Browsing by discipline "Psykologia"

Objectives. The job satisfaction of employees is important to organizations, because dissatisfaction impacts directly the economic results of the company, e.g. through increased employee turnover, poor quality of work and hiding problems. Job satisfaction has been defined as a relationship between the expectations for a job by an employee and the subjectively perceived fulfilment of those expectations. In this research, factors influencing job satisfaction are investigated by comparing three theoretical models related to job satisfaction. According to the Job Demands – Job Control model, demands of the job affect job satisfaction. Better job control or support from supervisor or peers can decrease the impact of demands on job satisfaction. According to the Effort – Reward Imbalance model, job satisfaction can be explained by investigating whether the rewards received from the job are commensurate with the effort required by the job. In the Job Demands and Resources model, different jobs have different demands and resources which are important. The model emphasizes the difference between jobs and assumes that demands impact job stress but not job satisfaction, whereas resources are mainly associated with job satisfaction. Methods. Based on the three models and previous empirical research results, 11 hypotheses were created and tested by using a large survey sample. The sample included 2 195 employees which represented 13 departments from nine organizations. The dependent variable was job satisfaction, and independent variables were associated with job demands, job control, rewards, and support by supervisor and peers. Linear mixed models were used as the statistical method because of its ability to compare the possibly different impacts of various resources and demands in different organizations. Results and conclusions. The most important factors associated with job satisfaction were opportunities to advance, possibility to use and develop skills and job security. Older employees were more satisfied with their jobs. Increased demands decreased the influence of peer support on job satisfaction. When the demands were high, the support of supervisor was more important. The impact of material rewards, such as salary or benefits, was low. As a conclusion, the Job Demands – Resources model was best able to explain job satisfaction out of the three tested models in this sample, if the model was expanded to include job security from the Effort-Reward Imbalance model.

Aims. There is a growing body of research indicating that childhood experiences interact with genetic vulnerabilities in the development of depression. Parent-child relationship quality has been shown to have a critical role in the development of depression later in life. Moreover, research has shown that the quality of parenting can also have long-term and persistent effects on various neurobiological systems, such as the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis. Indeed, the impaired function of HPA axis has been the most consistently found association with depression. This makes genes related to HPA axis regulation of particular interest to researchers. One possible candidate gene is FK506 binding protein 51 (FKBP5) gene, which has been shown to interact with adverse childhood experiences in predicting future risk of depression. This study examines whether perceived quality of parent-child relationship predicts depressive symptoms in adulthood and whether this association is moderated by the FKBP5 polymorphisms. Methods. This study is part of The Helsinki Birth Cohort Study. Total of 1 667 subjects completed a psychological questionnaire in 2004, including the Beck Depression Inventory (21 item, BDI) and the Parental Bonding Instrument (25 item, PBI). This study utilised the three factor structure of PBI; care, denial of psychological autonomy and encouragement of behavioral freedom, which were measured separately for mother and father. The study looked at three FKBP5 gene polymorphisms: rs1360780, rs9394309 and rs9470080 extracted from the genome-wide data genotyped with modified Illumina 610k array. The study utilised two models 1 and 2; model 1 adjusted for age and gender and additionally model 2 adjusted for childhood and adulthood socioeconomic status (SES) as well as separation experiences. Results and conclusions. As hypothesised and in line with previous studies the quality of parenting predicted depressive symptoms in adulthood. Participants, who perceived having received more care and encouragement of behavioral freedom reported fewer depressive symptoms. Whereas denial of psychological autonomy resulted in reporting more depressive symptoms. None of the polymorphisms predicted depressive symptoms. More importantly, this is the first study to show that FKBP5 polymorphisms modify the relationship between perceived mother-child relationship and depressive symptoms. Among participants with two minor alleles, perceived lack of maternal care and maternal denial of psychological autonomy were most strongly associated with more depressive symptoms. Participants with one minor allele had similar results. Whereas among participants with two major alleles, perceived parenting had a smaller effect on the amount of depressive symptoms. These findings indicate that in addition to adverse experiences and traumas, also deficiencies in parenting can predispose to depression depending on the amount of minor alleles in FKBP5 polymorphisms.

