Correlations of spaces of pencils

The paper introduces an axiomatic system of a conjugacy in partial linear spaces, and provides its analytical characterization in spaces of pencils. A correlation of a space of pencils is defined and it is shown to correspond to a polarity of the underlying projective space, i.e. to a reflexive sesqui-linear form, or also to an involutory collineation, i.e. to an injective semi-linear map, in the self-dual case. A geometric characterization of segment subspaces in spaces of pencils is also provided.     

An investigation of aspects of the cry of pain model of suicide risk: the role of defeat in impairing memory

AIM: Feelings of defeat and deficits in autobiographical memory are thought to be central to the formation of suicidal thoughts and behaviours. However, no work has established the role of defeat, specifically, in directly leading to memory problems. This study sought to assess whether a defeating event and associated defeated mood impaired memory for a story. METHOD: Participants were from a student population. Those in the experimental condition (n=37) experienced an event which was designed to induce defeat prior to both the encoding and verbal retrieval of a story. Participants in control condition (n=37) experienced no such defeating event. Visual analogue scales of five mood states were taken at baseline, prior to encoding and prior to retrieval. RESULTS: Participants in the experimental condition reported increased feelings of defeat following baseline, and recalled fewer story units relative to the control condition. DISCUSSION: These results show that appraising an event as defeating increased subsequent defeated mood and led to impaired episodic memory, independently of low mood in general, thus suggesting a causal role of a specific negative mood state on impaired memory. Implications for clinical research are discussed.     

施动感双层结构的发展

施动感是个体在自主运动过程中对自身行为产生的主体性体验,揭示其发展过程对了解自我意识的形成具有重要意义。三阶段模式全面概括了施动感的发展过程。婴儿形成动作预测、建立动作-效果联结以及与养育者良好的人际互动对施动感的发展起着重要作用。未来施动感发展研究应从多种施动感生成理论出发,改进婴幼儿施动感的测量范式,探索施动感发展与社会认知发展、自闭症症状的关联。     

Code of Ethics of the National Society of Genetic Counselors: Explication of Revisions

The Code of Ethics (COE) of the National Society of Genetic Counselors (NSGC) was adopted in 1992. In 2004, the NSGC leadership appointed the Code of Ethics Work Group (COEWG) to consider revisions to the NSGC COE based on advice from the NSGC legal counsel, and to consider additional changes given growth in the scope of genetic counseling practice since the adoption of the original COE. After input from the NSGC membership, changes to the COE addressing the recommendations of the NSGC legal counsel were approved in December 2004. The COEWG then reviewed ethical codes and codes of professional conduct from 22 professional organizations, deemed to have similar goals and philosophies to the NSGC, searching for themes that encompassed genetic counseling practice that might not yet be addressed in the NSGC COE. Additional revisions to the COE were proposed, and after feedback from the NSGC membership, the revised COE was approved in January 2006 by majority vote of full members of the NSGC. The explications for the 2004 and 2006 revisions are presented.     

Method of micro-analysis of sound films of behavior

Initial viewings of sound films of human behavior resulted in the problem of how to divide the seemingly continuous flow of that behavior. This led to the development of methods and instrumentation that would permit variable-contrast scanning of the processes in order to detect points and criteria of segmentation. Since both speech and body motion are to be studied, instruments that would permit the analysis of each at a commensurate level were required. The instruments are primarily combinations of commercially available equipment that is relatively inexpensive yet reliable. These instruments, their use, and some of the preliminary observations are presented.     

论信息化生产方式的产生与马克思主义伦理的发展（上）

信息化生产方式的产生会给人类伦理学带来诸多新变动、新发展和新要求 ,因此 ,科学地分析信息化生产方式的产生对资本的益与忧 ,正确地看待信息化生产方式与马克思主义伦理的发展的关系是我们必须面临的任务。     

Preadolescents' recognition of faces of unfamiliar peers: the effect of attractiveness of faces

The authors examined preadolescents' ability to recognize faces of unfamiliar peers according to their attractiveness. They hypothesized that highly attractive faces would be less accurately recognized than moderately attractive faces because the former are more typical. In Experiment 1, 106 participants (M age = 10 years) were asked to recognize faces of unknown peers who varied in gender and attractiveness (high- vs. medium-attractiveness). Results showed that attractiveness enhanced the accuracy of recognition for boys' faces and impaired recognition of girls' faces. The same interaction was found in Experiment 2, in which 92 participants (M age = 12 years) were tested for their recognition of another set of faces of unfamiliar peers. The authors conducted Experiment 3 to examine whether the reason for that interaction is that high- and medium-attractive girls' faces differ more in typicality than do boys' faces. The effect size of attractiveness on typicality was similar for boys' and girls' faces. The overall results are discussed with reference to the development of face encoding and biological gender differences with respect to the typicality of faces during preadolescence.     

