On the “absoluteness” of category and magnitude scales of pain

The concept of “absolute scaling” (Zwislocki & Goodman, 1980) implies that direct judgments of sensory magnitude not only reflect the relative positions of the stimuli being judged, but also permit us to assess level differences in sensation. In order to explore this notion for different scaling methods, in the present investigation we compared magnitude estimation with category partitioning, a verbally anchored categorization procedure, in scaling painful pressure stimuli covering different intensity ranges. The results indicate that when the same stimulus range was presented after 1 week, both methods appeared to be highly reliable, with category partitioning faring somewhat better than magnitude estimation. When the stimulus range was unobtrusively changed between sessions, both methods reflected the within-subjects shift in absolute level. When two different sets of subjects judged the slightly different stimulus ranges, both methods resulted in scale values consistent with absolute scaling, though only category partitioning was sensitive enough to differentiate the two stimulus ranges. The results are discussed in the context of different possibilities of anchoring direct scaling methods in order to obtain “absolute” level information.     

Environmental annoyances: an urban-specific threat to quality of life?

Two questions are at the bases of this paper: (1) what is the importance of environmental features among all other factors contributing to threaten the individual's quality of life, and (2) are cities perceived as being worse than rural environments in terms of environmental quality? In order to respond to these questions, a French version of the Lazarus Hassle scale has been published in an issue of the periodic “Science et Vie”. 1791 individuals from all parts of France sent in their responses. Results show that environmental features are among the most severe hassles of daily life in French population. They are the most often mentioned and the highest ranked items. Looking at the size of the place of residence, it appears that inhabitants of rural areas do not consider themselves significantly less exposed to stressors like noise, air pollution, traffic problems or criminality than Parisians or inhabitants of other big agglomerations, and they do not feel significantly less irritated, frustrated or anxious by environmental problems, than others. In terms of people–environment relations, the results suggest that, whatever the objective environmental condition, people feel stressed by environmental problems, which indicates that the awareness of such issues seem to be at least partly dependent on normative social constructs.     

Sentence-reversion-based thought record (SRBTR): a new strategy to deal with “yes,but…” dysfunctional thoughts in cognitive therapy

The Dysfunctional Thought Record (DTR) is an effective and useful worksheet, widely used in cognitive therapy (CT), to help patients respond to automatic thoughts (ATs) and to change negative mood states. Some clients, however, seem not to improve with the use of the original DTR proposed by Beck et al. (1979). Padesky and Greenberger (1995) added two evidence columns to the original five-column DTR in order to generate more balanced alternative thoughts. In this paper, I present a case report and propose a modified thought record to deal especially with “yes, but…” dysfunctional thoughts.     

Homeworking and work-life balance: does it add to quality of life?

Work–life balance has recently emerged as part of a wider focus on quality of life issues. This paper adopts a personal well-being approach to the quality of life suggesting that a positive relation between self and place is essential to well being. The aim of this paper is to examine the potential contribution of homeworking to the quality of life. This paper draws from a recent study of homeworkers, funded by the ESRC. Interviews and questionnaire data are presented, with 123 homeworkers and 371 women working in the North East. The paper concludes by suggesting the benefits of flexible working are equally experienced and are differentiated by gender and type of work.     

Braille literacy as a human right: A challenge to the “inefficiency” argument against braille instruction

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) affirms a right to education for disabled persons and aims to ensure braille instruction for blind individuals. However, there is evidence that braille instruction is often circumvented or abandoned early in CRPD nations because it is perceived as an inefficient learning medium for blind students. This perception persists despite insufficient empirical evidence and a lack of understanding of the efficiency of reading versus listening for learning in sighted individuals. We therefore investigated the efficiency of learning written versus spoken words in blind and sighted samples. Participants (23 blind, 20 sighted) studied the written definitions of 70 rare English words in successive rounds, presented in conjunction with written or spoken wordforms. Blind participants learned with equal efficiency across modalities, whereas sighted participants learned spoken words more efficiently. The findings indicate the inefficiency argument against teaching braille is groundless, both because braille word learning is not less efficient than auditory word learning for blind individuals, and because reading is valued in the education of sighted individuals despite its apparent inefficiency in that population.     

Meta‐analyses of love scales: Do various love scales measure the same psychological constructs?

Abstract: Two statistical meta-analyses synthesized 33 empirical studies which investigated the correlation between relationship satisfaction and two types of love: Erotic Love and Companionate Love, measured by various love scales based on four major theories by Rubin, Lee, Hatfield, and Sternberg. The results drawn by the Hunter-Schmidt method showed that satisfaction was highly correlated with Erotic Love, but that its correlation with Companionate Love was unclear due to heterogeneity in the total sample of the all Companionate Love studies. A moderator analysis indicated a potential moderator, that is, theoretical differences between Lee's Color Theory of Love and the other three theories. The result suggested that a Companionate Love named "Storge" in the Color Theory should not be mixed up with other friendship-style loves defined by other theories as the Storge subscale would measure a different psychological construct.     

