Factor analysis of attitudes toward abortion.

700 Ss rated the concept abortion on a series of bipolar adjectives. Factor analysis of the ratings suggested (a) that Ss judged the concept along four orthogonal dimensions, immoral-repelling, cruel-destructive, emotional-serious, and rational-impulsive and (b) that males and females had similar factor structures. Polarity analysis showed that abortion was seen as immoral, repelling, bad, cruel, destructive, ugly, sinful, emotional, serious, rational and impulsive. Although this is highly unfavorable compared to the results of previous research, it appears to represent a liberal trend.     

Amnesics Have a Disproportionately Severe Memopry Deficit for Interactive Context

Two experiments were used to compare the recognition memory of amnesic and normal subjects for intentionally encoded words (targets) and for incidentally encoded words that were meaningfully related to the targets and presented at the same time (interactive context). In both experiments the target recognition of the two groups was matched at a high level by presenting the amnesics with much shorter lists of words to remember. Experiment 1 compared 20 amnesics and their matched controls and showed that whereas the amnesics' recognition of the target words did not benefit significantly when they were presented together with their interactive context words (relative to their recognition when the target words were presented alone), that of the controls did. Experiment 2 compared 14 amnesics and their matched controls and showed that when patients and their controls were matched on their target word recognition in isolation, then the patients still showed worse recognition for the interactive context words. These effects were not found only in Korsakoff patients, and their size did not correlate with behavioural measures of frontal-lobe damage. It is concluded that amnesics may be more impaired at recognizing incidentally encoded interactive context than they are at recognizing target material, and this deficit may be an essential feature of the syndrome.     

Epicurean Hedonism as Qualitative Hedonism

Epicurus’ theory of what is good for a person is hedonistic: only pleasure has intrinsic value. Critics object that Epicurus is committed to advocating sensualist excess, since hedonism seems both to imply that more pleasure is always of some good for you, and to recommend even debauched, sensual kinds of pleasure. However, Epicurus can respond to this objection much like J. S. Mill responds to the objection that hedonism is a “doctrine worthy only of swine”. I argue that Epicurus’ hedonism is a version of qualitative hedonism on which static pleasure is intrinsically superior to other kinds of pleasure. I also argue that Epicurus conceives of pleasure as a phenomenal or felt quality of experience, and that this is compatible with his troublesome claim that there is an upper limit to pleasure and wellbeing.     

Quantifying with words: An investigation of the validity of narrative‐derived performance scores

Performance appraisal research has focused almost entirely on traditional numerical ratings despite narrative text comments regularly being collected within appraisals. This study investigated the theory and utility of leveraging narrative comments to better understand employee performance. Narrative sentiment scores were derived using text mining on a large sample of narrative comments. These scores were then applied to an independent set of 2 years of performance data. It was assumed that narrative comments would reflect true performance variance that overlaps with traditional ratings, but also that they would capture incremental variance due to increases in total information and a reduction in rater‐motivated biases in contexts in which narrative data were not explicitly linked to administrative outcomes. The derived narrative scores were reliable across years, converged with traditional numerical ratings and explained incremental variance in future performance outcomes (performance ratings, involuntary turnover, promotions, and pay increases). Collectively, this study highlights how narratives can enhance performance measurement and demonstrates how these data can be economically scored in applied settings.