An item‐level investigation of conceptual and empirical distinctiveness of proactivity constructs

Beyond the prior investigations that took scale‐level approaches to determining discriminant validity in proactivity constructs, the current study contributes a much‐needed interrogation of the items used to measure the behaviors in this domain. The substantive validity (SV) assessments (Study 1) showed that many of the items were judged to be inconsistent with the definition of the construct they assess or, alternatively, more consistent with the definition of a different construct in the domain. Further, exploratory factor analysis revealed the difficulty in empirically separating the four behaviors, while BiM results also advocated against the unique variance of them after accounting for a general factor (Study 2). Altogether, our results show that the items are partly to blame for the empirical redundancy issue.     

Do apes and children know what they have seen?

Chimpanzees and young children understand much about what other individuals have and have not seen. This study investigates what they understand about their own visual perception. Chimpanzees, orangutans, and 2.5-year-old children were presented with a finding game in which food or stickers were hidden in one of two or three tubes. We varied whether subjects saw the baiting of the tubes, whether subjects could see through the tubes, and whether there was a delay between baiting and presentation of the tubes to subjects. We measured not only whether subjects chose the correct tube but also, more importantly, whether they spontaneously looked into one or more of the tubes before choosing one. Most apes and children appropriately looked into the tubes before choosing one more often when they had not seen the baiting than when they had seen the baiting. In general, they used efficient search strategies more often than insufficient or excessive ones. Implications of subjects' search patterns for their understanding of seeing and knowing in the self are discussed. Accepted after revision: 7 January 2001 Electronic Publication     

Unawareness of social interaction and emotional control deficits in alzheimer's disease

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to examine unawareness of deficit in Alzheimer's disease (AD) in a previously unexplored functional domain: social interaction and emotional control competency. Impairment of awareness was measured by calculating the degree to which patients and their caregivers disagreed on ratings of patient functioning. to assess potential underlying mechanisms or associated features of social/emotional unawareness, a regression equation examining disease and demographic correlates was created. In addition, to provide a basis of comparison for the social/emotional domain, unawareness of deficit was also assessed in two previously examined domains of functioning (i.e., cognitive and self-care competency). Results revealed that, as compared to caregivers, AD-diagnosed patients overestimated their social/emotional competency but to a lesser extent than they overestimated cognitive and self-care competencies. Regression analysis suggested that impaired awareness of social interaction and emotional control deficits was positively correlated with dementia severity and negatively correlated with education.     

A So Di Ting Set: Conceptions of Male and Female in Jamaica and Barbados

In 1997, two hundred and twenty-five (225) Jamaican adults were asked to give their opinions of the prevailing Jamaican male and female stereotypes. Again in 2009 a further one hundred and twenty-four (124) Jamaican adults were interviewed to determine their perceptions of the current gender stereotypes. The same was done in Barbados as a means of comparing the stereotypes of two English speaking Caribbean cultures with differing degrees of exposure to similar cultural influences. Equal numbers of male and female respondents were included in both studies. A 100-adjective list of male and female attributes was compiled using a 300-item list originally created by Cattell in 1943 and subsequently used and revised by various authors. The data were analysed using SPSS to arrive at the frequencies for each adjective. Responses of 65% or more were considered to be stereotypical of males and females within each culture. The results show that overall Jamaican men were seen as: coarse, reckless, aggressive, lazy, tough, arrogant, stern, disorderly, robust, rigid, autocratic, courageous, and hard-headed, Jamaican women were seen as: complaining, fussy, sexy, emotional, worrying, affectionate, sensitive, soft hearted and sophisticated. Barbadian men and women had overall lower stereotype scores than did Jamaicans. Barbadian men differed from Jamaican men in that they were seen as: reckless; disorderly; robust and tough man who is also show-off; arrogant; aggressive; hard-headed; courageous, adventurous; lazy; inventive and rigid, while Barbadian women were seen as: emotional; fussy; affectionate; complaining, sophisticated; sensitive; worrying; warm; fault-finding; sexy; touchy; sentimental and gentle. The popular music from both countries is used as a lens for understanding the cultures within which the respondents develop their gender stereotypes. The stereotype data is then compared with the music that is popular during the 10 years from the first study in Jamaica to the second pair of studies in Jamaica and Barbados.     

