The nature of work has been changing. It is becoming more and more uncertain, complex, cognitively demanding, disperse in space and in time, and diverse for the people involved. It requires diffuse decision making and responsibility. Knowledge and creative work, instead of industrial, currently occupies the majority of workforce. A recent NIOSH report (2002) claims that the changing nature of work asks for new research, tools and methods for evaluating the impact of its transformations on workers' health and safety. Following this claim, the current paper investigates the process of recovery from fatigue. Since it is known that the quality of recovery may be highly impoverished by the presence of persisting and pervasive mental activity, namely, by mental rumination, the investigation focuses on the possible differential characteristics of rumination among industrial and knowledge workers. The results from a field study shows evidence that industrial and knowledge workers are differentially affected by rumination. It is suggested that rumination can be a promising early indicator of stress in knowledge occupations.

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Seven experiments investigated whether orientation-dependent latency functions for the visual code resemble those observed in studies of mental rotations of visual images. The subjects were required to perform "same-different" classifications of two simultaneously presented letters. The dependent variables considered were reaction time (RT) and accuracy. Experiments 1, 2, 4, 5, and 6 showed that subjects could correctly classify two different letters on the basis of the visual code without preceding transformations. Experiments 1,2, and 7 showed orientationdependent effects for "same" responses. It appeared, however, that orientation functions for the visual code were clearly different from those previously observed for visual images. In addition, the findings of Experiments 4,5, and 6 indicated that a frame that jointly rotated with the disoriented letters could eliminate the orientation-dependent effects for "same" responses. Experiment 7 showed that the results of Experiments 4, 5, and 6 must be attributed to the structural characteristics of the frame and not to a directional cue. The results of Experiment 3 seemed to demonstrate that transformations did not occur when the subjects used the phonetic code to classify the letters. Overall, the results of the seven experiments were considered to provide a demonstration of the importance of the distinction between the operations on visual images and those on the visual code.

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The study presents new evidence for the validity of the HSE indicator tool to estimate the risk of work-related stress and suggests that most but not all the effects of psychosocial conditions on work ability might be mediated by the level of psychological distress induced by these conditions.

and CARLO UMILTAUniversity 0/Parma, Parma, Italy Models to explain same-different RT disparity have variously emphasized encoding or comparison processes. Of the latter, a dual-process holistic-analytic model that bears a similarity to a putative distinction between hemispheric processes has been proposed. Here two experiments test the models by employing simultaneous and successive matching whilevarying letter similarity, symmetry, and visual field of presentation. Same-different disparity is found regardless of delay, although it can be eliminated with appropriate similarity and symmetry manipulations. While visual field interacts with the same-different factor, it fails to do so in a manner consistent with the proposed hemispheric dichotomy. These and other results argue against encoding models of letter matching, and support a revised visual comparison model that incorporates dual processing and response criterion elements. However, the role of lateralized processes remains unclear.578

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