Women at Midlife: Implications for Theories of Women's Adult Development

Research on midlife transitions in women is reviewed, and implications for theories of women's adult development are discussed. Findings on menopause, the postparental period, and the roles of women at midlife are presented. Research on women at midlife suggests that new theoretical models of women's adult development should continue to emerge to accommodate the diversity of women's experiences at midlife. Several theoretical approaches are discussed in light of the research findings, and recommendations are made for future research on women's adult development. Implications for counselors working with women at midlife also are discussed.     

Comparisons of the Psychometric characteristics of the adaptive behavior inventory for children for different subgroups of children

Psychometric characteristics of the Adaptive Behavior Inventory for Children (ABIC) are analyzed through five statistical procedures (internal consistency, item difficulty, correlations of item-total correlations, concurrent validity, and construct validity) using data on 436 elementary age children from three racial-ethnic and two social class groups. Data from these five statistical procedures are reported for nine demographic characteristics: children's race, social class, sex, age, birth order, health, family size, family structure, and urban acculturation. Few systematic differences are apparent on internal consistency, correlation of item-total correlations, and construct validity. Some differences are apparent on item difficulty and concurrent validity. On item difficulty the ABIC scores are higher for middle-SES, older, first- or second-born children, and from families whose structures are more typical. Regarding concurrent validity, lower correlations are noted for Mexican American and Black, for more healthy, and for less acculturated children. ABIC-achievement correlations generally are too low to be of practical value. The results are interpreted in terms of possible test bias on the ABIC.     

Visual perception and aging.

A series of studies performed in our laboratory on aging and its effect on perceptual processing and working memory capacity for visual stimuli are reviewed. Specifically, studies on luminance, colour, motion, texture, and symmetry processing are reported. Furthermore, experiments on the capacity to retain size and spatial frequency information are also discussed. The general conclusion is that there are a number of perceptual abilities that diminish with age. However, the extent of these deficits will depend on the complexity of the neural circuitry involved for processing a given task. This is also true for visual working memory where no evidence of loss due to aging is demonstrated for processing low-level visual information, when individual differences in sensory input are compensated for. It is concluded that perceptual processing deficits due to aging (like working memory) will become evident when the computational load reaches a certain level of complexity (larger or more complex network) even if the tasks remain cognitively simple.     

The nature of environmental influences on weight and obesity: a behavior genetic analysis.

The nature of environmental influences on individual differences in weight and obesity is presently unclear. To resolve this issue, behavior genetic studies are reviewed for their relevance to environmental influences on weight and obesity. Results are consistent in suggesting that environmental experiences are important for weight and obesity, although they account for much less variation than do the effects of genes. Furthermore, only environmental experiences that are not shared among family members appear to be important. In contrast, experiences that are shared among family members appear largely irrelevant in determining individual differences in weight and obesity. These conclusions are consistent with a growing body of evidence on the relative unimportance of such shared experiences for many psychological characteristics.     

Similarity semantics and minimal changes of belief

Different similarity relations on sets are introduced, and their logical properties are investigated. Close relationships are shown to hold between similarity relations that are based on symmetrical difference and operators of belief contraction that are based on relational selection functions. Two new rationality criteria for minimal belief contraction, the maximizing property and the reducing property, are proposed.     

Religion and the Catholic Church’s View on (Heart) Transplantation: A Recent Statement of Pope Benedict XVI and its Practical Impact

Heart transplantation is performed on approximately 4,000 patients per year worldwide and is considered the last resort for treatment of end-stage heart diseases. Due to persistent organ shortage, resources are limited, waiting periods are extensive, and patients still die while being on a waiting list for transplantation. The role of all churches and the support of the representatives of the churches are critical for the spiritual wellbeing of patients awaiting heart transplantation as well as for prospective individual organ donors and their families. The supportive role of the Roman Catholic Church and the recent statement of Pope Benedict XVI on organ donation are discussed.     

Checking the Assumptions of Rasch's Model for Speed Tests

Two new tests for a model for the response times on pure speed tests by Rasch (1960) are proposed. The model is based on the assumption that the test response times are approximately gamma distributed, with known index parameters and unknown rate parameters. The rate parameters are decomposed in a subject ability parameter and a test difficulty parameter. By treating the ability as a gamma distributed random variable, maximum marginal likelihood (MML) estimators for the test difficulty parameters and the parameters of the ability distribution are easily derived. Also the model tests proposed here pertain to the framework of MML. Two tests or modification indices are proposed. The first one is focused on the assumption of local stochastic independence, the second one on the assumption of the test characteristic functions. The tests are based on Lagrange multiplier statistics, and can therefore be computed using the parameter estimates under the null model. Therefore, model violations for all items and pairs of items can be assessed as a by-product of one single estimation run. Power studies and applications to real data are included as numerical examples.     