Tests enhance retention and transfer of spatial learning

Many studies have reported that tests are beneficial for learning (e.g., Roediger & Karpicke, 2006a). However, the majority of studies on the testing effect have been limited to a combination of relatively simple verbal tasks and final tests that assessed memory for the same material that had originally been tested. The present study explored whether testing is beneficial for complex spatial memory and whether these benefits hold for both retention and transfer. After encoding a three-dimensional layout of objects presented in a virtual environment, participants completed a judgment-of-relative-direction (JRD) task in which they imagined standing at one object, facing a second object, and pointed to a third object from the imagined perspective. Some participants completed this task by relying on memory for the previously encoded layout (i.e., the test conditions), whereas for others the location of the third object was identified ahead of time, so that retrieval was not required (i.e., the study condition). On a final test assessing their JRD performance, the participants who learned through test outperformed those who learned through study. This was true even when corrective feedback was not provided on the initial JRD task and when the final test assessed memory from vantage points that had never been practiced during the initial JRD.     

Further psychodrama with delinquent adolescents

It was postulated that an integration of behavioral-cognitive techniques within a psychodramatic group therapy framework would reduce delinquents' acting-out tendencies and improve ego strength. The population consisted of a control and an experimental group of adolescents aged 14 to 16 of both sexes that were adjudicated delinquent. There were ten adolescents in the control group and initially eleven adolescents in the experimental group (only seven completed the twelve ninety-minute sessions). Both pre- and posttest measures on the Jesness, the High School Personality Questionnaire, and the I-E Scale were administered to the two groups of subjects. The results showed that significant improvement occurred in the delinquents' asocial index (.01 level), ego strength (.05 level), and introversive tendencies (.01 level). This study demonstrated that behavioral contracting, monetary reinforcement, and alternative behavioral rehearsal can be effectively integrated with more traditional psychodramatic techniques to reduce delinquents' acting-out tendencies.     

Pictures in sentences: understanding without words

To understand a sentence, the meanings of the words in the sentence must be retrieved and combined. Are these meanings represented within the language system (the lexical hypothesis) or are they represented in a general conceptual system that is not restricted to language (the conceptual hypothesis)? To evaluate these hypotheses, sentences were presented in which a pictured object replaced a word (rebus sentences). Previous research has shown that isolated pictures and words are processed equally rapidly in conceptual tasks, but that pictures are markedly slower than words in tasks requiring lexical access. The lexical hypothesis would therefore lead one to expect that rebus sentences will be relatively difficult, whereas the conceptual hypothesis would predict that rebus sentences would be rather easy. Sentences were shown using rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) at a rate of 10 or 12 words per second. With one set of materials (Experiments 1 and 2), readers took longer to judge the plausibility of rebus sentences than all-word sentences, although the accuracy of judgment and of recall were similar for the two formats. With two new sets of materials (Experiments 3 and 5), rebus and all-word sentences were virtually equivalent except in one circumstance: when a picture replaced the noun in a familiar phrase such as seedless grapes. In contrast, when the task required overt naming of the rebus picture in a sentence context, latency to name the picture was markedly longer than to name the corresponding word, and the appropriateness of the sentence context affected picture naming but not word naming (Experiment 4). The results fail to support theories that place word meanings in a specialized lexical entry. Instead, the results suggest that the lexical representation of a noun or familiar noun phrase provides a pointer to a nonlinguistic conceptual system, and it is in that system that the meaning of a sentence is constructed.     

The effects of positive and negative pre-sleep stimuli on dream experiences

In this study, the emotional and physical content of dreams was examined with post-sleep reports. In the first phase of the study, 45 students were asked to keep a dream diary for a week. The next week, the students were asked to look at a picture with positive, neutral, or negative affect in the evening before going to bed and then to record their dreams the following morning. Results showed that the pictures produced corresponding affect in morning dream reports, though physical elements of dreams and pictorial stimuli were not related to affect.