Public Sector Leaders\u27 Strategies to Improve Employee Retention

The U.S. Department of Labor and Statistics consistently reports significant employee turnover in the public sector, including the federal, state, and local levels. High turnover results in compromised public goods and services provided to a community. The widespread nature of the problem and the scarcity of literature focusing on employee retention strategies in the public sector merited this case study. Public sector leaders from Western New York who had implemented employee retention strategies in a public organization comprised the population for the study. Cost-benefit theory, human capital theory, and social capital theory provided the conceptual context for developing and executing the study. A total of 7 public sector leaders participated in semistructured interviews, which provided the primary source of data. Data were open coded, resulting in themes of employee development, engagement and empowerment, and positive work experience. The results contribute to social change by identifying practical business strategies that leaders may use to improve retention in their respective organizations. Maintaining a well-qualified, dedicated public workforce may lead to improved government goods and services on which communities rely

Facial expressions in response to a highly surprising event exceeding the field of vision: a test of Darwin's theory of surprise

Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.According to the affect program theory of facial displays, the evolutionary core of the human emotion system consists of a small set of discrete emotion mechanisms that comprise motor programs for emotion-specific facial displays. However, research on surprise has found that surprising events often fail to elicit the associated facial expression (widened eyes, raised eyebrows, mouth opening). The present study tested a refined Darwinian account of the facial expression of surprise, according to which surprising events cause widened eyes and raised eyebrows if they exceed the field of vision, as these facial changes increase the visual field and facilitate visual search. To test this hypothesis, we staged a surprising event that engulfed the field of vision: When the participants left the laboratory, they unexpectedly found themselves in a new room, a small chamber with bold green walls and a red office chair. In addition, to explore the role of social context for the expression of surprise, in two of three experimental conditions, a stranger or a friend they had brought to the experiment was sitting on the chair. The results provided no support for the Darwinian account of the facial expression of surprise. A complete expression of surprise was observed in 5% of the participants, and the individual components of the expression were shown only by a minority, regardless of social context. These findings reinforce doubts about the adequacy of affect program theory for the case of surprise

Cosmopolitan Sentiment: Politics, Charity, and Global Poverty

Duties to address global poverty face a motivation gap. We have good reasons for acting yet we do not, at least consistently. A ‘sentimental education’, featuring literature and journalism detailing the lives of distant others has been suggested as a promising means by which to close this gap (Nussbaum in Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions, CUP, Cambridge, 2001; Rorty in Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, vol. 3, CUP, Cambridge, 1998). Although sympathetic to this project, I argue that it is too heavily wed to a charitable model of our duties to address global poverty—understood as requiring we sacrifice a certain portion of our income. However, political action, aimed at altering institutions at both a global and a local level is likely to be necessary in order to provide effective long-term solutions to poverty globally. To rectify this, the article develops an alternative dialogical account of sentimental education, suitable for motivating support for political action to address global poverty

Translating emotion theory and research into preventive interventions.

Scientific advances in the field of emotions suggest a framework for conceptualizing the emotion-related aspects of prevention programs that aim to enhance children’s socioemotional competence and prevent the emergence of behavior problems and psychopathology. A conception of emotions as inherently adaptive and motivational and the related empirical evidence from several disciplines and specialities suggest 7 principles for developing preventive interventions: the utilization of positive and negative emotions, emotion modulation as a mediator of emotion utilization, emotion patterns in states and traits, different processes of emotion activation, emotion communication in early life, and the development of connections for the modular and relatively independent emotions and cognitive systems. Each principle’s practical implications and application in current prevention programs are discussed. Almost from its beginning, psychology has consisted of both a science and a profession, and an uneasy relation between the two. William James (1890/1950), who defined the field more than a century ago, had a lab and saw patients, but the relations between his science and practice have remained largely unknown (Taylor, 1999). This uneasy relation between the major aspects of psychol-ogy continued through the 20th century, leaving a wide gulf between the science and practice of psychology (Weisz, Donen-berg, Han, & Weiss, 1995). Experts have noted the dearth of mental health projects that integrate theory, findings from basic research, intervention, and careful evaluation of treatments o