Influence of future choice importance and arousal upon the halo effect

Two determinants of the magnitude of the influence of anticipated choice on the halo effect are investigated: importance of future choice and arousal. Male subjects ranked photographs on positive personality traits. Half of the photographs were of persons about which they anticipated making a choice. In confirmation of the hypotheses, (a) the intercorrelation of the rankings was greater for the choice photographs than for the nonchoice photographs when the subjects anticipated an important choice, but not when they anticipated an unimportant choice; and (b) the intercorrelation was greater for the choice photographs than for the nonchoice photographs when the subjects were aroused by caffeine and uninformed as to the source of their arousal, but not when they were informed as to the source of their arousal or not aroused.     

The Crossover of Work‐Family Conflict From One Spouse to the Other1

In a secondary analysis of data from 220 women serving in the U.S. Air Force and their spouses, we examined the effects of job and family stressors on work‐family conflict (WFC) and family‐work conflict (FWC), focusing on the crossover of these experiences from one spouse to the other. We found positive relationships of WFC with both job and family stressors for wives and with job stressors for husbands. We also found that job and family stressors predicted FWC for wives, but not for husbands. Furthermore, spouse's support buffered the relationship between one's job stressors and the experience of WFC for wives but accelerated these relationships for husbands. Our findings support the bidirectional crossover of WFC from one spouse to another.     

Everyday conditional reasoning: A working memory—dependent tradeoff between counterexample and likelihood use

Considerable evidence has revealed that working memory capacity is an important determinant of conditional reasoning performance. There are two accounts describing the conditional inference process, the probabilistic and the mental models accounts. According to the mental models account, reasoners retrieve and integrate counterexample information to attain a conclusion. According to the probabilistic account, reasoners base their judgments on probabilistic information. It can be assumed that reasoning according to the mental models process would require more working memory resources than would solving the inference on the basis of probabilistic information. By means of a verbal report study, we showed that participants with low working memory capacity more often use probabilistic information, whereas participants with higher working memory capacity are more likely to use counterexample information. Working memory capacity thus not only relates to reasoning performance, it also determines which process reasoners will engage in.     

Prospective Longitudinal Associations Between Persistent Sleep Problems in Childhood and Anxiety and Depression Disorders in Adulthood

The objective of this study was to examine the associations between persistent childhood sleep problems and adulthood anxiety and depression. Parents of 943 children (52% male) participating in the Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study provided information on their childrens sleep and internalizing problems at ages 5, 7, and 9 years. When the participants were 21 and 26 years, adult anxiety and depression were diagnosed using a standardized diagnostic interview. After controlling for childhood internalizing problems, sex, and socioeconomic status, persistent sleep problems in childhood predicted adulthood anxiety disorders (OR (95% CI) = 1.60 (1.05–2.45), p = .030) but not depressive disorders (OR (95% CI) = .99 (.63–1.56), p = .959). Persistent sleep problems in childhood may be an early risk indicator of anxiety in adulthood.     

Pathways to Medical Utilization

The role of psychologists in medical settings is evolving to include the development, delivery, and evaluation of psychosocial treatments for individuals who use disproportionate amounts of medical services. The primary purpose of this article is to present a model of psychological factors that drive health care utilization. A stepped care model of treatment delivery is also discussed along with a brief literature review depicting the impact of treatment approaches on high utilizing populations. This article concludes with recommendations for psychologists interested in providing treatment to medical utilizers.     

Individual capacity differences predict working memory performance and prefrontal activity following dopamine receptor stimulation

Dopamine receptors are abundant in the prefrontal cortex (PFC), a critical region involved in working memory. This pharmacological fMRI study tested the relationships between dopamine, PFC function, and individual differences in working memory capacity. Subjects performed a verbal delayed-recognition task after taking either the dopamine receptor agonist bromocriptine or a placebo. Behavioral effects of bromocriptine treatment depended on subjects’ working memory spans, with the greatest behavioral benefit for lower span subjects. After bromocriptine, PFC activity was positively correlated with a measure of cognitive efficiency (RT slope) during the probe period of the task. Less efficient subjects with slower memory retrieval rates had greater PFC activity, whereas more efficient subjects had less activity. After placebo, these measures were uncorrelated. These results support the role of dopamine in verbal working memory and suggest that dopamine may modulate the efficiency of retrieval of items from the contents of working memory. Individual differences in PFC dopamine receptor concentration may thus underlie the behavioral effects of dopamine stimulation on working memory function.     

