Career engagement : Investigating intraindividual predictors of weekly fluctuations in proactive career behaviors

The present study applies a micro-level perspective on how within-individual differences in motivational and social-cognitive factors affect the weekly fluctuations of engagement in proactive career behaviors among a group of 67 German university students. Career self-efficacy beliefs, perceived career barriers, experienced social career support, positive and negative emotions, and career engagement were assessed weekly for 13 consecutive weeks. Hierarchical linear regression analyses showed that above-average levels of career engagement within individuals were predicted by higher than average perceived social support and positive emotions during a given week. Conversely, within-individual differences in self-efficacy, barriers, and negative emotions had no effect. The results suggest that career interventions should provide boosts in social support and positive emotions.

The career engagement scale : Development and validation of a measure of proactive career behaviors

Careers today increasingly require engagement in proactive career behaviors; however, there is a lack of validated measures assessing the general degree to which somebody is engaged in such career behaviors. We describe the results of six studies with six independent samples of German university students (total N = 2,854), working professionals (total N = 561), and university graduates (N = 141) that report the development and validation of the Career Engagement Scale - a measure of the degree to which somebody is proactively developing her or his career as expressed by diverse career behaviors. The studies provide support for measurement invariance across gender and time. In support of convergent and discriminant validity, we find that career engagement is more prevalent among working professionals than among university students and that this scale has incremental validity above several specific career behaviors regarding its relation to vocational identity clarity and career self-efficacy beliefs among students and to job and career satisfaction among employees. In support of incremental predictive validity, beyond the effects of several more specific career behaviors, career engagement while at university predicts higher job and career satisfaction several months later after beginning work.

Commentary on "The Cognitive-Emotional Brain: From Interactions to Integration" by Luiz Pessoa - "On theory integration: Toward developing affective components within cognitive architectures"

In The Cognitive-Emotional Brain, Pessoa (2013) suggests that cognition and emotion should not be considered separately. We agree with this and argue that cognitive architectures can provide steady ground for this kind of theory integration and for investigating interactions among underlying cognitive processes. We briefly explore how affective components can be implemented and how neuroimaging measures can help validate models and influence theory development.

Embodied memory: unconscious smiling modulates emotional evaluation of episodic memories.

Since Damasio introduced the somatic markers hypothesis in Damasio (1994), it has spread through the psychological community, where it is now commonly acknowledged that somatic states are a factor in producing the qualitative dimension of our experiences. Present actions are emotionally guided by those somatic states that were previously activated in similar experiences. In this model, somatic markers serve as a kind of embodied memory. Here, we test whether the manipulation of somatic markers can modulate the emotional evaluation of negative memories. Because facial feedback has been shown to be a powerful means of modifying emotional judgements, we used it to manipulate somatic markers. Participants first read a sad story in order to induce a negative emotional memory and then were asked to rate their emotions and memory about the text. Twenty-four hours later, the same participants were asked to assume a predetermined facial feedback (smiling) while reactivating their memory of the sad story. The participants were once again asked to fill in emotional and memory questionnaires about the text. Our results showed that participants who had smiled during memory reactivation later rated the text less negatively than control participants. However, the contraction of the zygomaticus muscles during memory reactivation did not have any impact on episodic memory scores. This suggests that manipulating somatic states modified emotional memory without affecting episodic memory. Thus, modulating memories through bodily states might pave the way to studying memory as an embodied function and help shape new kinds of psychotherapeutic interventions.

Emotional intelligence compensates for low IQ and boosts low emotionality individuals in a self-presentation task

The research on emotional intelligence (EI) has focused mainly on testing the incremental validity of EI with respect to general intelligence and personality; less attention has been devoted to investigating the potential interaction effects. In a self-presentation task that required participants to obtain positive evaluations from others, individuals low in IQ but high in EI performed as well as the high IQ individuals. In addition, the low emotionality individuals performed significantly higher when also high in EI. The results extend the previous findings on the compensatory effect of EI on low IQ to the domain of interpersonal effectiveness and shed light on the effective functioning of personality traits when interpreted with the interaction of EI. Overall this study suggests that the role of EI in predicting performance might have been overlooked by checking solely for main effects and illustrates new venues for understanding the contribution of EI in explaining emotion-laden performance.