Related factors of the Survey of Study Habits and Attitudes and the Vocational Preference Inventory

The Survey of Study Habits and Attitudes (SSHA) and the Vocational Preference Inventory (VPI) were administered to 100 undergraduates. The scales of the two instruments were compared using canonical analysis. The analysis revealed a relationship between a component of the SSHA and a component of the VPI which accounted for 31% of the variance of the two instruments. The related components were interpreted as indicating that a dimension running from an academic orientation to a nonacademic orientation was measured by certain scales of each instrument.     

Monkeys are rational!

Five squirrel monkeys showed a significant Symbolic Distance Effect (SDE) when tested on procedures designed to incorporate reaction time (RT) measures within the five-term series (“transitive inference”) task. Taken together with the high levels of transitive choice obtained by these subjects, this result shows that monkeys have met choice and reaction time criteria perceived by many as indexical of “linear representation”. Explicit evaluation of the representational implications of the SDE was subsequently undertaken in three-choice transfer tests, which initially revealed consistent deviations from the ranks predicted on a linear model. Extensive testing with the triadic method, however, elicited spontaneous improvement in overall choice ranking according to a linear principle. Further decomposition of the RT data showed that the irregularities in the initial transfer behaviour are by no means paradoxical. The ordinal separation data structure, from which the SDE is derived, masks two separate populations of scores--one fast and relatively undifferentiated, the other slow and based on judgements with poorly encoded items. And it is these factors, not inter-item distance, which, we argue, are the main determiners of the SDE. Whilst this phenomenon is thus only weakly indexical of principled linear representation, we contend that new (triad-based) ranking evidence suggests that monkeys may be capable of seriation as well as transitivity.     

Pollard on Habits of Action

Bill Pollard has recently developed an account of habits of action, endeavoring to rehabilitate the traditional notion of habit in a way that can be used to address current philosophical concerns. I argue that Pollard’s account has important shortcomings. The account is intended to apply indiscriminately to both habitual and skilled acts, but this overlooks crucial distinctions. Moreover, Pollard’s account fails to do justice to the various ways in which the idea of habit figures in the explanation and assessment of action. These shortcomings are a consequence of certain assumptions Pollard shares with the accounts of mind and action he sets to criticize. As long as these assumptions are left intact, the potential of dispositional notions such as habit and skill to contribute to contemporary debates will not be realized.     

Radio Listening Habits of Children

Abstract

Young, K. Social Psychology. (2nd ed.) New York: Crofts, 1945. Pp. 578. Reviewed by C. R. Carpenter.

Schilder, P. Goals and Desires of Man. New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1942. Pp. 305. Reviewed by Nathan Israeli.     

Preference relations

Various principles about preferences between sets of options are presented and considered with respect to several familiar decision rules. Necessary and sufficient (or minimally sufficient) preference principles are given for each rule. The paper concludes with an example of how easy it is to misjudge the reasonableness of preference principles.     

Position,Preference and Personality: A Microlevel Explanation of Negativity in Day‐To‐Day Politics

While many scholars investigate the determinants of negativity in the political sphere, it remains largely unclear why some politicians are more negative than others. Studies thus far lack explanations at the individual level, and they almost exclusively focus on negativity during electoral races. Surveying national and regional representatives in Belgium (N = 228), this study seeks to explain individual politicians’ willingness to go negative during everyday politics. The results show that negativity is not so much related to institutionally driven differences between representatives but more to politicians’ personal characteristics and preference roles. Negative politics, hence, is not an inevitable result of institutional structures, rules, and norms, but rather depends on the characteristics and motivations of the individual representatives citizens elect.     

Problems of Operationalizing Habits and Integrating Habits in Normative Decision‐Making Models1

This paper reports on a study, conducted in Bochum, Germany, involving 160 participants. Two research interests were combined in our study. The first aim was to integrate habit into the process of normative decision making to predict environmentally relevant behavior. Two approaches of implementing habits are analyzed and discussed. Both conceptualizing habitual and normative influences on behavior as excluding paths and integrating habit into the process of normative decision making are illustrated by data. With our approach, we intended to initialize a discussion about the consideration of habits in the context of normative decisions. The second aim was to develop and test different modifications of Verplanken's (Verplanken, Aarts, van Knippenberg, & van Knippenberg, 1994) response frequency measure (RFM) to improve the operational ization of habit. The modified forms of RFM were not more appropriate than the unmodified form. Therefore, we suggest using the unmodified RFM until there is an improved form available.     