HOW PROTHETIC IS THE CONTINUUM OF SMELL?: A further comment on the relation between magnitude and category scales

The relation K =αlog( ψ + q / k ) +β between category scale K and magnitude scale ψ found in previous experiments on loudness and softness of white noise was confirmed for smell data, too. The small increase in variability (SDs) of judgments with magnitude for smell as compared with loudness and softness suggests the substitution of the prothetic-metathetic dichotomy with a quantifiable feature, protheticness, with metathetic continua as the limiting case.     

What is “Intervention”?

I begin by noting that several theologians and others object to special divine action (divine intervention and action beyond conservation and creation) on the grounds that it is incompatible with science. These theologians are thinking of classical Newtonian science; I argue that in fact classical science is in no way incompatible with special divine action, including miracle. What is incompatible with special divine action is the Laplacean picture, which involves the causal closure of the universe. I then note that contemporary, quantum mechanical science doesn't even initially appear to be incompatible with special divine action. Nevertheless, many who are well aware of the quantum mechanical revolution (including some members of the Special Divine Action Project) still find a problem with special divine action, hoping to find an understanding of it that doesn't involve divine intervention. I argue that their objections to intervention are not sound. Furthermore, it isn't even possible to say what intervention is, given the quantum mechanical framework. I conclude by offering an account of special divine action that isn't open to their objections to intervention.     

How “rational” is “rationality”?

Abstract

By taking serious a remark once made by Paul Bernays, namely that an account of the nature of rationality should begin with concept-formation, this article sets out to uncover both the restrictive and the expansive boundaries of rationality. In order to do this some implications of the perennial philosophical problem of the “coherence of irreducibles” will be related to the acknowledgement of primitive terms and of their indefinability. Some critical remarks will be articulated in connection with an over-estimation of rationality - concerning the influence of Kant’s view of human understanding as the formal law-giver of nature (the supposedly “rational structure of the world”), and the apparently innocent (subjectivist) habit to refer to experiential entities as ‘objects’. The other side of the coin will be highlighted with reference to those kinds of knowledge transcending the limits of concept-formation - culminating in formulating the four most basic idea-statements philosophy can articulate about the universe. What is found “in-between” these (restrictive) and (expansive) boundaries of rationality will then briefly be placed within the contours of a threefold perspective on the self-insufficiency of logicality - as merely one amongst many more dimensions conditioning human life. Although the meaning of the most basic logical principles - such as the logical principles of identity, non-contradiction and sufficient reason - will surface in our analysis, exploring some of the complex issues in this respect, such as the relationship between thought and language, will not be analysed. The important role of solidarity - as the basis of critique - will be explained and related both to the role of immanent criticism in rational conversation and the importance of acknowledging what is designated as the principle of the excluded antinomy (which in an ontic sense underlies the logical principle of non-contradiction). The last section of our discussion will succinctly illuminate the proper place of the inevitable trust we ought to have in rationality - while implicitly warning against the rationalistic over-estimation of it (its degeneration into a rationalist “faith in reason”). Our intention is to enhance an awareness of the reality that rationality is embedded in and borders on givens which are not open to further “rational” exploration - givens that both condition (in a constitutive sense) and transcend the limits of conceptual knowledge. Some of the distinctions and insights operative in our analysis are explained in Strauss 2000 and 2003. Yet, most of the systematic perspectives found in this analysis of rationality are only developed in this article for the first time. Since a different study is required to discuss related problems and results found within cognitive science, it cannot be discussed within one article.     

What is the deficit in phonological processing deficits: auditory sensitivity, masking, or category formation?

Although children with language impairments, including those associated with reading, usually demonstrate deficits in phonological processing, there is minimal agreement as to the source of those deficits. This study examined two problems hypothesized to be possible sources: either poor auditory sensitivity to speech-relevant acoustic properties, mainly formant transitions, or enhanced masking of those properties. Adults and 8-year-olds with and without phonological processing deficits (PPD) participated. Children with PPD demonstrated weaker abilities than children with typical language development (TLD) in reading, sentence recall, and phonological awareness. Dependent measures were word recognition, discrimination of spectral glides, and phonetic judgments based on spectral and temporal cues. All tasks were conducted in quiet and in noise. Children with PPD showed neither poorer auditory sensitivity nor greater masking than adults and children with TLD, but they did demonstrate an unanticipated deficit in category formation for nonspeech sounds. These results suggest that these children may have an underlying deficit in perceptually organizing sensory information to form coherent categories.     

Understanding “because”: How important is the task?