Background and purpose: Newborn visual alertness (NVA) and orientation (NVO) are established clinical markers of brain health and maturation. They are thought to reflect the early form of attentional alerting and orienting networks and form the base for the development of more complex cognitive and executive functions that emerge later in infancy and early childhood. To examine this hypothesis, the present study aimed to find out if NVA and NVO are associated with attention regulation at the age of 7 months. Methods: This study was a part of two larger ongoing research projects. A total of 54 full term low risk infants were included in the study. The infants' NVA and NVO were assessed as part of a regular neurological assessment of a newborn infant. Later, at the age of seven months, the infants participated in an eye-tracking study. Four alternating stimuli (fearful, happy and neutral face and noise stimulus) were presented as the central stimulus and a geometrical shape (black and white balls or checker board) as the overlapping peripheral target. The gaze shift latencies from central stimulus to the peripheral target and the effect of the central stimulus' content on the gaze shift latencies were analyzed and then compared between the different NVA and NVO groups. Results: NVA: Infants with good and intermediate NVA shifted gaze fast and showed the bias towards a fearful face. Infants who looked only briefly at the moving target as newborns (poor NVA) were also fast but had no bias towards fearful faces. NVO: Infants with good NVO were also fast in shifting gaze and fearful faces modified the gaze behavior. Infants who followed moving targets only with gaze without a head turn as newborns (intermediate NVO) were slower than the other infants in gaze shifting at the age of seven months. Additionally, these infants did not show the bias towards fearful faces. Infants with poor NVO were not different from the infants with the best NVO showing fast and flexible gaze behavior. Conclusions: These results suggest a continuum of gaze behavior from the newborn period to the late infancy. Good alertness and orientation were associated with good attentional and perceptual competence at the age of seven months. Weak alertness was associated with fast and less flexible gaze behavior than in the other infants at the age of seven months. Following with eye movements only was associated with slow and less flexible gaze behavior than in the other infants. The differences in the gaze behavior of the infants who followed only with the gaze or had a poor alertness when compared to the other infants can reflect typical but slower maturation of an infant or more persistent difference in the development.

Background. Knowing what a psychological test measures and if it works the same way in different contexts, i.e. has measurement invariance (MI), is crucial for its valid and reliable use. The Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale – Fourth Edition (WAIS-IV) was published in Finland in 2012. However, recent research suggests that the factor model given in the WAIS-IV test manual and the information regarding MI between different age groups and levels of education are lacking. Methods. This study employed the normative sample of the Finnish WAIS-IV. First, the factor model in the manual was examined and improved using confirmatory factor analysis with a mixed data-theory approach. Second, the new model was tested for strict residual MI for different age groups and levels of education, in order to study if the test reaches an acceptable level of MI. Results and conclusions. The results indicated that the normative data is best modeled by an oblique non-g model. The study also replicated a Spatial Visualization factor with loadings from Block Design, Visual Puzzles and Picture Completion, and Quantitative Reasoning factor with Figure Weights and Arithmetic. A previously unmentioned link in factor analytic literature on WAIS-IV was found between Block Design and Processing Speed factors. The results questioned the link between Arithmetic and Verbal Comprehension factor and found the underlying source of shared variance to be links between Information and Arithmetic, which was interpreted as Educational Achievement. WAIS-IV reached strict residual MI for both different age groups and levels of education. The study offers a more accurate factor model of WAIS-IV and gives confidence that psychologists can reliably apply it over different ages and levels of education in the normal population of Finland.

Objectives: In recent years, scientific inquiry has been able to dig into the effects of sleep on memory. More specifically, slow oscillations (SO) detected with EEG during deep sleep, have been found to reactivate memory representations which further enhances their processing and consolidation into long-term memory. In previous studies, auditory stimulation during deep sleep has been found to strengthen the brain's natural SO cycles and enhance consolidation of declarative memory but it has also been found to have unwanted side-effects on mood. This study is part of a research project, Sound Deep Sleep, where the objective is to develop a non-pharmacological method for home use to enhance the positive effects of deep sleep using auditory stimulation. In this study the effects of different auditory stimuli and their duration on memory consolidation and mood was investigated. Methods: 21 healthy adult volunteers took part in the study. The subjects slept in a sleep research lab in the Institute of Occupational Health for four nights with electrodes attached to the scalp and their memory performance and mood was tested once every evening and once every morning. Memory performance was tested with paired associative words, face-name test and with sequential finger tapping. Subject's mood was tested with POMS questionnaire and task load with NASA-TLX. During the four nights, subjects were presented with brief auditory noise or percussion sounds for the whole night of for the first four hours or with no auditory stimulation in a randomized order. The auditory stimulation was time locked to SO cycles according to online detection by a previously developed algorithm. The volume of the sound was adjusted according to online detection of sleep depth by the same algorithm. Results and conclusions: Auditory stimulation did not affect memory consolidation, mood, task load or subject's sleep architecture. The results on memory consolidation are contradictory to previously published data and possible explanations for the contradiction are discussed. The fact that this study had larger sample size and almost identical design than previous studies casts doubt that the effects size of auditory stimulation on memory consolidation might be smaller than previously expected or that it concerns only a sub-population of people. Based on the results of this study, suggestions for future research designs are introduced.

