Text messaging amongst New Zealand drivers: Prevalence and risk perception

Recent work suggests that text messaging impairs simulated and actual driving performance and that this impairment exceeds that of conversing on a cell phone while driving. Additionally, research has shown that text messaging is common in several countries, and despite drivers acknowledging the high risk involved in doing so, drivers continue to engage in this behaviour – regardless of legislation banning it. A nationwide online survey in New Zealand, of 1057 respondents, collected anonymous self-report data regarding the frequency of cell phone use (conversing and text messaging) while driving, beliefs concerning the safety of conversing or text messaging while driving. This article presents part of the results of that study – focusing on text messaging behaviour and risk perception regarding text messaging while driving. Over half of respondents surveyed reported sending or reading between 1 and 5 text messages while driving in a typical week. Despite this, 89% of participants agreed that text messaging while driving in general impairs driving performance. There were no gender differences between the number of text messages read and sent. Age was found to be an important indicator of participant’s willingness to engage in text messaging while driving, with younger drivers more likely to engage in this behaviour. The implications of these findings for future research and countermeasure development are discussed.     

Harm to Future Persons: Non-Identity Problems and Counterpart Solutions

Non-Identity arguments have a pervasive but sometimes counter-intuitive grip on certain key areas in ethics. As a result, there has been limited success in supporting the alternative view that our choices concerning future generations can be considered harmful on any sort of person-affecting principle. However, as the Non-Identity Problem relies overtly on certain metaphysical assumptions, plausible alternatives to these foundations can substantially undermine the Non-Identity argument itself. In this paper, I show how the pervasive force and nature of Non-Identity arguments rely upon a specific adoption of a theory of modality and identity and how adopting an alternative account of modality can be used to reject many conclusions formed through Non-Identity type arguments. By using Lewis’s counterpart-theoretic account to understand ways we might have been, I outline the basis of a modal account of harm that incorporates a person-affecting aspect. This, in turn, has significant implications for ethical decision-making in areas such as reproductive choice and the welfare of future generations.     

Finding MAPs using strongly equivalent high order recurrent symmetric connectionist networks

Belief revision is the problem of finding the most plausible explanation for an observed set of evidences. It has many applications in various scientific domains like natural language understanding, medical diagnosis and computational biology. Bayesian Networks (BN) is an important probabilistic graphical formalism widely used for belief revision tasks. In BN, belief revision can be achieved by finding the maximum a posteriori (MAP) assignment. Finding MAP is an NP-Hard problem. In previous work, we showed how to find the MAP assignment in BN using High Order Recurrent Neural Networks (HORN) through an intermediate representation of Cost-Based Abduction. This method eliminates the need to explicitly construct the energy function in two steps, objective and constraints. This paper builds on that previous work by providing the theoretical foundation and proving that the resultant HORN used to find MAP is strongly equivalent to the original BN it tries to solve.     

The sideline behaviour of coaches at children’s team sports games

Objectives

This study aimed to establish the prevalence, pattern and nature of coaches’ verbal behaviour at children’s (ages 6-12 years) team sports events. The study draws upon the motivational model presented by Mageau and Vallerand (2003) to examine the influence of global (gender), contextual (sport related), and social (athlete gender) factors on coach comments.

Design

A cross-sectional observational study of coaches stratified across four team sports: Rugby Union, Netball, Association Football and Touch Rugby.

Method

The Observation Instrument at Sports Events was used to categorise covertly recorded verbal comments made by coaches at organised team sports games.

Results

Overall, 10,697 comments were recorded at 72 games at a rate of 3.71 comments/minute; 35.4% were categorised as positive, 21.6% as negative, and 43.0% as neutral. Significant differences in negative comments were identified between sport (p < .001) with rugby coaches recording the highest percentage of negative comments and the lowest percentage of positive comments; by coach gender (p < .001), with male coaches recording higher rates of negative comments; and by athlete gender (p < .001), with coaches of male-only teams recording higher rates of negative comments. When simultaneously included in a Poisson regression model the difference in negative comments between sports remained statistically significant (p < .001) whereas coach gender was no longer significant.

