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Family problems, although separate from the work sphere, can impact one’s experience of work even when away from home. We propose that challenges arising from the home and family domain affect individuals’ experience of work because they act as distractions. If so, working memory, an ability relevant to managing distractions, should attenuate the effects that one’s family problems have on experienced job demands. Using a nationally representative dataset (N = 2591) with both concrete measures of family problems and cognitive performance measures, we show that family problems predict experiencing one’s job as more demanding and stressful. However, increasing working memory ability attenuates this relationship. Results suggest that although family problems impinge on one’s work, increased working memory ability to manage distractions may reduce their consequences. We connect our findings and their implications to relevant theoretical frameworks that inform the linkage between family and work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Executive functions are the cognitive abilities that enable individuals to effectively manage their attention. The efficient management of attention facilitates performance when individuals must think and act quickly and adaptively, or when job demands are novel and time is constrained. In organizations, these executive functions may be especially relevant for how successful leaders and managers perform in their several roles and how they further organizational goals. Yet, organizational behavior research has largely neglected an executive functioning lens. The present work illustrates how the core facets of executive functions—inhibition, working memory, and shifting—have implications for leadership and management outcomes by influencing common leadership tasks: decision-making, planning and monitoring, problem solving, negotiating, and innovating. Our goal is to supplement prevailing explanations of these tasks (e.g., general intelligence and job knowledge) with this executive functioning lens. We provide strategies for organizations to assess and bolster these executive functions in their leaders and managers and urge future organizational research to consider the important role of executive functions involved in the selection, training, and management of leaders and managers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: Social relationships supply purpose to life. How can socially disconnected people, who show lower levels of purpose, compensate for purpose in life? We propose that religious beliefs can compensate for the purpose in life that social relationships would otherwise provide, through providing (a) greater purpose to turn to and (b) divine figures that can substitute for social relationships.Method: In three studies, we analyze three nationally representative and longitudinal data sets (N = 19,775) using moderated regression and cross-lagged panel analyses.Results: Consistent with our hypotheses, religious beliefs were of minimal influence on purpose in life for socially connected individuals, who already held higher levels of purpose than socially disconnected individuals. However, for socially disconnected individuals, being highly religious predicted higher levels of purpose in life.Conclusions: Results suggest that although people primarily derive purpose from social relationships, socially disconnected individuals may leverage their religious beliefs for purpose and social comfort until they can reconnect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Personal growth is usually considered an outcome of intrapersonal processes-personal resources residing within the person. Comparatively, little research has examined the interpersonal processes underlying personal growth. We investigated how one interpersonal factor-people's relationships with others-influences personal growth. Study 1 showed that brief reminders of a supportive (vs. nonsupportive) other led people to choose a job that promoted personal growth over one that offered a higher salary. Moreover, feelings of self-confidence from thinking about a supportive (vs. nonsupportive) other mediated personal growth. Extending these results, Studies 2 and 3 demonstrated that people's perceptions of how supportive their close others are predicted personal growth in two distinct cultures with varying emphasis on individual (vs. collective) growth. Consistent with Study 1's findings, the results were also mediated by feelings of self-confidence. These findings suggest that the link between supportive relationships and personal growth may reflect a general process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the present study, we used a valence classification task to investigate the common and distinct neural basis of the two fundamental dimensions of social cognition (agency and communion) using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The results showed that several brain areas associated with mentalizing, along with the inferior parietal gyrus in the mirror system, showed overlap in response to both agentic and communal words. These findings suggest that both content categories are related to the neural basis of social cognition; further, several areas in the default mode network (DMN) showed similar deactivations between agency and communion, reflecting task-induced deactivation (TID). In terms of distinct activations, the findings indicated greater deactivations for communal than agentic content in the ventral anterior cingulate (vACC) and medial orbitofrontal cortex (mOFC). Communion also showed greater activation in some visual areas compared to agentic content, including occipital gyrus, lingual gyrus, and fusiform gyrus. These activations may reflect greater allocation of attentional resources to visual areas when processing communal content, or inhibition of cognitive activity irrelevant to task performance. If so, this suggests greater attention and engagement with communion-related content. The present research thus suggests common and differential activations for agency- versus communion-related content. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Few studies have examined the effect of intergroup threat on cognitive outcomes such as memory. Different theoretical perspectives can inform how intergroup threat should affect memory for threat-relevant and neutral information, such as the mood-congruency approach, Yerkes-Dodson law, Easterbrook's theory, and also evolutionary perspectives. To test among these, we conducted two experiments to examine how exposure to intergroup threats affected memory compared to control conditions. In study 1, we manipulated symbolic threat and examined participants' memory for threat and neutral words. In study 2, memory performance was assessed following the induction of realistic threat. Across the studies, in the control condition participants showed better memory for threat-related than neutral information. However, participants under threat remembered neutral information as well as threat-related information. In addition, participants in the threat condition remembered threat-related information as well as participants in the control condition. The findings are discussed in terms of automatic vigilance processes but also the effects of threat on arousal and its effect on information processing. This latter perspective, suggests paradoxically, that under some circumstances involving an outgroup threat, non-threatening information about outgroups can be extensively processed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]