Objectives of the study: Multidiscipline knowledge is needed in evaluation of person's functional capacity in work: physical and psychosocial factors must be considered. Generic models and tools are needed to provide common practices to evaluate work-ability (or demands of the work) and to understand the relevance of multifaceted factors underneath. Reflective processing of one's own knowledge and intuitions is seen to improve a person's ability to understand the relevance of unfamiliar information and to achieve a higher cognitive congruence in a multi-professional group. That can be achieved through group-learning practices. In a current research effect of IMBA- methods training is studied. It is assumed that training will increase the cognitive congruence between professionals evaluating work-ability. Methods: Three training groups were arranged in 2005. 51 professionals of vocational rehabilitation participated (43 women and 8 men). They evaluated both the functional capacities of a person and the demands of work before and after their IMBA-training. Evaluations were done on the basis of written case-information. The data of these evaluation tasks is data of this study. Both independent samples and repeated measures settings was used. The effect of training is analyzed as a measure of absolute agreement indexes (ICC and rrg) Results and conclusions: The results agreed with the hypothesis: After IMBA training the level of absolute agreement was higher in evaluating both the demands of work and the functional capacities of a person. Differences between training groups, features of the task or familiarity of the material didn't seem to influence the effect. Agreement got higher in evaluating physical and psychosocial factors of workability. The effect was very systematic. The evaluations were more congruent after training even though the effect was not strong enough to reach statistical significance with these samples. What was surprising was that demands of work were systematically evaluated lower after training as the functional capacities of persons were evaluated the same or a little higher after the training. Interesting question is: Do the professionals overestimate the demands of the work in general when making evaluations based on their intuitive thinking? If that's the case, the customers of vocational rehabilitation are seen as more disabled compared to demands the work than they are in real. The possibility of a systematic error like this in evaluating workability must be studied more in the future.

Locus of control of reinforcement is a concept which is embedded within Rotter's social learning theory. It is a generalized expectancy that reflects the consistent differences among individuals in the degree to which they perceive contingencies or independence between their behavior and subsequent events in social situations. If they expect that a reinforcement or an outcome is contingent on their behavior or their relatively permanent characteristics, it can be defined as a belief in internal control or, put differently, a belief in internal locus of control of reinforcement. Many essential things in adolescent's lives have been associated with internal locus of control. If they have an internal belief in the controllability of events in their lives it seems to lead to better health and greater academic achievement. One well known antecedent of internal control perception is a warm and nurturant family environment. Nevertheless the connection between breastfeeding and locus of control in adolescence is presumably never studied before. The purpose of this study was to explore, whether having been breastfed or duration of breastfeeding, predicts locus of control in adolescence. . In this study we used a sample (n=641) of The Cardiovascular Risk in Young Finns Study. The study project was started in 1979, and the aim of the project was to study the levels of coronary heart disease factors and their determinants in children and adolescents. Information concerning breastfeeding and its duration was collected from parents in year 1983. The adolescent locus of control was measured in year 1986 by a shortened inventory which consists of 23 items. The original inventory has 40 items. Linear and logistic regression analysis' were used as statistical methods. The result of the study was that there was no connection between breastfeeding and locus of control in adolescents. By reason of no connection, breastfeeding did not predict locus of control in adolescence. Interestingly, two statistically significant predictors of internal locus of control were age of adolescent and educational level of parents. Family income was connected to internal locus of adolescent but it did not predict it. It is impossible to make any firm conclusions on the basis of one study. More studies are needed.

It has been suggested that semantic information processing is modularized according to the input form (e.g., visual, verbal, non-verbal sound). A great deal of research has concentrated on detecting a separate verbal module. Also, it has traditionally been assumed in linguistics that the meaning of a single clause is computed before integration to a wider context. Recent research has called these views into question. The present study explored whether it is reasonable to assume separate verbal and nonverbal semantic systems in the light of the evidence from event-related potentials (ERPs). The study also provided information on whether the context influences processing of a single clause before the local meaning is computed. The focus was on an ERP called N400. Its amplitude is assumed to reflect the effort required to integrate an item to the preceding context. For instance, if a word is anomalous in its context, it will elicit a larger N400. N400 has been observed in experiments using both verbal and nonverbal stimuli. Contents of a single sentence were not hypothesized to influence the N400 amplitude. Only the combined contents of the sentence and the picture were hypothesized to influence the N400. The subjects (n = 17) viewed pictures on a computer screen while hearing sentences through headphones. Their task was to judge the congruency of the picture and the sentence. There were four conditions: 1) the picture and the sentence were congruent and sensible, 2) the sentence and the picture were congruent, but the sentence ended anomalously, 3) the picture and the sentence were incongruent but sensible, 4) the picture and the sentence were incongruent and anomalous. Stimuli from the four conditions were presented in a semi-randomized sequence. Their electroencephalography was simultaneously recorded. ERPs were computed for the four conditions. The amplitude of the N400 effect was largest in the incongruent sentence-picture -pairs. The anomalously ending sentences did not elicit a larger N400 than the sensible sentences. The results suggest that there is no separate verbal semantic system, and that the meaning of a single clause is not processed independent of the context.

