Crowding effects of density and personal space requirements among older people: the impact of self-control and social support

The authors examined the effects of self-control and social support among a representative sample of 300 older people, 150 in high-density and 150 in low-density households in India. The Self-Control Schedule (M. Rosenbaum, 1980), the Comfortable Interpersonal Distance Test (M. Duke & S. Nowicki, 1972), the Social Support Questionnaire, and the Judgement of Environmental Quality Scale (I. G. Sarason, H. M. Levine, R. B. Basham, & B. R. Sarason, 1983) were the measures. A 2 x 2 x 2 (Density x Social Support x Self-Control) analysis of variance for perceptions of home environment and personal space requirements revealed that the Self-Control x Social Support interaction moderated the crowding effects of density: The participants in high-density households evaluated their home environments more positively and reduced their personal space requirements.     

ROLE OF SOCIAL VALUES IN INDIAN ORGANIZATIONS

The transplant of the western form of industrial organizations in India was expected to bring a radical shift from a dependency and personalized to a contractual work relationship, from a steeply hierarchical to a reasonably egalitarian authority structure, ascribed to occupational bases of identity formation. The shift did not occur to the extent it was expected. Instead, technological requirements and job demands at many places were unduly compromised with the socio-cultural factors leading to soft management style which proved to be dysfunctional. At other places, the same socio-cultural factors helped develop a synergetic work culture where workers and managers worked together for higher productivity and greater viability. The critical factor which made the difference was the establishment of work as the master value. The other social values played a facilitating role in establishing and realizing the work values.     

A stochastic multidimensional unfolding approach for representing phased decision outcomes

This paper presents a stochastic multidimensional unfolding (MDU) procedure to spatially represent individual differences in phased or sequential decision processes. The specific application or scenario to be discussed involves the area of consumer psychology where consumers form judgments sequentially in their awareness, consideration, and choice set compositions in a phased or sequential manner as more information about the alternative brands in a designated product/service class are collected. A brief review of the consumer psychology literature on these nested congnitive sets as stages in phased decision making is provided. The technical details of the proposed model, maximum likelihood estimation framework, and algorithm are then discussed. A small scale Monte Carlo analysis is presented to demonstrate estimation proficiency and the appropriateness of the proposed model selection heuristic. An application of the methodology to capture awareness, consideration, and choice sets in graduate school applicants is presented. Finally, directions for future research and other potential applications are given.     

Ecocultural Factors in Cognitive Style Among Children From Hills and Plains of Nepal

The predictive value of the ecocultural model in the development of cognitive style was examined among the two cultural groups of Gurungs and Brahmins residing in contrasting ecologies of the hills and plains of Nepal. Acculturative influence of formal schooling was also analyzed. Story–Pictorial EFT (S–P EFT) for measuring cognitive style was administered to 240 children of 6–8 years divided into eight equal sub-groups according to two types of ecologies, two cultures and two levels of education. A 2 × 2 × 2 ANOVA revealed significant main effects of ecology and schooling. Effect of culture was not significant, but it played a significant role in conjunction with ecology. Findings are discussed in the light of relative functional utility of disembedding/analytical skill for the inhabitants of hills and plains.     

Personal space and density as factors in task performance and feeling of crowding.

The study was an investigation of the effects of density and personal space on simple and complex task performance and on feelings of crowding on 60 female Hindu students in India. A 2 x 2 design was used. Density was manipulated by varying the number of subjects in a fixed room space (social density), and the stop-distance technique was used to measure personal space. Results revealed that complex task performance was adversely affected by a high-density condition and by the personal space of the subjects, leading to a significant interaction effect of the two variables, but no significant main or interaction effect was found for the simple task performance. The subjects with "far" personal space under the high-density condition evaluated the environment of the experimental room as most crowded, more than any other subject did.     

TOWARDS PARTNERSHIP FOR RELEVANT RESEARCH IN THE THIRD WORLD

Over twenty years back, the concept of development and the resource superiority in the West imposed on the Third World psychologists a relationship which since then has evolved from the stage of pure subordination through indigenization into a phase which might turn out to be relatively more collaborative. The purpose of this paper is to take a brief historical account of the process of this evolving relationship which also tends to change the concept of development itself. The purely economic concept of development through industrialization and individual efforts has yielded to an emerging view of development where economic, social, environmental, and other factors are integrated and centred around human development. While based primarily on the Indian experiences, the perspective developed here may have some relevance to the Third World in general.     

The role of sequence order in determining view canonicality for novel wire-frame objects

Objects are best recognized from so-called “canonical” views. The characteristics of canonical views of arbitrary objects have been qualitatively described using a variety of different criteria, but little is known regarding how these views might be acquired during object learning. We address this issue, in part, by examining the role of object motion in the selection of preferred views of novel objects. Specifically, we adopt a modeling approach to investigate whether or not the sequence of views seen during initial exposure to an object contributes to observers’ preferences for particular images in the sequence. In two experiments, we exposed observers to short sequences depicting rigidly rotating novel objects and subsequently collected subjective ratings of view canonicality (Experiment 1) and recall rates for individual views (Experiment 2). Given these two operational definitions of view canonicality, we attempted to fit both sets of behavioral data with a computational model incorporating 3-D shape information (object foreshortening), as well as information relevant to the temporal order of views presented during training (the rate of change for object foreshortening). Both sets of ratings were reasonably well predicted using only 3-D shape; the inclusion of terms that capture sequence order improved model performance significantly.     

Modernizing the Virtue of Humility

This paper offers a novel, secular account of the virtue of humility. There are only two such accounts in recent philosophical literature: one defended by Julia Driver, the other by George Schueler. Driver attaches the virtue of humility to people who underestimate their merits, or lack beliefs about their merits altogether. Schueler thinks that humility requires indifference to how we are regarded vis-à-vis our accomplishments. This paper brings out the limitations of those accounts and constructs a new one which is free of them.

The new account derives directly from the under-appreciated approach defended a century ago by Hastings Rashdall, who developed a secular (albeit religiously-inspired) account of humility according to which true humility reflects love for one's neighbour. After indicating the flaws in Rashdall's approach, I develop an account based on his intuitions. Specifically, I argue that humility requires suppressing our egos when they lead us to neglect or disregard other duties. Humility comprises two dimensions: a private dimension, for when we uphold self-regarding duties rather than succumb to the temptations of ego; and a public dimension, for when we display fidelity to other-regarding duties at the expense of the pleasures of ego.