Habits of nervous tension and suicide

In a prospective study of 1,046 male medical students, those who later committed suicide showed a heightened sensitivity in stressful situations as assessed by the Habits of Nervous Tension Questionnaire (HNT). Survival analyses specified 2 of the 25 HNT items as the strongest suicide predictors: Irritability (relative risk 5.5; 95% confidence interval 1.76-17.17) and Urinary Frequency (3.3; 1.07-10.32). No other risk factors for suicide emerged from family background measures or individual medical school measures. It appears that types of sensitivity reflect psychological characteristics that are long-term precursors of suicide.     

Interactions between Learning Sets in Monkeys

Relationships between stage of moral judgment and antecedent social experiences are presented for a non-Western sample of young adults. Cross sectional data are presented for two groups of Kenyan students: 52 University of Nairobi students; and 40 fourth form secondary school Ss. Critical variables are (a) family modernization, (b) attending ethnically pluralistic secondary schools, and (c) living independently away from home. The correlations between moral judgment stage and these three variables are controlled for, and compared to, correlations between stage of moral judgment and age, sex, race, and academic ability (as measured by standardized achievement tests or by grades). The evidence demonstrates associations between moral stage and all three critical variables, though in different ways for the two age levels of Ss.     

Auditory List Memory in Rhesus Monkeys

Auditory memory of 2 rhesus monkeys was tested in a serial probe recognition task. Lists of four environmental or natural sounds were followed by a retention interval and a test. The test matched one of the list items on half of the trials. The retention interval was varied across sessions. Six experiments showed similar results and changes in the serial position function. At short retention intervals, there was good memory for first list items (primacy effect) and poor memory for last list items. At intermediate retention intervals, memory improved for last list items (recency effect). At long retention intervals (20 s and 30 s), the recency effect was strong, and the primacy effect had dissipated. These auditory primacy and recency effects and their changes with retention interval were opposite to those for visual memory. Implications for processes and mechanisms of memory are discussed.     

Monkeys show an oblique effect.

Monkeys aligned a cursor bar with high-contrast square-wave gratings presented in a variety of orientations. Alignment time increased with increasing spatial frequency from 6 to 24 cycles deg-1 regardless of the orientation of the grating. At higher spatial frequencies, alignment tasks took longer for obliquely oriented gratings than for horizontal and vertical ones. Reducing grating contrast by blurring the image of the 24 cycle deg-1 grating also produced longer alignment times for the obliques. These data indicate that monkeys have an oblique effect similar to that found in humans, implying that the monkey is a useful animal model for investigating the development of meridional anisotropies.     

Preference Consistency and Preference Strength: Processing and Judgmental issues1

Recent research in motivated reasoning has examined processing of information that is consistent or inconsistent with one's preferences. This paper extends the work by examining the micro‐processes of the processing of such information. In addition, it examines the moderating impact of preference strength and argument quality on processing of and judgments associated with preference‐consistent and preference‐inconsistent information. Across 2 studies, evidence was obtained suggesting that preference‐inconsistent information is processed in greater depth as well as in a more biased manner. Findings are also reported indicating that when preferences are weak, people are less resistant to changing their preferences, particularly when exposed to strong arguments accompanying preference‐inconsistent information. Implications for comparative advertising in a consumer marketing context are discussed.     

Monkeys match and tally quantities across senses

We report here that monkeys can actively match the number of sounds they hear to the number of shapes they see and present the first evidence that monkeys sum over sounds and sights. In Experiment 1, two monkeys were trained to choose a simultaneous array of 1-9 squares that numerically matched a sample sequence of shapes or sounds. Monkeys numerically matched across (audio-visual) and within (visual-visual) modalities with equal accuracy and transferred to novel numerical values. In Experiment 2, monkeys presented with sample sequences of randomly ordered shapes or tones were able to choose an array of 2-9 squares that was the numerical sum of the shapes and sounds in the sample sequence. In both experiments, accuracy and reaction time depended on the ratio between the correct numerical match and incorrect choice. These findings suggest monkeys and humans share an abstract numerical code that can be divorced from the modality in which stimuli are first experienced.     

Monkeys display classic signatures of human symbolic arithmetic

Non-human primates compare quantities in a crude manner, by approximating their values. Less is known about the mental transformations that non-humans can perform over approximate quantities, such as arithmetic transformations. There is evidence that human symbolic arithmetic has a deep psychological connection with the primitive, approximate forms of quantification of non-human animals. Here, we ask whether the subtle performance signatures that humans exhibit during symbolic arithmetic also bear a connection to primitive arithmetic. Specifically, we examined the problem size effect, the tie effect, and the practice effect—effects which are commonly observed in children’s math performance in school. We show that, like humans, monkeys exhibited the problem size and tie effects, indicating commonalities in arithmetic algorithms with humans. Unlike humans, however, monkeys did not exhibit a practice effect. Together, these findings provide new evidence for a cognitive relation between non-symbolic and symbolic arithmetic.