The Five-Factor Model, Conscientiousness, and Driving Accident Involvement

ABSTRACT Personality researchers and theorists are approaching consensus on the basic structure and constructs of personality. Despite the apparent consensus on the emergent five-factor model (Goldberg, 1992, 1993), less is known about external correlates of separate factors. This research examined the relations between Conscientiousness, one dimension of the model, and driving accident involvement. Using multiple measures in independent samples drawn from college students (N= 227) and a temporary employment agency (N= 250), the results generally demonstrate a significant inverse relation between Conscientiousness and driving accident involvement; individuals who rate themselves as more self-disciplined, responsible, reliable, and dependable are less likely to be involved in driving accidents than those who rate themselves lower on these attributes. The findings are consistent with other research demonstrating the relations among Conscientiousness and other tasks and job performance. Suggestions for future research are discussed.     

Daily Mood Variability: Form of Diurnal Patterns and Determinants of Diurnal Patterns

Mood and affect are often assessed in psychological research without regard for the potential influence of time of day or other environmental factors. This study examined the determinants of daily mood variability. Ninety-four subjects completed a diary every 15 min for 1 day, and subjects' moods, activities, and locations were assessed. Diurnal cycles were found for several moods (e.g., happy, tired), activities (e.g., discourse, thinking), and locations (e.g., home, work). Diurnal cycles in most moods were strongly associated with activities and location, yet diurnal cycles of some moods (rushed, sad, and tired) were not dependent on these factors. These findings have implications for mood assessment: Mood assessment performed only at particular times of day, or those relying on point assessment, may be influenced by time of day and by the activities and location of the subject.     

Peirce's evolutionary pragmatic idealism

In this paper I synthesize a unified system out of Peirce's life work, and name it “Peirce's Evolutionary Pragmatic Idealism”. Peirce developed this philosophy in four stages:

1. His 1868–69 theory that cognition is a continuous and infinite social semiotic process, in which Man is a sign.
2. His Popular Science Monthly pragmatism and frequency theory of probabilistic induction.
3. His 1891–93 cosmic evolutionism of Tychism, Synechism, and Agapism.
4. Pragmaticism: The doctrine of real potentialities (“would-be's”), and Peirce's pragmatic program for developing concrete reasonableness.

Peirce's evolutionary conception of the cosmos is pantheistic, and he constructed it to reconcile religion with Darwinian evolution.     

Restructuring School Counselor Education: Work in Progress

Responding to the cry for school reform and to the growing demand for school counselors, this article offers a rationale for the pursuit of a new approach to educating school counselors. Based on a set of related assumptions, the proposed model relies on a group-oriented, democratic strategic planning process of empowerment that involves participants in the collaborative development of a school counselor education program.     

Induction, Grue Emeralds and Lady Macbeth's Fallacy

This paper does not purport to offer yet another 'solution' to the much discussed 'new riddle' of induction. The focus, instead, is on the genesis of Goodman's paradox and its relation to the classic problem of induction. In the arguments which led Goodman from the dissolution of Hume's problem to the discovery of the new riddle, I reveal a fundamentally flawed assumption about the nature of inductive inference which undermines Goodman's contention that the genuine problem of induction consists in distinguishing between projectible and non-projectible regularities. I further show that if the same set of observations may indeed support an indefinitely large number of inductive predictions, then the rationale for dismissing the classic problem of induction disappears. Stripped of its erroneous assumptions, the new riddle becomes nothing more than a special case of Hume's problem.     

Averting the gaze disengages the environment and facilitates remembering

When people are asked moderately difficult questions, they often avert their gazes. We report five experiments in which we documented this phenomenon. They demonstrate that (1) the frequency of gaze aversion is related to the difficulty of cognitive processing, (2) this behavior cannot be due solely to demand characteristics or embarrassment, and (3) the behavior is functional: Averting the gaze improves performance. We speculate that averting the gaze helps people to disengage from environmental stimulation and thereby enhances the efficiency of cognitive processing directed by nonenvironmental stimulation.     

Perseveration of cardiac-rate effects in the rhesus monkey following pavlovian conditioning

The effects of Pavlovian conditioning on diurnal cardiac rate were studied in four rhesus monkeys. A three-hour conditioning period, consisting of 18 CS-UCS pairings with UCS an aversive tail-shock, produced cardiac-rate elevation which persisted for as long as 12 hours after the session.     

A multi-purpose logic module for behavioral experiments

A notational system has been developed that can be used to describe most reinforcement schedules or other sequential procedures by appropriately interconnecting the basic notational units. The notational language has been applied in the past to develop a user-oriented computer program for behavioral experiments. The present paper describes a digital logic module designed to be isomorphic with the basic unit of the notational language, thus permitting rapid programming of new experiments directly from the notational system. The major advantage of the new module is that it requires no electronic sophistication on the part of the user, since the one module serves as the basic unit of all experiments.