ENFRANCHISING INCOMPETENTS: SURETYSHIP AND THE JOINT AUTHORSHIP OF LAWS

Proposals to lower the age of voting, to 15 for example, are regularly met with worries that people that age are not sufficiently ‘competent’. Notice however that we allow people that age to sign binding legal contracts, provided that those contracts are co‐signed by their parents. Notice, further, that in a democracy voters are collectively ‘joint authors’ of the laws that they enact. Enfranchising some less competent voters is no worry, the Condorcet Jury Theorem assures us, so long as the electorate's competence averaging across all voters remains better‐than‐random.     

GENDER AND TASK IN THE DETERMINATION OF SPATIAL COGNITIVE PERFORMANCE

A variety of sex differences in spatial cognitive performance have been documented. However, factors other than those specifically related to gender and cognition per se, such as the perceived spatial character of given tasks, may contribute to such differences. In the present experiments, spatial memory and mental image rotation tasks were presented to female and male adults. The task formats or instructions were varied to emphasize or deemphasize the spatial character of the tasks. Highly "spatial" instructions or format significantly depressed performance on spatial tasks for women but not for men. "Nonspatial" instructions or format, within which the spatial character of the task was not explicit, resulted in no significant differences between the performances of women and men on either type of task. These findings indicate that instructional or format effects relating to the purported "spatial" character of a given task may significantly influence the relative performance of women and men.     

DETERMINATION AND EVALUATION OF RATE MEASUREMENTS IN THE ANALYSIS OF SPACE MEDICAL DATA

Measures of rate of change and of rate of rate of change are developed for application to physiological and psychological data. Examples are given of the use of these measures with heart-rate data for comparisons within and between subjects. It is shown that the measures provide information over and above that offered by means and variances, and that the measures appropriately reflect the impact of external variables.     

STATISTICAL HAZARDS IN THE DETERMINATION OF ADVERSE IMPACT WITH SMALL SAMPLES

In 1975, a small but prestigious fellowship program was charged with implementing a selection process that discriminated against women. One set of relevant data described the selection rates for the three most recent years of the program, while another set consisted of rankings based on written qualifications and on performance during a weekend interview, available only for 1975. The numbers of candidates involved were so small that adequate statistical power could not be assured; results were equivocal. To increase power, the probabilities for the three years considered separately can be combined. Disagreement between the expert witnesses for the plaintiff and the defendant were based on differing assumptions about appropriate statistical procedures.     

METAANALYSES OF VALIDITY STUDIES PUBLISHED BETWEEN 1964 AND 1982 AND THE INVESTIGATION OF STUDY CHARACTERISTICS

Review and metaanalyses of published validation studies for the years 1964-1982 of Journal of Applied Psychology and Personnel Psychology were undertaken to examine the effect of (1) research design; (2) criterion used; (3) type of selection instrument used; (4) occupational group studies; and (5) predictor-criterion combination on the level of observed validity coefficients. Results indicate that concurrent validation designs produce validity coefficients roughly equivalent to those obtained in predictive validation designs and that both of these designs produce higher validity coefficients than does a predictive design which includes use of the selection instrument. Of the criteria examined, performance rating criteria generally produced lower validity coefficients than did the use of other more "objective" criteria. In comparing the validities of various types of predictors, it was found cognitive ability tests were not superior to other predictors such as assessment centers, work samples, and supervisory/peer evaluations as has been found in previous metaanalytic work. Personality measures were clearly less valid. Compared to previous validity generalization work, much unexplained variance in validity coefficients remained after corrections for differences in sample size. Finally, the studies reviewed were deficient for our purposes with respect to the data reported. Selection ratios, standard deviations, reliabilities, predictor and criterion intercorrelations were rarely and inconsistently reported. There are also many predictor-criterion relationships for which very few validation efforts have been undertaken.     

尿儿茶酚胺的高效液相色谱分析——电化学检测法

本文报道了尿去甲肾上腺素、肾上腺素和多巴胺的高效液相色谱分析电化学检测法。用Bio—Rex阳离子树脂处理提取尿中的儿茶酚胺。该法的回收率去甲肾上腺素为97±5％;肾上腺素为97±9％;多巴胺为76±8％(各进行5次测定)。本文同时对不同生理心理状态下尿儿茶酚胺的分泌量进行了液相色谱法测定。