Ethical Decision Making and Leadership Stress

The theme of this entry is how ethical decisionmaking is influenced by leadership stress. From a traditional point of view, stress is seen as a potential threat to leaders’ ethical decisions (Selart and Johansen 2011). There is substantial evidence suggesting that stress has a negative impact on leaders’ cognition and information processing, leading to errors and biases in their decisionmaking. However, it must be pointed out that in many types of professions (e.g., chief pilots, chief surgeons, and chief fire officers) leaders are more or less bound to develop advanced levels of stresstolerance in order to function ethically. This implies that stress does not always have to result in unethical decisions among leaders (Klein 1996). The structure of this entry is organized such that its first part is devoted to clarification of the relationship between ethical decision-making and leadership, while the second part is focused on how stress adds to this relationship

Negative emotional stimuli reduce contextual cueing but not response times in inefficient search

In visual search, previous work has shown that negative stimuli narrow the focus of attention and speed reaction times (RTs). This paper investigates these two effects by first asking whether negative emotional stimuli narrow the focus of attention to reduce the learning of a display context in a contextual cueing task and, second, whether exposure to negative stimuli also reduces RTs in inefficient search tasks. In Experiment 1, participants viewed either negative or neutral images (faces or scenes) prior to a contextual cueing task. In a typical contextual cueing experiment, RTs are reduced if displays are repeated across the experiment compared with novel displays that are not repeated. The results showed that a smaller contextual cueing effect was obtained after participants viewed negative stimuli than when they viewed neutral stimuli. However, in contrast to previous work, overall search RTs were not faster after viewing negative stimuli (Experiments 2 to 4). The findings are discussed in terms of the impact of emotional content on visual processing and the ability to use scene context to help facilitate search

The interaction of gambling outcome and gambling harm-minimisation strategies for electronic gambling: the efficacy of computer generated self-appraisal messaging

It has been argued that generating pop-up messages during electronic gambling sessions, which cause a player to engage in self-appraisal of their gambling behaviour, instil greater control and awareness of behaviour (Monaghan, Computers in Human Behaviour, 25, 202–207, 2009). Consideration for the potential interaction between the messaging’s efficacy and gambling outcome (winning or losing) is lacking however. Thirty participants took part in a repeated-measures experiment where they gambled on the outcome of a computer-simulated gambling task. Outcome was manipulated by the experimenter to induce winning and losing streaks. Participants gambled at a significantly faster speed and a higher average stake size, which resulted in a greater betting intensity in the Loss condition compared to the Win condition. Computer generated self-appraisal messaging was then applied during the gambling session, which was able to significantly reduce the average speed of betting in the Loss condition only, demonstrating an interaction effect between computer generated messaging and gambling outcome

Sex differences in the Simon task help to interpret sex differences in selective attention.

In the last decade, a number of studies have reported sex differences in selective attention, but a unified explanation for these effects is still missing. This study aims to better understand these differences and put them in an evolutionary psychological context. 418 adult participants performed a computer-based Simon task, in which they responded to the direction of a left or right pointing arrow appearing left or right from a fixation point. Women were more strongly influenced by task-irrelevant spatial information than men (i.e., the Simon effect was larger in women, Cohen's d = 0.39). Further, the analysis of sex differences in behavioral adjustment to errors revealed that women slow down more than men following mistakes (d = 0.53). Based on the combined results of previous studies and the current data, it is proposed that sex differences in selective attention are caused by underlying sex differences in core abilities, such as spatial or verbal cognition

Interactive perceptual and attentional limits in visual extinction.

We report a case-study of YE, a 54-year-old person who suffered multiple shell injuries that caused a right-parietal lesion and left hemianopia, almost 30 years ago. We conducted 4 experiments using a basic extinction paradigm in which YE had to report single stimuli presented on the left or right or two stimuli presented simultaneously in both visual fields. We show that extinction was selectively affected both by increasing the relative perceptual salience of the contralesional stimulus and by cueing attention to the contralesional side. The effects of perceptual salience and attentional cueing interacted, with cueing being more effective when the stimuli had relatively high perceptual salience. The data are consistent with attentional and perceptual factors interacting to determine the competition between left and right side stimuli that underlies extinction