Threat of resource loss: The role of self-regulation in adaptive task performance

Changes at work are often accompanied with the threat of, or actual, resource loss. Through an experiment, we investigated the detrimental effect of the threat of resource loss on adaptive task performance. Self-regulation (i.e., task focus and emotion control) was hypothesized to buffer the negative relationship between the threat of resource loss and adaptive task performance. Adaptation was conceptualized as relearning after a change in task execution rules. Threat of resource loss was manipulated for 100 participants undertaking an air traffic control task. Using discontinuous growth curve modeling, 2 kinds of adaptation—transition adaptation and reacquisition adaptation—were differentiated. The results showed that individuals who experienced the threat of resource loss had a stronger drop in performance (less transition adaptation) and a subsequent slower recovery (less reacquisition adaptation) compared with the control group who experienced no threat. Emotion control (but not task focus) moderated the relationship between the threat of resource loss and transition adaptation. In this respect, individuals who felt threatened but regulated their emotions performed better immediately after the task change (but not later on) compared with those individuals who felt threatened and did not regulate their emotions as well. However, later on, relearning (reacquisition adaptation) under the threat of resource loss was facilitated when individuals concentrated on the task at hand.

Main themes and missing elements in psychological research into child maltreatment in Africa

These 18 papers on aspects of violence against children add to a growing body of African literature that tends to focus on four major themes. The first three are generic to research worldwide, and include efforts to uncover the extent of adverse experiences during childhood, describe the effects on health and well-being, and examine professional practices, concepts and myths. The fourth theme is more particular to Africa, and is focused on understanding how to protect children within the context of poverty, some harmful traditional practices and community violence. Despite best efforts by researchers and child rights advocates, there are missing elements in the research to date, including scant focus on the problems of emotional abuse and neglect, and limited attention to evaluation of the effectiveness of prevention and care programs.

Covitality constructs as predictors of psychological well-being and depression for secondary school students'

This study was an examination of the strength of relations among covitality, and its underlying constructs of belief in self, emotional competence, belief in others, and engaged living, and two outcome variables; subjective well-being and depression. Participants included 361 Australian secondary school students (75 males and 286 females) who completed a series of online questionnaires related to positive psychological well-being in adolescents. The results from the first standard multiple regression analysis indicated that higher levels of belief in self, belief in others, and engaged living were significant predictors of increased subjective well-being. The results from the second standard multiple regression showed that higher levels of belief in self, belief in others, and engaged living were significant predictors of decreased feelings of depression. In both standard multiple regression models, the combined effect of the traits that comprise covitality was greater than the effect of each individual positive psychological trait.

Positive psychological strengths and school engagement in primary school children

A sizeable body of research has investigated the impact of specific character strengths or traits on significant outcomes. Some recent research is beginning to consider the effects of groups of strengths, combined as a higher order variable, and termed covitality. This study investigated the combined influence of four positive character traits: gratitude, optimism, zest and persistence, upon school engagement, within a sample of 112 Australian primary school students. The combined effect of these four traits, in defining covitality as a higher or second order factor within a path analysis, was found to predict relatively higher levels of school engagement and pro-social behaviour.

MEG Adaptation resolves the spatiotemporal characteristics of face-sensitive brain responses

An unresolved goal in face perception is to identify brain areas involved in face processing and simultaneously understand the timing of their involvement. Currently, high spatial resolution imaging techniques identify the fusiform gyrus as subserving processing of invariant face features relating to identity. High temporal resolution imaging techniques localize an early latency evoked component—the N/M170—as having a major generator in the fusiform region; however, this evoked component is not believed to be associated with the processing of identity. To resolve this, we used novel magnetoencephalographic beamformer analyses to localize cortical regions in humans spatially with trial-by-trial activity that differentiated faces and objects and to interrogate their functional sensitivity by analyzing the effects of stimulus repetition. This demonstrated a temporal sequence of processing that provides category-level and then item-level invariance. The right fusiform gyrus showed adaptation to faces (not objects) at ∼150 ms after stimulus onset regardless of face identity; however, at the later latency of ∼200–300 ms, this area showed greater adaptation to repeated identity faces than to novel identities. This is consistent with an involvement of the fusiform region in both early and midlatency face-processing operations, with only the latter showing sensitivity to invariant face features relating to identity.