Previous exploratory studies suggest that pre-attentive auditory processing of musicians differ depending on the strategies they use in music practicing and performance. This study aimed at systematically determining whether there are differences in neural sound processing and behavioral measures between musicians preferring and not-preferring aural strategies including improvising, playing by ear and rehearsing by listening recordings. Participants were assigned into aural (n = 13) and non-aural (n = 11) groups according to how much they employ aural strategies, as determined by a questionnaire. The amplitude, latency, and scalp topography of the memory-related mismatch negativity (MMN) component of the event-related brain potentials were investigated with the so-called ‘optimal’ paradigm probing simple sound feature processing and with the ‘transposed-melody’ paradigm, probing complex sound pattern processing. Further, their behavioral accuracy in sound perception was tested with an attentive discrimination task in the transposed-melody paradigm and with the AMMA musicality test. Results showed that there were group differences both at the pre-attentive and behavioral levels of sound processing. First, in the optimal paradigm, the MMN morphology for the isolated sound features was similar between groups but its MMN amplitude, latency and topography for different sound features differed. Second, in the ‘transposed-melody’ paradigm, MMN was larger for the deviant that changed its contour as compared with the deviant that changed the last tone and thus the interval between the two last tones of the melody. The Contour-MMN amplitude as determined in the beginning of the recordings correlated with the subsequent behavioral discrimination accuracy in attentive condition. However, there were no group differences in the behavioral discrimination both deviants being detected equally well. The Interval-MMN amplitudes decreased especially in the aural group after the attentive condition. Moreover, the Interval-MMN latency in the non-aural group prolonged after the attentive condition as compared to the preceding condition whereas in the aural group the MMN latency shortened. No changes were seen in the Contour-MMN between conditions with either of the groups. Third, the non-aural group outperformed the aural group in the AMMA musicality test (Tonal subtest and Total scores). Additionally, AMMA scores (especially the Rhythm) correlated significantly with the Contour-MMN amplitudes after the attentive condition. Taken together, the present results suggest that practice strategies do not affect musicians' pre-attentive processing of simple sound features but might affect complex sound pattern processing. Complex sound pattern processing related also to the attentive behavioral performance in all musicians. While providing new insights into behavioral and neural differences between musicians preferring different practice strategies, results only partially support previous findings concerning discriminatory accuracy of violation within complex sound pattern learning.

Temperament is known to be connected with students' school achievement, both academic achievement and school adjustment. In the Finnish school system, school adjustment can be measured by behavior grade. Equal rating is important for students' future education choices. Rating has also influence on students' self-image. In this study, the aim was to examine the connection between self-rated temperament traits and GPA (grade point average) and behavior grade. Also, the possible mediator effect of behavior grade between the connection of temperament traits and behavior grade was examined. The participants of this study were Finnish adolescents (n=4255, average age 15,1). Students evaluated their temperament traits with TABC-R and DOTS-R questionnaires. School achievement was evaluated with student's latest GPA and behavior grade. The connection between grades and temperament traits were examined with correlational analysis and regression analysis. Mediator effect between temperament and GPA was examined with Bootstrapping analysis. The connection was slightly different between GPA and behavior grade. The strongest connection with behavior grade had traits associated with school adjustment, such as impulsivity and negative emotionality. The strongest connection with GPA had traits associated with task orientation, such as persistence and distractibility. Behavior grade mediated the effect between temperament traits and GPA, especially for impulsivity, distractibility, negative emotionality and mood. These results confirm that teachers' ratings are connected with students' temperament, also when evaluating students behavior. Temperament is connected with grades both directly and medially. In future when developing student evaluation criteria, it is important that teachers are aware of the possible influence of temperament traits. The necessity of rating students' behavior with a grade should be discussed. The criteria of evaluating students' behavior at school should be clear, so that assessing temperament traits would be avoided.