This paper's purpose is to assess how management's perceptions regarding certain aspects of environmental reporting relate to the firm's actual reporting strategy. Toward that end, we propose a model where a firm's environmental disclosure is conditional upon executive assessments of corporate concerns. The study relies on a survey that was sent to environmental management executives from European and North American multinational firms enquiring about the determinants of corporate environmental disclosure. Responses from these executives were then contrasted with their firms' actual (...) environmental reporting practices, which was measured using a comprehensive multi-criteria grid. Results show that there is a relationship between environmental managers' attitudes toward various stakeholder groups and how those managers respond to the stakeholders via the decision to disclose and the actual disclosures made. Our model provides a perspective as to how a firm responds to the numerous stakeholders to whom it must be accountable. This accountability in turn relates to how the company communicates its actions to society in order to achieve or maintain its social legitimacy. (shrink)

This article explores the concept of recognizing a face holistically and examines the experimental paradigms that serve as the “gold standards” for holistic perception. It discusses the contribution of featural and configural information to the holistic process and the controversy surrounding these often misunderstood concepts. It claims that the recruitment of holistic processes is what distinguishes faces from most types of object recognition. The discussion focuses on the kind of featural and configural information that is impaired in an inverted face (...) as well as the information that is spared. Finally, the article considers the concept of a “perceptual field” that allows for the preservation of both featural and configural information within a restricted spatial region of an inverted face. (shrink)

We explore the relationship between chief executive officer (CEO) personality traits and corporate social responsibility (CSR) reporting. Upper echelons theory indicates that the values, experiences, and personalities of top organizational managers influence their organization's strategic decisions and effectiveness. We utilize IBM Watson Personality Insights software to infer CEOs’ personality traits based on their responses to questions raised by analysts during year‐end conference calls; we obtain CEOs’ Big Five personality traits—openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism—from which we compute a measure of (...) their risk tolerance. Using a longitudinal dataset of Standard and Poor's 500 firms for 2008–2015, we document that high CEO risk tolerance is related to lower CSR report readability and smaller CSR disclosure volume. This finding indicates that executives who are comfortable with greater risk are more willing to supply stakeholders with reports that are shorter and require greater effort to understand. Exploration of the association between CEO Big Five personality traits and CSR report readability and disclosure volume allows key stakeholders to better comprehend CSR disclosures and connotations thereof. Overall, our results contribute to the debate on how CEO personality traits affect organizations’ CSR disclosure reporting strategies, and support upper echelons theory in the CSR setting. (shrink)

_Investigative Ethics: Ethics for Police Detectives and Criminal Investigators_ presents applied philosophical analyses of the ethical issues that arise for police detectives and other investigators in contemporary society. Explores ethical issues relating to investigative independence, rights of victims and suspects, use of informants, entrapment, privacy and surveillance, undercover operations, deception, and suspect interviewing Represents the first monograph providing a detailed consideration of ethical issues in police investigations Features authorship by an applied philosopher specializing in police ethics, and a former UK (...) senior police officer Combined authorship ensures the text is anchored in actual police practice as well as providing high quality ethical analysis. (shrink)

Face perception is a highly conserved process that directs our attention from infancy and is supported by specialized neural circuitry. Oxytocin can increase accuracy and detection of emotional faces, but these effects are mediated by valence, individual differences, and context. We investigated the temporal dynamics of oxytocin’s influence on the neural substrates of face perception using event related potentials (ERP). In a double blind, placebo controlled within-subject design, 21 healthy male adults inhaled oxytocin or placebo and underwent ERP imaging during (...) two face processing tasks. Experiment 1 investigated effects of oxytocin on neural correlates of fearful versus neutral facial expressions, and Experiment 2 manipulated point-of-gaze to neutral faces. In Experiment 1, we found that oxytocin reduced N170 latency to fearful faces. In Experiment 2, N170 latency was decreased when participant gaze was directed to the eyes of neutral faces; however, there were no oxytocin-associated effects in response to different facial features. Findings suggest oxytocin modulates early stages of social perception for socially complex information such as emotional faces relative to neutral. These results are consistent with models suggesting oxytocin impacts the salience of socially informative cues during processing, which leads to downstream effects in behavior. Future work should examine how oxytocin affects neural processes underlying basic components of social behavior (such as, face perception) while varying emotional expression of stimuli or comparing different characteristics of participants (e.g., gender, personality traits). (shrink)

Effective clinical practice in a hospital needs current knowledge together with the skills and right attitude; these should be applied continuously. Failure of this system can be due to ignorance or arrogance. We attempted to correct these deficiencies by formulating a set of policies which were enforced from 1962 to 1983. The policies related to the following: intensive care (including asthma, nutrition and organ donation), drug prescribing and resuscitation. We believe that these rules improved patient care and the standards of (...) training; the prescribing policy also saved money. (shrink)

