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Abusive Supervision – Who’s to Blame?
It seems self-evident that abusive supervision encourages deviant behavior among subordinates. Boss yells at employee, and employee can’t shout back without the risk of getting fired or suspended. So employee vents anger and frustration on the organization — stealing company property or abusing an expense account. But could it be that such deviant behaviors are what cause bosses to treat employees abusively, rather than the other way around? A newly published behavioral study suggests that possibility. An international team of researchers theorized that abusive supervision will lead to organizational deviance, and vice versa.
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Investigating the Siren Song of Mobile Devices in the Car
The vast majority of U.S. states ban motorists from texting while driving, and at least a dozen bar even voice conversations over a handheld device. Similar prohibitions are being enacted around the world. But so far they haven’t made a substantial dent in distracted driving. At any given moment during the day in the United States, approximately 660,000 drivers are using a handheld communications device instead of concentrating on the road, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. So why do so many of us ignore the dangers of texting or chatting on the phone when we’re behind the wheel?
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Seeing the Glass as Half Full: Taking a New Look at Cognition and Aging
From a cognitive perspective, aging is typically associated with decline. As we age, it may get harder to remember names and dates, and it may take us longer to come up with the right answer to a question. But the news isn’t all bad when it comes to cognitive aging, according to a set of three articles in the July 2014 issue of Perspectives in Psychological Science. Plumbing the depths of the available scientific literature, the authors of the three articles show how several factors -- including motivation and crystallized knowledge -- can play important roles in supporting and maintaining cognitive function in the decades past middle age.
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Applications Invited for Inaugural TANG Prize for Achievements in Psychology
The Department of Psychology at the University of Toronto is pleased to announce the call for nominations for the 2014 inaugural TANG Prize for Achievements in Psychology. As a department at a public university, we believe in furthering the science of psychology in service of enhancing human wellbeing. Applications are encouraged from internationally-recognized scholars in psychology or a closely-related field who have shown creativity and rigor in their approach and whose record of achievement has left an indelible mark on the field. This award has been made possible through generous support from the TANG Foundation.
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The Process of Problem Solving
People encounter problems every day. Some problems, such as solving the daily Sudoku puzzle, are enjoyable, while others, like figuring out how to retrieve the keys you just locked in the car, are not. Although researchers have examined problem solving, there is still a lot we don’t know about how we strategically work through problems. In a 2013 article published in the Journal of Cognitive Psychology, Ngar Yin Louis Lee (Chinese University of Hong Kong) and APS William James Fellow Philip N. Johnson-Laird (Princeton University) examined the ways people develop strategies to solve related problems.
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Mixed Motives May Mess Up Motivation
Many professionals are driven by a pure passion for their work, finding reward in simply doing a good job, delivering a great service, or producing a great product. For these people, their career is not