The causal connective because requires the order of clauses within a sentence to violate the order of events in the real world; i.e., effect because cause is correct. Children's (4, 6, and 8 years of age) ability to comprehend because was explored in a series of four studies. The first, a replication with variations of existing studies, assessed children's ability to judge as anomalous sentences in which the order of clauses is reversed. Comprehension of impersonal sentences is better than of sentences derived from narratives of their own experiences, although children do poorly at this task until age 8. However, results of study 2 suggest that children's poor understanding of task requirements is partly responsible, since increased task instructions and modeling led to significant improvement in the ability of preschoolers to judge sentences as anomalous. In the third study, children named the cause event after being told a causal sequence (involving either psychological or physical causality) of the form: Event A, Event C (effect) because Event B (cause), Event D. Comprehension of physical causality sequences is superior, but again, only 8-year-olds showed good performance. In Study 4, children were asked to find the cause event in four-clause sequences of the same form as in Study 3, but memory props were added in the form of pictures of events A, B, and D. Near perfect performance was shown by all children. Overall, comprehension studies of because are judged to be rife with methodological problems, and memory demands are seen to be particularly important.The authors wish to thank Lynn Anne Pye for her contributions to Study 4, which formed part of her undergraduate honors degree research, as well as F. Michael Rabinowitz for his comments and statistical aid. This research was supported by NSERC grant A7911 to the senior author.     

“Piensa” twice: On the foreign language effect in decision making

In this article, we assess to what extent decision making is affected by the language in which a given problem is presented (native vs. foreign). In particular, we aim to ask whether the impact of various heuristic biases in decision making is diminished when the problems are presented in a foreign language. To this end, we report four main studies in which more than 700 participants were tested on different types of individual decision making problems. In the first study, we replicated Keysar et al.’s (2012) recent observation regarding the foreign language effect on framing effects related to loss aversion. In the second section, we assessed whether the foreign language effect is present in other types of framing problems that involve psychological accounting biases rather than gain/loss dichotomies. In the third section, we studied the foreign language effect in several key aspects of the theory of decision making under risk and uncertainty. In the fourth study, we assessed the presence of a foreign language effect in the cognitive reflection test, a test that includes logical problems that do not carry emotional connotations. The absence of such an effect in this test suggests that foreign language leads to a reduction of heuristic biases in decision making across a range of decision making situations and provide also some evidence about the boundaries of the phenomenon. We explore several potential factors that may underlie the foreign language effect in decision making.     

Multi‐Criteria Ratios: What is the Unit?

When Analytic Hierarchy Process ratios are normalized to sum to unity, the unit of measure becomes obscure. This paper investigates this obscurity and whether ratio measurement is possible when there is no prior knowledge of the measurement unit. Initially, we look at ratio scales of tangible attributes of objects with well‐known measures. Then, ratio scales of unknown intangible attributes of objects are analysed. We discover that natural zero and a specific unit of measure are not necessarily used explicitly in deriving ratio scale measures. Nevertheless, the derived scale does have a derived unit of measurement. We conclude that although composite multi‐criteria answers are possible in ratio form, it is important to know that a unit of measure exists if ambiguities are to be avoided. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Acquiring Foreign Language Vocabulary Through Meaningful Linguistic Context: Where is the Limit to Vocabulary Learning?

The present studies examined the effects of varying degrees of unfamiliar vocabulary within written discourse on individuals’ abilities to use linguistic context for the purposes of translation and comprehension (i.e., lexical inferencing). Prose varied in the number of foreign words introduced into each sentence (e.g., 0 through 7 content words per sentence). Furthermore, Krashen’s Input Hypothesis and the Evaluation component of the Involvement Load Hypothesis were tested to determine the degree at which non-comprehensible input hinders the ability of a learner to successfully use linguistic context for translation and comprehension. Results indicated that, as the number of foreign words per sentence, i.e., non-comprehensible input, increased the ability to successfully translate foreign words and create situational models for comprehension begins to decrease especially beyond five unfamiliar words per sentence. This result suggests that there is an optimal level of effectiveness in the use of a linguistic context strategy for learning foreign language vocabulary, but also that there is a limit to the strategy’s effectiveness. Implications and applications to the field of foreign language learning are discussed.     

“What is a class?”

Conclusion The argument of this paper suggests that for the last hundred years or so fundamental premisses of logic have been incorrect. From these premisses a vast superstructure has been developed which, it would seem, is no more meaningful than a game such as chess.The basic errors in current class theory, it seems to me, have impeded progress in the fields of mathematics and logic. I am certain that on the theory proposed, the correct definition of a natural number can be provided. I can, in fact, provide this. What benefits it will bring to logic only time will tell.Of the greatest importance is the fact that if the theory is true, at last, there will be a firm link between the Humanities and the Sciences.     

Vis‐à‐vis the Couch: Where is Psychoanalysis?

The author discusses ways in which the couch or chair (lying down versus sitting up) may be used to maintain safety and defend against perceived dangers in the analytic process. Several dialectics are relevant as they intersect with that of danger and safety, including engagement/privacy, interiority/exteriority and subject/object. The author discusses these dialectics in terms of the ways in which the analyst is used at different points in time, i.e. as an objectifi ed other, a subjective object or part-object, or as a subject with an internal world. The therapeutic action associated with sitting up (versus lying down on the couch) has been undertheorized, despite the fact that many, if not most, analysands sit up for some portion of their analysis. Through the use of a heuristic visual-spatial metaphor as represented by the use of the couch or chair, the author discusses the signifi cance of lying down and sitting up for therapeutic action.