Workplace belongingness, psychological distress and resilience in emergency service workers

- Objective Ambulance personnel provide emergency medical services to the community, often attending to highly challenging and traumatic scenes in complex and chaotic circumstances. Currently the assessment of predictors of psychological well-being remains limited. The current study investigated whether workplace belongingness was significant in predicting psychological distress as well as the presence of resilience in ambulance personnel whilst controlling for more routinely examined factors. - Method Australian ambulance officers (N = 740) completed a survey battery including the Kessler 10 (Kessler & Mroczek, 1994), Brief Resilience Scale (Smith et al., 2008) and Psychological Sense of Organisational Membership (Cockshaw & Shochet, 2010) scale. - Results Controlling for more commonly examined factors such as severity of trauma exposure and length of service, hierarchical multiple regression analyses demonstrated that workplace belongingness was significantly associated with reduced distress levels and enhanced resilience levels. - Conclusions Results suggest that strategies to enhance a sense of workplace belongingness in emergency service organisations could promote the well-being of emergency workers despite routine exposure to potentially traumatic events.

Unsupervised Domain Adaptation by Domain Invariant Projection

Domain-invariant representations are key to addressing the domain shift problem where the training and test exam- ples follow different distributions. Existing techniques that have attempted to match the distributions of the source and target domains typically compare these distributions in the original feature space. This space, however, may not be di- rectly suitable for such a comparison, since some of the fea- tures may have been distorted by the domain shift, or may be domain specific. In this paper, we introduce a Domain Invariant Projection approach: An unsupervised domain adaptation method that overcomes this issue by extracting the information that is invariant across the source and tar- get domains. More specifically, we learn a projection of the data to a low-dimensional latent space where the distance between the empirical distributions of the source and target examples is minimized. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on the task of visual object recognition and show that it outperforms state-of-the-art methods on a stan- dard domain adaptation benchmark dataset

Domain Adaptation on the Statistical Manifold

In this paper, we tackle the problem of unsupervised domain adaptation for classification. In the unsupervised scenario where no labeled samples from the target domain are provided, a popular approach consists in transforming the data such that the source and target distributions be- come similar. To compare the two distributions, existing approaches make use of the Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD). However, this does not exploit the fact that prob- ability distributions lie on a Riemannian manifold. Here, we propose to make better use of the structure of this man- ifold and rely on the distance on the manifold to compare the source and target distributions. In this framework, we introduce a sample selection method and a subspace-based method for unsupervised domain adaptation, and show that both these manifold-based techniques outperform the cor- responding approaches based on the MMD. Furthermore, we show that our subspace-based approach yields state-of- the-art results on a standard object recognition benchmark.

"The last egg in the basket?" Elderly primiparity: A review of findings

The recent trend of later childbearing among primiparous women is examined with attention to its possible motivations and how they might relate to maternal and infant outcomes. The influence of psychological factors is examined in the context of the inconsistencies in the obstetric literature regarding the risk factors associated with advancing maternal age. An interplay of psychological and biologic factors in determining the outcome of pregnancy and adaptation to motherhood in elderly primiparous women is proposed in terms of the compensatory as opposed to cumulative effect of psychological factors. The adoption of a broad perspective in the study of the experience of later motherhood is recommended as the direction for future research.

Genotypic variation in seedling root architectural traits and implications for drought adaptation in wheat (Triticum aestivum L.)

Root system characteristics are of fundamental importance to soil exploration and below-ground resource acquisition. Root architectural traits determine the in situ space-filling properties of a root system or root architecture. The growth angle of root axes is a principal component of root system architecture that has been strongly associated with acquisition efficiency in many crop species. The aims of this study were to examine the extent of genotypic variability for the growth angle and number of seminal roots in 27 current Australian and 3 CIMMYT wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) genotypes, and to quantify using fractal analysis the root system architecture of a subset of wheat genotypes contrasting in drought tolerance and seminal root characteristics. The growth angle and number of seminal roots showed significant genotypic variation among the wheat genotypes with values ranging from 36 to 56 (degrees) and 3 to 5 (plant-1), respectively. Cluster analysis of wheat genotypes based on similarity in their seminal root characteristics resulted in four groups. The group composition reflected to some extent the genetic background and environmental adaptation of genotypes. Wheat cultivars grown widely in the Mediterranean environments of southern and western Australia generally had wider growth angle and lower number of seminal axes. In contrast, cultivars with superior performance on deep clay soils in the northern cropping region, such as SeriM82, Baxter, Babax, and Dharwar Dry exhibited a narrower angle of seminal axes. The wheat genotypes also showed significant variation in fractal dimension (D). The D values calculated for the individual segments of each root system suggested that, compared to the standard cultivar Hartog, the drought-tolerant genotypes adapted to the northern region tended to distribute relatively more roots in the soil volume directly underneath the plant. These findings suggest that wheat root system architecture is closely linked to the angle of seminal root axes at the seedling stage. The implications of genotypic variation in the seminal root characteristics and fractal dimension for specific adaptation to drought environment types are discussed with emphasis on the possible exploitation of root architectural traits in breeding for improved wheat cultivars for water-limited environments.