Verb reading in developmental language impairment

This research addresses the issues of frequency and regularity in verb reading and their importance for the organization of the mental lexicon in DLI francophones. A reading task probes response latencies and response accuracy for DLI and control participants on frequent and infrequent inflected forms of verbs. DLI participants are slower at reading verbs even if their mean accuracy rates are higher than controls'. Results also indicate that the type of suffix on the verb affects controls and DLI participants differently in their accuracy rates: DLI participants exhibit higher error rates on less frequent inflections, while controls do not. Finally, unusual patterns are found for DLI participants on regular versus irregular verbs: regular verbs are slower to be read by DLI participants. These results are compared to findings from a previous simple lexical decision study. They are interpreted as indicating that DLI word reading patterns are qualitatively different from those evidenced by controls.     

Clarifying the Relationship Between Organizational Citizenship Behaviors, Gender, and Knowledge Sharing in Workplace Organizations in Taiwan

This study examines the relationships between organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs) and knowledge sharing using gender as a moderator. In the proposed model, five components of OCBs—altruism, courtesy, conscientiousness, sportsmanship, and civic virtue—influence knowledge sharing. Gender stereotypes have a moderating effect on each path and a main effect on each antecedent. These moderating effects are simultaneously examined using data obtained from employees at various companies who attend evening college classes for advanced study in Taiwan. A moderating test reveals that the influence of altruism on knowledge sharing is stronger for women than for men, while the influences of courtesy and sportsmanship on knowledge sharing are stronger for men than for women. Lastly, the influences of conscientiousness and civic virtue on knowledge sharing are similar between women and men. Implications of empirical findings are also discussed.     

人们何以能够“舍生取义”?基于保护性价值观认知神经机制的解释

保护性价值观是一种拒绝与其他任何价值相互交易, 尤其拒绝与经济价值进行交易的观念。近些年来的认知神经科学研究证据表明, 人们之所以可以为了坚守保护性价值观, 表现出“舍生取义”的行为(如对抗利益诱惑甚至放弃生命), 一方面在于保护性价值观是以一种道义主义的绝对规则方式进行表征和建构的, 这使得人们较少进行利弊权衡; 另一方面, 由于保护性价值观与自我和道德认同过程紧密相关, 使得其被主观赋予了最高价值。未来研究中, 可以在借鉴保护性价值观的研究范式基础上, 开展对中国人核心价值观的实证研究探讨, 关注其文化差异问题, 并进行正确价值观的干预和正确引导的应用实践研究。     

Attributional Ambiguity of Affirmative Action

We propose that affirmative action policies that are perceived to give preference to individuals solely or primarily on the basis of their group membership create attributional ambiguity about the personal deserving of individuals affected by these procedures. This ambiguity about the extent to which outcomes are deserved is hypothesized to be self-protective for people who are denied a position, but to have detrimental consequences among beneficiaries, especially if they are members of groups whose competence is doubted (either by themselves or others). Selection procedures that are perceived to be based both on individual merit and group membership, in contrast, are hypothesized to reduce attributional ambiguity about deserving and thus attenuate the effects of group-based preferential selection procedures on those who are benefited and bypassed by these procedures. An experiment was conducted to test these hypotheses. Men and women were randomly selected or rejected for a leadership role under one of three procedures: outcomes based (a) solely on sex, (b) solely on merit, or (c) on both sex and merit. Results provided partial support for our hypotheses.     

Would We Recognize Progress if We Saw it? A Commentary

Comments on the nature of special education as an enterprise and judgment of its progress are offered. Five independent but necessary and sufficient criteria for judgment of progress in special education for students with emotional or behavioral disorders are suggested. Comments are made on each of the articles in the series, and concluding remarks call for more data and better thinking.     

Community Living Skills

Persons with chronic mental health problems are frequently found living in the community at varying quality of life levels. Though rehabilitation programs are suitable for patients with acute exacerbations of mental health pathology, these programs are necessary but not sufficient to meet the needs of the chronic person. Long-term reliance on biomedically-based rehabilitation can produce dependence on the system and maintain reliance on the "sick role" which is counterproductive for current trends related to deinstitutionalization and "least restrictive environment." The intent of this article is to focus on an one alternative service delivery model- psychoeducation. The potentials for this mode to normalize or maximize independence is discussed and two community living skills programs for the chronically mentally ill are described to exemplify the application of psychoeducation.     