Theoretical and methodological elements for integrating ethics as a foundation into the education of professional and design disciplines

The paper addresses the integration of ethics into professional education related to the disciplines responsible for the conception and creation of the artificial (artefactual or technology). The ontological-epistemological paradigm of those disciplines is understood within the frame of the sciences of the artificial as established by Herbert Simon (1969). According to that paradigm, those sciences include disciplines not only related to the production of artefacts (technology), such as engineering, architecture, industrial design, etc, but also disciplines related to devised courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones, like medicine, law, education, etc. They are centered on intentional action and at their core is the activity of design, which is their common foundation and attitude, or their common culture. The science of design becomes the broader foundational discipline for any professions engaged in the intentional transformation of the world. The main distinction between design disciplines and scientific ones rests on the object-project dichotomy. Indeed, contrary to Science that sees the world as an object to be observed, Design sees the world as a project and acts upon the world through projects, which are grounded in intentions, ends, and values. Design disciplines are meant to transform the world, or part of it, and are teleological. Being so, they are embodied in an act that is ethical and their ontology-epistemology must be addressed also through practical reason to resituate all professional disciplines according to their involved nature. The paper introduces theoretical, methodological, and ethical elements to establish a model that integrates ethics into the education of the professional disciplines, design-based disciplines, responsible for the creation of the artificial, artefactual or technological, world. The model is articulated around the notions of ethical engagement and responsibility through the act of design understood as action with intention situated in a project, common in all professional disciplines. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the “Ethics and Social Responsibility in Engineering and Technology” meeting, New Orleans, 2003.     

SPSS and SAS programs for addressing interdependence and basic levels-of-analysis issues in psychological data

Levels-of-analysis issues arise whenever individual-level data are collected from more than one person from the same dyad, family, classroom, work group, or other interaction unit. Interdependence in data from individuals in the same interaction units also violates the independence-of-observations assumption that underlies commonly used statistical tests. This article describes the data analysis challenges that are presented by these issues and presents SPSS and SAS programs for conducting appropriate analyses. The programs conduct the within- and-between-analyses described by Dansereau, Alutto, and Yammarino (1984) and the dyad-level analyses describedby Gonzalez and Griffin (1999) and Griffin and Gonzalez (1995). Contrasts with general multilevel modeling procedures are then discussed.     

Sequence learning in pianists and nonpianists: An fMRI study of motor expertise

Previous studies of motor learning have proposed a distinction between fast and slow learning, but these mechanisms have rarely been examined simultaneously. We examined the influence of longterm motor expertise (slow learning) while pianists and nonpianists performed alternating epochs of sequenced and random keypresses in response to visual cues (fast learning) during functional neuroimaging. All of the participants demonstrated learning of the sequence as demonstrated by decreasing reaction times (RTs) on sequence trials relative to random trials throughout the session. Pianists also demonstrated faster RTs and superior sequence acquisition in comparison with nonpianists. Withinsession decreases in bilateral sensorimotor and parietal activation were observed for both groups. Additionally, there was more extensive activation throughout the session for pianists in comparison with nonpianists across a network of primarily right-lateralized prefrontal, sensorimotor, and parietal regions. These findings provide evidence that different neural systems subserve slow and fast phases of learning.     

SPSS and SAS programs for generalizability theory analyses

The identification and reduction of measurement errors is a major challenge in psychological testing. Most investigators rely solely on classical test theory for assessing reliability, whereas most experts have long recommended using generalizability theory instead. One reason for the common neglect of generalizability theory is the absence of analytic facilities for this purpose in popular statistical software packages. This article provides a brief introduction to generalizability theory, describes easy to use SPSS, SAS, and MATLAB programs for conducting the recommended analyses, and provides an illustrative example, using data (N= 329) for the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale. Program output includes variance components, relative and absolute errors and generalizability coefficients, coefficients for D studies, and graphs of D study results.