Development of perception of the unity of musical events

Infants' and young children's perception of the unity of musical events was investigated in three studies. In the first two, children watched video displays of two musicians playing different musical instruments side by side in synchrony, and heard a soundtrack in synchrony with both instruments but specific to one. The children judged which instrument was producing the music they heard. Three- to 4-year-olds differentiated instruments from different families but not instruments from the same family. Five- to 7-year-olds additionally differentiated instrument pairs differing in size and pitch range (e.g., violin, cello). In the third study, infants were presented some of the same musical events in order to assess whether specific experience with the instruments is necessary for perceiving the unity of musical events. Looking times revealed that 7- to 9-month-olds detected the correspondence of the sight and sound of some musical instruments. Specific experience with a variety of instruments is evidently not necessary for detecting correspondences of audible and visible properties and for differentiating instruments from different families.     

论信息化生产方式的产生与马克思主义伦理的发展（下）

信息化生产方式的产生会给人类的伦理带来诸多新变动、新发展和新要求 ,因此 ,科学地分析信息化生产方式的产生对资本的益与忧 ,正确地看待信息化生产方式与马克思主义伦理发展的关系是我们必须面临的任务。     

Prediction of facial displays from knowledge of norms of emotional expressiveness

A study was conducted to examine the accuracy of prediction of facial expressiveness from knowledge of the norms of expressiveness in same-sex and mixed-sex social interactions. Men and women subjects were videotaped while they viewed emotionally loaded stimulus slides and rated their responses to them. The edited videotapes were shown to judges who attempted to identify the emotion reported by each viewer for each slide. A separate group of subjects was asked to rate how acceptable or appropriate it is for a man or a woman to express each target emotion under the conditions of the slide-viewing study. The accuracy of emotion identification data correlated highly with acceptability ratings across emotions and sex pairings, although examined more closely, the data show this predictability only for same-sex pairings. Alternative explanations for these results in terms of display rules and the social demands of interactions are discussed.The authors wish to thank Alan Fridlund for helpful comments on a previous version of this paper.     

Prognostic utility of Locus of Control in treatment of agoraphobia

The purpose of the present study was to examine the prognostic utility of the Rotter Internal-External Locus of Control Scale with agoraphobics undergoing behavioral and pharmacological treatments. Fifty subjects meeting DSM-III criteria for agoraphobia, completed the instrument at pre- and post-assessments. Despite marked pre-post improvements, the scale was found to be lacking in discriminative power and clinical sensitivity to detect these changes. However, the scale was found to have utility as a prognostic index of post-treatment levels of improvement, with ‘externality’ being strongly associated with improvement. These findings and related issues are discussed.     

A test of the equality of standard errors of measurement

A procedure is proposed for testing the significance of group differences in the standard error of measurement of a psychological test. Wilks' criterion is used to assure that the tests used in ascertaining reliability and hence variance of errors of measurement may be assumed parallel for each group. Votaw's criterion may be used to check whether the test scores of all the groups have the same mean, variance, and covariance. It is possible, however, for the variance and reliability of the test to differ widely from group to group, so that Votaw's criterion is not satisfied even though the variance of errors of measurement stays relatively constant. For this case a modification of Neyman and Pearson's criterion is developed to test agreement among standard errors of measurement despite group differences in mean, variance, and reliability of the test.The author wishes to acknowledge the helpful criticisms of Dr. Harold Gulliksen, who suggested the problem.     

The role of locus of control of reinforcement in interpersonal attraction

The purpose of the present study was to examine initial interpersonal attraction as a function of locus of control orientation. Subjects, previously tested for internality and externality, listened to a tape of an alleged stranger of the same age and sex as the subject. In reality the tapes were prepared to be either primarily internal or external in emphasis. Subjects were then asked to make some judgments about the supposed stranger. Among these judgments was the degree of attraction felt toward the individual on the tape. It was hypothesized that similarity of locus of control orientation between a subject and a stranger would lead to greater initial attraction than would a complementary locus of control orientation. Contrary to prediction, the results showed that both internal and external subjects were significantly more attracted to an internal stranger than to an external stranger. These results were discussed within an interpersonal attraction framework which suggested the need for a two-factor theory as the basis for interpersonal attraction.     

A study of the foundations of ethical decision-making of nurses

A study of nurses and nursing students was conducted to determine the various philosophical positions they hold with respect to ethical decision-making in nursing and their relationship to the subjective-objective controversy in value theory. The study revealed that most nurses and nursing students tend to be subjectivists in value theory, i.e., believe that value judgments are purely personal, private expressions of one's own opinion or inner-feelings and not believe that value judgments are knowledge claims capable of being true or false and therefore not expressions of moral requirements and normative imperatives emanating from an external value structure or moral order in the world. In addition, the study revealed that most nurses and nursing students are inconsistent in the philosophical foundations of their ethical decision-making, i.e., in decision-making regarding values they tend to hold beliefs which are incompatible with other beliefs they hold about values.     