We explore the relationship between chief executive officer (CEO) personality traits and corporate social responsibility (CSR) reporting. Upper echelons theory indicates that the values, experiences, and personalities of top organizational managers influence their organization's strategic decisions and effectiveness. We utilize IBM Watson Personality Insights software to infer CEOs’ personality traits based on their responses to questions raised by analysts during year‐end conference calls; we obtain CEOs’ Big Five personality traits—openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism—from which we compute a measure of (...) their risk tolerance. Using a longitudinal dataset of Standard and Poor's 500 firms for 2008–2015, we document that high CEO risk tolerance is related to lower CSR report readability and smaller CSR disclosure volume. This finding indicates that executives who are comfortable with greater risk are more willing to supply stakeholders with reports that are shorter and require greater effort to understand. Exploration of the association between CEO Big Five personality traits and CSR report readability and disclosure volume allows key stakeholders to better comprehend CSR disclosures and connotations thereof. Overall, our results contribute to the debate on how CEO personality traits affect organizations’ CSR disclosure reporting strategies, and support upper echelons theory in the CSR setting. (shrink)

A key emergent property of group social dynamic is synchrony–the coordination of actions, emotions, or physiological processes between group members. Despite this fact and the inherent nested structure of groups, little research has assessed physiological synchronization between group members from a multi-level perspective, thus limiting a full understanding of the dynamics between members. To address this gap of knowledge we re-analyzed a large dataset comprising physiological and psychological data that were collected in two laboratory studies that involved two different social (...) group tasks. In both studies, following the group task, members reported their experience of group cohesion via questionnaires. We utilized a non-linear analysis method-multidimensional recurrence quantification analysis that allowed us to represent physiological synchronization in cardiological interbeat intervals between group members at the individual-level and at the group-level. We found that across studies and their conditions, the change in physiological synchrony from baseline to group interaction predicted a psychological sense of group cohesion. This result was evident both at the individual and the group levels and was not modified by the context of the interaction. The individual- and group-level effects were highly correlated. These results indicate that the relationship between synchrony and cohesion is a multilayered construct. We re-affirm the role of physiological synchrony for cohesion in groups. Future studies are needed to crystallize our understanding of the differences and similarities between synchrony at the individual-level and synchrony at the group level to illuminate under which conditions one of these levels has primacy, or how they interact. (shrink)

This paper's purpose is to assess how management's perceptions regarding certain aspects of environmental reporting relate to the firm's actual reporting strategy. Toward that end, we propose a model where a firm's environmental disclosure is conditional upon executive assessments of corporate concerns. The study relies on a survey that was sent to environmental management executives from European and North American multinational firms enquiring about the determinants of corporate environmental disclosure. Responses from these executives were then contrasted with their firms' actual (...) environmental reporting practices, which was measured using a comprehensive multi-criteria grid. Results show that there is a relationship between environmental managers' attitudes toward various stakeholder groups and how those managers respond to the stakeholders via the decision to disclose and the actual disclosures made. Our model provides a perspective as to how a firm responds to the numerous stakeholders to whom it must be accountable. This accountability in turn relates to how the company communicates its actions to society in order to achieve or maintain its social legitimacy. (shrink)

This study examines a sample of three editions of 19 financial accounting and auditing textbooks (n = 57) to explore the state of accounting educational content through the coverage of five key topics (ethics, professional judgment, governance, corporate social responsibility, and fraud) and 16 accounting scandals/troubled corporations. The study method is descriptive and uses independent sample t tests to identify significant differences over time and between countries. The major findings are fourfold. First, some topics' coverage and/or scandals exist in most (...) of the sample's books based on their indexes. However, the page coverage for these topics/scandals is not overwhelming when compared to the number of pages in these texts. Second, the scandals/troubled corporations' page coverage increased between the earliest and the later editions as did a depth of coverage trend measure. Third, U.S. texts in the sample contained significantly more pages devoted to these topics and scandals than the non-adapted Canadian sample texts. Finally, and as expected, the sampled auditing texts contain significantly more pages devoted to these topics and scandals compared to the other financial accounting texts in the sample. Educators and textbook authors interested in the future of business and accounting education will find this study of interest. If reminding accounting students of the ethical dilemmas they will face in their future careers is important, then this study indicates places where coverage in this sample of texts may be enhanced either through the use of standalone supplementary ethics texts or instructor introduced sources. (shrink)

The paper by Mescall et al. provides an opportunity to consider the meaning of “accounting professionalism” in the twenty-first century. To examine the paper, this discussion focuses on three areas, the research question Mescall et al. addresses, contributions of their paper, and what the paper tells us about accounting professionalism.