Formulas for component scores

General formulas for obtaining scores for individuals on components (factors derived from correlation matrices with unit communality estimates) are given. They are specialized to give Hotelling's formula for principal component scores. Formulas for scores on components rotated from principal components are developed.The final version of this paper was prepared while the author was a U. S. Public Health Service Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.     

Neighbourhood effects on error rates in speech production

Models of speech production differ on whether phonological neighbourhoods should affect processing, and on whether effects should be facilitatory or inhibitory. Inhibitory effects of large neighbourhoods have been argued to underlie apparent anti-frequency effects, whereby high-frequency default features are more prone to mispronunciation errors than low-frequency nondefault features. Data from the original SLIPs experiments that found apparent anti-frequency effects are analysed for neighbourhood effects. Effects are facilitatory: errors are significantly less likely for words with large numbers of neighbours that share the characteristic that is being primed for error ("friends"). Words in the neighbourhood that do not share the target characteristic ("enemies") have little effect on error rates. Neighbourhood effects do not underlie the apparent anti-frequency effects. Implications for models of speech production are discussed.     

A unified theory of the meaning of some spatial relational terms

This paper presents a unified account of the meaning of the spatial relational terms right, left, in front of, behind, above and below. It claims that each term has three types of meanings, basic, deictic and intrinsic, and that the definitions of each type of meaning are identical in form for all six terms. Restrictions on the use of the terms, which are different for above and below than for the rest, are explained by a general constraint on all uses of spatial relational terms, the framework vertical constraint. This constraint depends on the existence of a fourth type of meaning for above and below, one defined by the framework in which the related objects are located. It is argued that a theory centred on the framework vertical constraint is preferable to one centred on the principle of canonical orientation (Levelt, 1984).     

Revision of the sentence completion test for ego development

New forms of the Washington University Sentence Completion Test are presented, revised to be closely comparable for men and women. The two pages of each form are usable as alternate 18-item forms. All stems on the new forms have a manual derived for women, for men, or for both. Order of items on the new forms is designed to maximize cooperation and to insure independent answers on the several stems. Data taken from several diverse samples using the previous forms show the median item validity (correlation of item rating with total protocol rating) slightly higher for women (about .50) than for men (about .46). However, the difference is wholly accounted for by difference in the variance of the samples. First-person stems and impersonal ones are about equally valid for women, but impersonal ones appear to be more valid for men. More impersonal stems are included on the new forms.     

Sensitivity analysis in factor analysis: Difference between using covariance and correlation matrices

Influence curves of some parameters under various methods of factor analysis have been given in the literature. These influence curves depend on the influence curves for either the covariance or the correlation matrix used in the analysis. The differences between the influence curves based on the covariance and the correlation matrices are derived in this paper. Simple formulas for the differences of the influence curves, based on the two matrices, for the unique variance matrix, factor loadings and some other parameter are obtained under scale-invariant estimation methods, though the influence curves themselves are in complex forms.The authors are most grateful to the referees, the Associate Editor, the Editor and Raymond Lam for helpful suggestions for improving the clarity of the paper.     

Precedent autonomy and personal identity

Debates on precedent autonomy and some forms of paternalistic interventions, which are related to questions of personal identity, are analyzed. The discussion is based on the distinction between personal identity as persistence and as biographical identity. It first is shown that categorical objections to advance directives and "Ulysses contracts" are based on false assumptions about personal identity that conflate persistence and biographical identity. Therefore, advance directives and "Ulysses contracts" are ethically acceptable tools for prolonging one's autonomy. The notions of personality and biographical identity are used to analyze the ethically relevant features. Thereby, it is shown that these concepts are operative in and useful for thinking in biomedical ethics. The overall conclusion is that categorical arguments against precedent autonomy or "Ulysses contracts" are based on misleading theories of personal identity and that advance directives are an ethically respectable tool for prolonging individuals' autonomy in cases of dementia and mental illness.     

A review of psychophysiological research with hyperkinetic children

A number of studies have appeared which focus on the issue of whether hyperactive children are psychophysiologically different from normal children and what impact the stimulant drugs may have on psychophysiological characteristics of these children. The present paper reviews these studies under the type of measures that were employed. In general, the results suggest that hyperactive children are probably not under- or overaroused in their resting levels of autonomic functions, although some children may display resting cortical underarousal. However, the findings of studies on the impact of stimulation on autonomic or central functions intimate that some hyperactive children are probably underreactive to environmental stimulation, or are "underarousable." Indeed, where differences between hyperactive and normal children are found in such evoked-response studies, they are consistently in this direction of "underarousability." Results for the effects of stimulant drugs suggest that these drugs energize or increase the "arousal" of these children and enhance the impact of stimulation on the nervous system. The implications of these results for current theories of hyperactivity and for future research are discussed.