Effects of amount of attention allocated to the location of visual stimulus pairs on perception of simultaneity

This study examined whether a change in the amount of attention equally allocated to two locations affects judgments of the simultaneity or successiveness of stimuli presented at those locations. Observers were cued to expect two brief flashes either to the left and right of fixation or above and below fixation. Stimulus onset asynchrony was randomly varied. On a small proportion of trials, the stimuli appeared at the unexpected locations. Observers were more likely to report the stimuli as simultaneous when they appeared in the unexpected locations. A model proposed to account for the data assumes that a brief stimulus event is represented by a probability distribution reflecting the uncertainty in determining the time of the event’s occurrence, and two events are judged to be simultaneous if they are perceived to fall within some critical temporal interval, c, which is a function of the amount of attention allocated to the task.     

The matching of parts of things

An axiomatic treatment of the relation ‘part of’ is shown to lead naturally to an account of the ways in which parts of things are matched. The determination of matchings by the properties of parts and by the relations between parts is discussed and shown to be relevant to certain classificatory problems in science. The connexions between matchings and symmetries of parts are explored, and a general account is given of the ways in which ambiguities in the matching of parts may be resolved.     

Epistemology of AI Revisited in the Light of the Philosophy of Information

Artificial intelligence has often been seen as an attempt to reduce the natural mind to informational processes and, consequently, to naturalize philosophy. The many criticisms that were addressed to the so-called “old-fashioned AI” do not concern this attempt itself, but the methods it used, especially the reduction of the mind to a symbolic level of abstraction, which has often appeared to be inadequate to capture the richness of our mental activity. As a consequence, there were many efforts to evacuate the semantical models in favor of elementary physiological mechanisms simulated by information processes. However, these views, and the subsequent criticisms against artificial intelligence that they contain, miss the very nature of artificial intelligence, which is not reducible to a “science of the nature”, but which directly impacts our culture. More precisely, they lead to evacuate the role of the semantic information. In other words, they tend to throw the baby out with the bath-water. This paper tries to revisit the epistemology of artificial intelligence in the light of the opposition between the “sciences of nature” and the “sciences of culture”, which has been introduced by German neo-Kantian philosophers. It then shows how this epistemological view opens on the many contemporary applications of artificial intelligence that have already transformed—and will continue to transform—all our cultural activities and our world. Lastly, it places those perspectives in the context of the philosophy of information and more particularly it emphasizes the role played by the notions of context and level of abstraction in artificial intelligence.     

Children's Representations of the World of Drugs

The changing profile of drug use has highlighted the need for age-appropriate education which requires insight into children's representations of drugs. Representations were elicited from 134 children aged between 5 and 11 years, drawn from two schools, by asking them to draw and write their responses to questions relating to a story about losing and finding a bag of drugs. Relevant responses were generated by 119 children aged between 8 and 11 years. A content analysis of these responses revealed differences with school and age. Older children were more likely to recognize that drugs can be good or bad depending on type, quantity taken and reason for use. The children had firm ideas about who takes drugs and their motivations and were knowledgeable about methods of use. They recognized that drugs can be dangerous, but had little understanding of how or why. The children's representations were characterized by fear and uncertainty and most wanted to know more. These findings are used to argue that there is a need for child-centred constructivist approaches to drug education which seek to demystify drugs and drug use and to orientate children to the realities of the world of drugs in the 1990s.     

The Role of Diseconomies of Transportation and Public Safety Problems in the Measurement of Urban Quality of Life

Quality of Life has become an issue of urban research due to a greater awareness of its contribution when identifying areas for intervention and when monitoring urban planning policies. This case study from Costa Rica refers to the role of diseconomies of transportation and public safety problems in the measurement of urban quality of life. Theoretically, urban diseconomies, or negative externalities, are the result of rises in average total costs over time as production increases and of the use of certain factors without increasing scales. The cost of urban diseconomies related to transportation and to public safety problems affects both external conditions contributing to quality of life (e.g.: level of income, access to services and resources and productivity) and people’s subjective perspective of quality of life in various domains (e.g.: stress, time use, leisure time and so on). These deficiencies have led to the reversal of gains from concentrated economic activities and positive externalities achieved by agglomerated dwellings thus becoming urban diseconomies. An analysis is provided of city living and its ever-growing problems warranting new styles of planning, regulations, and urban management, along with physical intervention based on comprehensive, innovative technical solutions. The data comes from various sources, and a statistical model was used to obtain estimates and projected data. The results suggest that if measures are not taken to reverse current urban growth and the expansion of the Greater Metropolitan Area, people’s opportunities and fundamental rights of access to capacity building, potentially allowing them to have more meaningful lifestyles, will be restricted.