Autonomy and Conjugal Love: A Reply to Golash

In my response to Golash I distinguish between two steps in my original argument. The first relates to the special value of conjugal (two-person) love relationships. I defend this step against criticisms, arguing that the two-person relationship provides a form of recognition that is of special importance to us and cannot be found in other sorts of relationship. The two-person relationship is one that, at least as private individuals, we have special reason to pursue. The second step concerns the claim that the special value of such relationships tends to promote the autonomy of those who have them. It is this second step that is important for the argument that a liberal state – one, at any rate, that takes itself to be in the business of safeguarding the pre-conditions of autonomy – could have reason to favour marriage or some form of civic partnership over other forms of intimate adult tie. However, I admit that Golash puts forward plausible – if anecdotal – arguments against this second step. I therefore agree that I need to be more tentative about this step than I was in the original paper.     

Beyond resilients,undercontrollers, and overcontrollers? an extension of personality prototype research

Prototypes of personality were investigated in two studies. In study I, clusters of Big‐Five‐based prototypes were examined using a general population sample of 1908 German adults. Convergent evidence suggested the appropriateness of a five‐cluster solution, which corresponds to previously identified temperament based prototypes. In study II, the five‐cluster solution was cross‐validated in a sample of 256 prisoners. Moreover, it was shown that a population‐based approach (using discriminant functions derived from study I) was superior over the traditional sample‐based cluster approach (using Ward followed by k‐means). The authors argue that future typological research can be sufficiently grounded on a five‐prototype conception rather than on a three‐prototype conception, and suggest a new and flexible assignment procedure. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Social Status and Aggressiveness as Moderators of the Relationship Between Interactional Justice and Workplace Deviance

Workplace deviance is a prevalent and costly problem for organizations. This study examines the relationship between interactional justice, a specific type of organizational justice perception that reflects how a person is treated by an authority, and 2 categories of deviant behavior. Based on a person-situation model, we expected the relation between interactional justice and deviance to be stronger when the employee is high rather than low in aggressiveness. Drawing from prior research suggesting that people with low status react defensively to self-invalidating events, we hypothesized that the social status variables of hierarchical position, gender, and race would also moderate the relation between interactional justice and deviance. Finally, we propose a 3-way interaction involving aggressiveness, status, and interactional justice. Data were collected from 192 employees of a public sector organization. The results provide support for several of the hypothesized interactions involving aggressiveness, social status variables, and interactional justice.     

Toward a Noninferentialist,Nonreliabilist Account of Perceptual Justification

While it may be a datum of common sense that perceptual experiences can justify beliefs, there is no clear consensus about how they can do so. According to what I call “inferentialism,” perceptual experiences can justify beliefs because perceptual experiences have propositional contents and thus can serve as reasons for belief. A critical commitment of inferentialism is that justification requires the obtaining of a nonarbitrary or nonaccidental semantic relation between justifier and justified, a requirement that I call semantic appropriateness (SA). By contrast, reliabilists reject SA and argue that perceptual experiences can justify beliefs because perceptual experiences are part of a reliable belief‐forming process. In this paper, I explore whether a commitment to SA inevitably leads to a commitment to inferentialism. This exploration is largely motivated by doubts over whether perceptual experiences have propositional contents. If those doubts prove to be well‐founded, then it seems either that perceptual experiences cannot justify beliefs or that some form of reliabilism is true. I argue that although we should take the doubts seriously, there is a way to make sense of SA that does not require inferentialism.     

