Abstract
The appropriate enforcement phrases used during occupational health and safety (OHS) inspection activities is a crucial factor to guarantee the compliance with OHS regulations in enterprises. However, few researchers have empirically investigated the issue of how enforcement phrases are processed. The present study explored the neural features of processing two types of enforcement phrases (severe-and-deterrent vs. mild-and-polite phrases) used during OHS inspections by applying event-related potentials (ERP) method. Electroencephalogram data were recorded while the participants distinguished between severe-and-deterrent phrases and mild-and-polite phrases depicted in written Chinese words. The ERP results showed that severe-and-deterrent phrases elicited significantly augmented P300 amplitude with a central-parietal scalp distribution compared with mild-and-polite phrases, indicating the allocation of more attention resources to and elaborate processing of the severe-and-deterrent phrases. It reveals that humans may consider the severe-and-deterrent phrases as more motivationally significant and elaborately process the severity and deterrence information contained in the enforcement phrases for the adaptive protection. The current study provides an objective and supplementary way to measure the efficiency of different enforcement phrases at neural level, which may help generate appropriate enforcement phrases and improve the performance of OHS inspections.
Highlights
Nowadays, the occupational health and safety (OHS) issue has attracted more and more attention from the enterprises, governments, as well as researchers because of its close relationship to the vital interests of the workers and great importance to enterprises’ operation and performance (Fernández-Muñiz et al, 2009)
The paired t-test showed that the reaction time was not significant between severe-and-deterrent enforcement phrases and the mild-and-polite enforcement phrase (t = −1.929, p = 0.073), the reaction time to distinguish severe-anddeterrent phrases was longer (Mean = 960.315 ms, SD = 113.921 for severe-and-deterrent; Mean = 903.058 ms, SD = 166.158 for mild-and-polite)
The present study investigated the neural activities underlying the processing of two types of enforcement phrases used during the OHS inspections by means of an explicit evaluation task
Summary
The occupational health and safety (OHS) issue has attracted more and more attention from the enterprises, governments, as well as researchers because of its close relationship to the vital interests of the workers and great importance to enterprises’ operation and performance (Fernández-Muñiz et al, 2009). The enforcement phrases used by inspectors have a direct impact on the workers and managers’ responses to enforcement actions, which is a key factor to make the regulations of OHS practicable and encourage the compliance (Fernández-Muñiz et al, 2009; Kvorning et al, 2015). Few researchers have studied the cognitive processing of the enforcement phrases and the differences in processing between the two types of phrases. It is still not clear whether the severity and deterrence information are conveyed by the enforcement phrases and humans can identify them.
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