Psychological Capital, Positive Affect, and Organizational Outcomes: A Three-Wave Cross-Lagged Study

Psychological capital (PsyCap) is a higher-order construct comprising hope, efficacy, optimism, and resiliency, which has attracted more and more attention from both academics and practitioners. Despite promising progress made in the PsyCap literature, the underlying mechanisms linking PsyCap to organizational outcomes still need more investigation utilizing longitudinal research design. Moreover, the reciprocal relationships between PsyCap and positive affect require more attention. Therefore, we aim to test the central role of positive affect in the relationships between PsyCap and affective organizational commitment (AOC) on one hand and organizational citizenship behaviour toward organization (OCBO) on the other hand as well as the reciprocal relationships between PsyCap and positive affect in this study. A three-wave longitudinal survey was conducted using a cross-lagged panel design with a one-month time lag between two consecutive waves. Panel data was collected from 208 workers in Beijing, China. The results support the hypothesis that positive affect serves as a mediator in the relationships between PsyCap and OCBO. Moreover, we also find some support for a reciprocal relationship between PsyCap and positive affect. The theoretical and practical implications of the findings are also discussed

An Intelligent Secure Adversarial Examples Detection Scheme in Heterogeneous Complex Environments

Funding Information: Funding Statement: This work was supported in part by the Natural Science Foundation of Hunan Province under Grant Nos. 2023JJ30316 and 2022JJ2029, in part by a project supported by Scientific Research Fund of Hunan Provincial Education Department under Grant No. 22A0686, and in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant No. 62172058. This work was also funded by the Researchers Supporting Project (No. RSP2023R102) King Saud University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Xianmin Gong's Quick Files

The Quick Files feature was discontinued and it’s files were migrated into this Project on March 11, 2022. The file URL’s will still resolve properly, and the Quick Files logs are available in the Project’s Recent Activity

Social motives, attributions and expectations as predictors of the decision to participate in a speed-dating event

Two studies investigated the role of dispositional social approach and avoidance motives (i.e., what people generally desire and fear in social relationships) for the decision to participate in a speed-dating event. In a sample of N = 205 college students (Study 1), approach motives were positively and avoidance motives negatively associated with the decision to participate in a speed-dating event. Focusing on the underlying processes, Study 2 (N = 153) showed that approach and avoidance motives were differentially associated with attributions of acceptance and rejection experienced in a previous speed-dating scenario. The higher participants’ approach motives were, the more they attributed acceptance to internal, stable, and global causes. Conversely, the higher participants’ avoidance motives were, the more they attributed rejection to internal, stable, and global causes. Attributions, in turn, predicted expectations for an upcoming speed-dating event, and positive expectations positively predicted decision for participating in the speed-dating event. Thus, what people generally desire and fear in social relationships influence relationship initiation through differential attributions of previous social success and failure and thereby expectations for the upcoming social events

It Is What You Have, Not What You Lose: Effects of Perceived Gains and Losses on Goal Orientation Across Adulthood

Objectives: Goal orientation tends to shift from predominantly striving for gains to maintenance and loss avoidance across adulthood. A dominant hypothesis states that age-related increases in losses drive the motivational shift. The present study tests this hypothesis and an alternative, namely that perceived accumulation of resources/assets and discrepancy between the actual and desired state underlie the stronger maintenance and loss-avoidance orientation in older than younger adults. Methods: Data from N = 182 U.S. adult participants on Amazon Mechanical Turk (preregistered; 50.0% female; 19–77 years, M = 45.1, SD = 15.86) comprise measures of demographics, goal orientation in 16 selected life domains as well as perceived accumulation, losses, actual-desired discrepancy in the same domains. Results: Multilevel modeling analyses showed that, as expected and confirming prior research, gain orientation decreased and maintenance orientation increased with age. Moreover, both perceived losses and accumulation of resources/assets increased with age, while the actual-desired discrepancy decreased. Larger perceived accumulation and smaller actual-desired discrepancies were associated with stronger maintenance orientation. Regardless of age, a smaller actual-desired discrepancy was also associated with stronger loss-avoidance orientation. Contrary to predictions, perceived losses were negatively associated with gain orientation, but not significantly associated with maintenance or loss-avoidance orientation. Discussion: Results replicate the shift in goal orientation across adulthood. Speaking against the loss hypothesis, perceived accumulation of resources/assets and actual-desired discrepancy seem to play an important role in determining goal orientation over adulthood, while the role of perceived losses may be less significant than commonly assumed

Does Goal Orientation Modulate Satisfaction with Cognitive Performance in Different Age Groups?

OBJECTIVES: The current experiment tested the causal effect of goal orientation on subjective satisfaction with performance on a cognitive task. METHODS: A sample of N = 231 young, middle-aged, and older adults (21 - 79 years) completed a dot-memory task in one of three goal-orientation conditions aiming for improvement, maintenance, or avoidance of decline in performance. RESULTS: Bayesian analyses showed that in all age groups goal orientation influenced actual performance, but did not affect perceived performance or performance satisfaction. Performance satisfaction was positively correlated with perceived performance, but not with actual performance. DISCUSSION: The findings suggest that whether goal orientation benefits older adults' subjective well-being might depend on (a) the goal content (previous research targeted personal goals) or (b) whether it enhances their perception of the status quo (and thus reduces the discrepancy between actual and desired states). This study contributes to a better understanding of the role of goal orientation in subjective well-being across adulthood

Are Gender Differences in Emotion Culturally Universal? Comparison of Emotional Intensity Between Chinese and German Samples

Are gender differences in emotion culturally universal? To answer this question, the current study compared gender differences in emotional arousal (intensity) ratings for negative and positive pictures from the International Affective Picture System (IAPS) across cultures (Chinese vs. German culture) and age (younger vs. older adults). The raters were 53 younger Germans (24 women), 53 older Germans (28 women), 300 younger Chinese (176 women), and 126 older Chinese (86 women). The results showed that gender differences in arousal ratings were moderated by culture and age: Chinese women reported higher arousal for both negative and positive pictures compared with Chinese men; German women reported higher arousal for negative pictures, but lower arousal for positive pictures compared with German men. Moreover, the gender differences were larger for older than younger adults in the Chinese sample but smaller for older than younger adults in the German sample. The results indicated that gender differences in self-report emotional intensity induced by pictorial stimuli were more consistent with gender norms and stereotypes (i.e., women being more emotional than men) in the Chinese sample, compared with the German sample, and that gender differences were not constant across age groups. The study revealed that gender differences in emotion are neither constant nor universal, and it highlighted the importance of taking culture and age into account

Are Older Adults More Willing to Donate? The Roles of Donation Form and Social Relationship

Objectives: Whether older adults are more prosocial than younger adults has been under debate. In the current study, we investigated how age differences in prosocial behaviors varied across different contextual factors, that is, donation form, kinship, and social distance. Methods: To achieve this purpose, 89 younger and 66 older adults took part in a hypothetical donation task in which they were asked to donate money and time to relatives and nonrelatives at various social distances. Results: The results showed that, compared to younger adults, (a) older adults donated less to nonrelatives (regardless of the donation form), but donated a similar amount (in money) or even donated more (in time) to relatives; (b) older adults displayed higher levels of kin selection (favoring relatives over nonrelatives) in both monetary and time donations; and (c) older adults showed higher levels of social discounting (favoring socially close over distant others) in monetary but not time donation. Discussion: The study underscored the importance of contextual factors in understanding age differences in prosocial behaviors such as donation