A comparative study of speaker adaptation methods

For the problem of speaker adaptation in speech recognition, the performance depends on the availability of adaptation data. In this paper, we have compared several existing speaker adaptation methods, viz. maximum likelihood linear regression (MLLR), eigenvoice (EV), eigenspace-based MLLR (EMLLR), segmental eigenvoice (SEV) and hierarchical eigenvoice (HEV) based methods. We also develop a new method by modifying the existing HEV method for achieving further performance improvement in a limited available data scenario. In the sense of availability of adaptation data, the new modified HEV (MHEV) method is shown to perform better than all the existing methods throughout the range of operation except the case of MLLR at the availability of more adaptation data.

Personality and social psychological studies on computer-mediated communication in school settings

The present study examined how personality and social psychological factors affect third and fourth graders' computer-mediated communication. Personality was analysed in terms of the following strategies: optimism, pessimism and defensive pessimism. Students worked either individually or in dyads which were paired homogeneously or heterogeneously according to the strategies. Moreover, the present study compared horizontal and vertical interaction. The study also examined the role that popularity plays, and students were divided into groups based on their popularity level. The results show that an optimistic strategy is useful. Optimism was found to be related to the active production and processing of ideas. Although previous research has identified drawbacks to pessimism in achievement settings, this study shows that the pessimistic strategy is not as debilitating a strategy as is usually assumed. Pessimistic students were able to process their ideas. However, defensive pessimists were somewhat cautious in introducing or changing ideas. Heterogeneous dyads were not beneficial configurations with respect to producing, introducing, or changing ideas. Moreover, many differences were found to exist between the horizontal and vertical interaction; specifically, the students expressed more opinions and feelings when teachers took no part in the discussions. Strong emotions were observed especially in the horizontal interaction. Further, group working skills were found to be more important for boys than for girls, while rejected students were not at a disadvantage compared to popular ones. Schools can encourage emotional and social learning. The present study shows that students can use computers to express their feelings. In addition, students who are unpopular in non-computer contexts or students who use pessimism can benefit from computers. Participation in computer discussions can give unpopular children a chance to develop confidence when relating to peers.

Psychological consequences of cancer from the salutogenic and dyadic perspective

Previous empirical research has shown that positive, i.e. salutogenic, psychological resources and social support, have health-promoting effects in stressful life situations. In the present study the associations between sense of coherence (SOC), dispositional optimism, partner support, psychological distress, and quality of life among cancer patients and their partners were examined. The data was collected from Helsinki University Central Hospital in 1997 2000 by self-report questionnaires approximately 2, 8, and 14 months post diagnosis. Participants in studies I-IV were 155, 123, 153, and 147 cancer patients and their partners, respectively. The sample of the present study consisted of physically relatively well-functioning patients, whose overall psychological wellbeing was generally good as compared to the healthy population. Partners in this study, however, reacted more strongly to their partners illness and treatment. The partners displayed e.g. higher levels of anxiety and depression than the patients. The results of this study indicated that cancer patients and their partners with strong SOC and who are optimistic report fewer symptoms of distress. Moreover, patients who display an optimistic attitude to life, who receive support from their partner, and who control how they express anger have a better quality of life. The findings also confirmed that the role of the partner is significant in coping with cancer. The symptoms of depression and anxiety in patients and partners were associated, and the partner s optimism seemed to protect also the patient from elevated levels of anxiety. The role of the partner was also highlighted in the couples anger-expression styles. The patients and partners tendency to inhibit anger was associated with decreased partner support and worse patient quality of life. Finally, in the present study we found substantial gender differences. For the patients, partner support was more significant for the women than for the men. Furthermore, for the female patients, the husband s tendency to openly express anger (anger-out) had a negative impact on their psychological quality of life, whereas the wives high anger-out seemed to predict good psychological quality of life in the men. Also, in this study the female partners reported higher levels of anxiety and depression as compared to the male partners. The results of the present study extend the previous literature on positive psychological resources and psychological wellbeing among cancer couples. Furthermore, these findings support the theory on SOC and optimism as health-promoting factors. However, the construct of SOC seems to include other important elements besides optimism. The findings of this study are applicable in designing new rehabilitation programmes for cancer patients and their partners.