Linkages between violence-associated attitudes and psychological,physical, and sexual dating abuse perpetration and victimization among male and female adolescents

Attitudes about violence and sex in dating relationships were related to psychological, physical, and sexual teen dating abuse perpetration and victimization. Data from Wave 4 of the national, randomly selected, Growing up with Media cohort (n = 876 adolescents aged 14-19 years), collected in 2011, were analyzed. Dating youth perceived more peer pressure to have sex and were more accepting of sex in brief or nonmarital relationships than pre-dating youth. Boys had higher levels of rape-supportive attitudes than girls. Among dating youth, the relative odds of involvement in teen dating abuse as a perpetrator or a victim were generally associated with greater acceptance of relationship violence, perceived peer pressure to have sex, and acceptance of sex in brief and/or nonmarital relationships. Rape-supportive attitudes were not significantly associated with any type of teen dating abuse involvement. Programs aimed at preventing dating abuse might benefit from targeting attitudes associated with sexual activity as well as relationship violence.     

Association between substance use disorders and self- and other-directed aggression: An integrated model approach

Our study's objective is to determine whether substance use disorders’ association with aggression differs according to the type of substance and/or the form of aggression, within the same population. We used data from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health across 2008–2014, with a pooled sample of 270,227 adult respondents. We used regression models to estimate the odds ratios for those having alcohol and/or drug use disorder(s) perpetrating (a) each form of aggression compared with no aggression and (b) other-directed compared with self-directed aggression. Alcohol use disorder alone and drug use disorder(s) alone were both associated with significantly increased odds of committing self-directed, other-directed, and combined aggression. Individuals with drug use disorder(s) alone were more likely to commit other-directed than self-directed aggression (adjusted odds ratio = 1.46, 95% CI = 1.04–2.05). Individuals with alcohol use disorder alone were not likely to commit one over the other (adjusted odds ratio = 1.20, 95% CI = 0.90–1.61). In conclusion, the integrated model of aggression based on the stress–diathesis model is a relevant framework to study risk factors for aggression. Further research is needed to identify longitudinal predictors of directionality of aggression.     

Mediators of the associations between parents’ conditional regard and the quality of their adult-children’s peer-relationships

Motivation and Emotion - Parental conditional regard (PCR) involves parents providing or withdrawing affection to motivate children to do what the parents want. Numerous studies have demonstrated...     

Work Sample Selection Tests and Expected Reduction in Adverse Impact: A Cautionary Note

Almost all book chapters, review articles, and textbooks in the field of personnel selection suggest that work sample tests are associated with lower levels of ethnic group adverse impact than paper‐and‐pencil tests of cognitive ability. However, the empirical literature is heavily dependent on adverse impact estimates obtained from incumbent samples rather than applicant samples. As such, parameter estimates are subject to range restriction from prior selection and on‐the‐job experiences. Further, an emerging consensus in the selection literature indicates that any method of assessment can be associated with high or low levels of adverse impact – depending on the nature of the construct(s) being measured. To begin to examine these issues, we present two recent sets of applicant data from public sector jobs (for a management and entry‐level job, each with technical and interpersonal skill requirements) and show that adverse impact of work sample exams might be more extensive than realized. We discuss the mismatch between what the field of employee selection “knows” and what is said in articles/summaries about work samples. Employers and other practitioners who depend on advice in academic overview articles may be overly optimistic and eventually disappointed by minimal reduction in adverse impact. Implications for workforce diversity and future research needs are also discussed.     

What do Raven's Matrices measure? An analysis in terms of sex differences

Although it is sometimes claimed that Raven's Matrices provide an almost pure measure of g, there is evidence that the easier items in the Standard Progressive Matrices and in Set I of the Advanced Matrices measure a perceptual or Gestalt factor distinct from the more analytic items in the rest of the tests. There is also, however, both factor analytic and experimental evidence that these analytic items fall into two partially separate groups, distinguishable by the type of rule needed for their solution in the analysis proposed by Carpenter, Just, and Schell (1990) [Carpenter, P. A., Just, M. A., Schell, P. (1990). What one intelligence test measures: A theoretical account of the processing in the Raven's Progressive Matrices Test. Psychological Review, 97, 404–431]. Re-analysis of published data suggests a new source of evidence for this further distinction: males do better than females on items requiring an addition/subtraction or distribution of two rule, but there is no sex difference on items requiring pairwise progression or distribution of three rules. A specially designed experiment confirmed this pattern of results.