediating role of job attitudes is not supported. The relationships between leadership support, professional development, and empowerment, and OCBs and job attitudes differ systematically. Evidence of how employee demographics can alter the modeled relationships is also presented. The findings have significant implications for the theory and practice of managing frontline employees. Limitations of the study are discussed and a program of further research is sketched. (C) 2003 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Effect of carbon/noncarbon addition on hydrogen storage behaviors of magnesium hydride

Various Mg/carbon and Mg/noncarbon composite systems were prepared by mechanical milling and their hydrogen storage behaviors were investigated. It was found that all the carbon additives exhibited prominent advantage over the noncarbon additives, such as BN nanotubes (BNNTs) or asbestos in improving the hydrogen capacity and dehydriding/hydriding kinetics of Mg. And among the various carbon additives, purified single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWNTs) exhibited the most prominent catalytic effect on the hydrogen storage properties of Mg. The hydrogen capacities of all Mg/C composites at 573 K reached more than 6.2 wt.% within 10 min, about 1.5 wt.% higher than that of pure MgH2 at the identical operation conditions. Under certain operation temperatures, H-absorption/desorption rates of Mg/carbon systems were over one order of magnitude higher than that of pure Mg. Furthermore, the starting temperature of the desorption reaction of MgH2 has been lowered to 60 K by adding SWNTs. On the basis of the hydrogen storage behavior and structure/phase investigations, the possible mechanism involved in the property improvement of Mg upon adding carbon materials was discussed. (c) 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Cognitive asymmetry in employee emotional reactions to leadership behaviors

This article is predicated on the idea that leaders shape workplace affective events. Based on Affective Events Theory (AET), I argue that leaders are sources of employee positive and negative emotions at work. Certain leader behaviors displayed during interactions with their employees are the sources of these affective events. The second theoretical underpinning of the article is the Asymmetry Effect of emotion. Consistent with this theory, employees are more likely to recall negative incidents than positive incidents. In a qualitative study, evidence that these processes exist in the workplace was found. Leader behaviors were sources of positive or negative emotional responses in employees; employees recalled more negative incidents than positive incidents, and they recalled them more intensely and in more detail than positive incidents. Consequently, leaders may need to exercise their emotional intelligence to generate emotional uplifts to overcome the hassles in the workplace that employees seem to remember so vividly. (c) 2006 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.