The role of root architectural traits in adaptation of wheat to water-limited environments

Better understanding of root system structure and function is critical to crop improvement in water-limited environments. The aims of this study were to examine root system characteristics of two wheat genotypes contrasting in tolerance to water limitation and to assess the functional implications on adaptation to water-limited environments of any differences found. The drought tolerant barley variety, Mackay, was also included to allow inter-species comparison. Single plants were grown in large, soil-filled root-observation chambers. Root growth was monitored by digital imaging and water extraction was measured. Root architecture differed markedly among the genotypes. The drought-tolerant wheat (cv. SeriM82) had a compact root system, while roots of barley cv. Mackay occupied the largest soil volume. Relative to the standard wheat variety (Hartog), SeriM82 had a more uniform rooting pattern and greater root length at depth. Despite the more compact root architecture of SeriM82, total water extracted did not differ between wheat genotypes. To quantify the value of these adaptive traits, a simulation analysis was conducted with the cropping system model APSIM, for a wide range of environments in southern Queensland, Australia. The analysis indicated a mean relative yield benefit of 14.5% in water-deficit seasons. Each additional millimetre of water extracted during grain filling generated an extra 55 kg ha-1 of grain yield. The functional implications of root traits on temporal patterns and total amount of water capture, and their importance in crop adaptation to specific water-limited environments, are discussed.

Psychological resources, their social antecedents, and association with well-being and health behaviour in early adulthood

The success of entering work life, young people s psychological resources and self-reported well-being were studied in a longitudinal setting from a life-span developmental-contextual perspective in early adulthood. The aim was to analyse how psychosocial characteristics in early childhood and adolescence predict successful entrance into work life, how this is associated with well-being, and to assess the level of psychological resources such as dispositional optimism, personal meaning of work and coping in early adulthood. The role of these and social support, in the relationship between regional factors (such as place of residence and migration), self-reported health and life satisfaction was studied. The association between a specific coping strategy, i.e. eating and drinking in a stressful situation and eating habits, was studied to demonstrate how coping is associated with health behaviour. Multivariate methods, including binary logistic regression analyses and ANOVA, were used for statistical analyses. The subjects were members of the Northern Finland 1966 Birth Cohort, which consists of all women and men born in 1966 in the two northernmost provinces of Finland (n= 12,058). The most recent follow-up, at the age of 31 years when 11,637 subjects were alive, took place in 1997-1998. The results show, first, that social resources in the childhood family and adolescence school achievement predict entrance into the labour market. Secondly, psychosocial resources were found to mediate the relationship between migration from rural to urban areas, and subjective well-being. Thirdly, psychological resources at entrance into the labour market were found to develop from early infancy on. They are, however, influenced later by work history. Fourthly, stress-related eating and drinking, as a way of coping, was found to be directly associated with unhealthy eating habits and alcohol use. Gender differences were found in psychosocial resources predicting, and being associated with success in entering the labour market. For men, the role of attitudinal and psychological factors seems to be especially important in entrance into work life and in the development of psychological resources. For women, academic attainment was more important for successfully entering work life, and lack of emotional social support was a risk factor for stress-related eating only among women. Stress-related eating and drinking habits were predicted by a long history of unemployment as well as a low level of education among both genders, but not excluding an academic degree among men. The results emphasize the role of childhood psychosocial factors in preventing long-term unemployment and in enhancing psychological well-being in early adulthood. Success in entering work life, in terms of continuous work history, plays a crucial role for well-being and the amount of psychological resources in early adulthood. The results emphasize the crucial role of enhancing psychological resources for promoting positive health behaviour and diminishing regional differences in subjective well-being.