Conclusions

The ratio of negative coach comments for all sports gives cause for concern. These findings suggest that sports of national and cultural significance are a key driver of coaching behaviours in a competitive environment.     

In perfect harmony: synchronizing the self to activated social categories

The self-concept is one of the main organizing constructs in the behavioral sciences because it influences how people interpret their environment, the choices they make, whether and how they initiate action, and the pursuit of specific goals. Because belonging to social groups and feeling interconnected is critical to human survival, the authors propose that people spontaneously change their working self-concept so that they are more similar to salient social categories. Specifically, 4 studies investigated whether activating a variety of social categories (i.e., jocks, hippies, the overweight, Blacks, and Asians) increased associations between the self and the target category. Whereas Studies 1 and 2 focused on associations between stereotypic traits and the self, Studies 3 and 4 examined self-perceptions and self-categorizations, respectively. The results provide consistent evidence that following social category priming, people synchronized the self to the activated category. Furthermore, the findings indicate that factors that influence category activation, such as social goals, and factors that induce a focus on the interconnectedness of the self, such as an interdependent vs. independent self-construal, can impact this process. The implications of changes to the working self-concept for intergroup relations are discussed.     

IRTs of the ABCs: children's letter name acquisition

We examined the developmental sequence of letter name knowledge acquisition by children from 2 to five years of age. Data from 2 samples representing diverse regions, ethnicity, and socioeconomic backgrounds (ns = 1074 and 500) were analyzed using item response theory (IRT) and differential item functioning techniques. Results from factor analyses indicated that letter name knowledge represented a unidimensional skill; IRT results yielded significant differences between letters in both difficulty and discrimination. Results also indicated an approximate developmental sequence in letter name learning for the simplest and most challenging to learn letters--but with no clear sequence between these extremes. Findings also suggested that children were most likely to first learn their first initial. We discuss implications for assessment and instruction.     

Predicates in perspective

A familiar strategy of argument to the effect that natural-language predicates are semantically context dependent rests on constructing what I term Travis cases: different contexts for the use of a predicate are imagined in which its semantic (typically, truth-conditional) properties are claimed to differ. I propose an account of the semantic properties of predicates that give rise to Travis cases; I then argue that the account underwrites a genuine alternative to the standard explanations of Travis cases to be found in the literature; I close with a brief sketch of the connections, required by a fuller development of my account, among the semantic notion of a predicate??s content, the metaphysical notion of a property??s instantiation, and the cognitive notion of a language user??s perspective in using a predicate.     

Emotion in the neutral face: a mechanism for impression formation?

The current work examined contributions of emotion-resembling facial cues to impression formation. There exist common facial cues that make people look emotional, male or female, and from which we derive personality inferences. We first conducted a Pilot Study to assess these effects. We found that neutral female versus neutral male faces were rated as more submissive, affiliative, na?ve, honest, cooperative, babyish, fearful, happy, and less angry than neutral male faces. In our Primary Study, we then "warped" these same neutral faces over their corresponding anger and fear displays so the resultant facial appearance cues now structurally resembled emotion while retaining a neutral visage (e.g., no wrinkles, furrows, creases, etc.). The gender effects found in the Pilot Study were replicated in the Primary Study, suggesting clear stereotype-driven impressions. Critically, ratings of the neutral-over-fear warps versus neutral-over-anger warps also revealed a profile similar to the gender-based ratings, revealing perceptually driven impressions directly attributable to emotion overgeneralisation.     

Development and validation of a revised measure of codependency

This study assessed the factor structure, internal consistency, and concurrent validity of a revised instrument, the Composite Codependency Scale (CCS), a 19‐item measure designed to assess codependent traits. Exploratory factor analysis of the CCS, using data from 301 adults from the general population and 49 attending members of Codependents Anonymous (CoDA), yielded three factors: self‐sacrifice, interpersonal control, and emotional suppression. The scale and its subscales exhibited good internal consistency. Consistent with the tenets of the codependency model, higher codependency scores were significantly associated with higher levels of depression, anxiety, stress, and familial dysfunction and lower levels of narcissistic tendencies, self‐esteem, and emotional expressivity. Furthermore, the revised measure effectively discriminated members of CoDA from those in the general population.