Improving Psychological Measurement: Does It Make a Difference? A Comment on Nesselroade and Molenaar (2016)

Nesselroade and Molenaar advocate the use of an idiographic filter approach. This is a fixed-effects approach, which may limit the number of individuals that can be simultaneously modeled, and it is not clear how to model the presence of subpopulations. Most important, Nesselroade and Molenaar's proposal appears to be best suited for modeling long time series on a few variables for a few individuals. Long time series are not common in psychological applications. Can it be applied to the usual longitudinal data we face? These are characterized by short time series (four to five points in time), hundreds of individuals, and dozens of variables. If so, what do we gain? Applied settings most often involve between-individual decisions. I conjecture that their approach will not outperform common, simpler, methods. However, when intraindividual decisions are involved, their approach may have an edge.     

Parental Bonding and Its Effect on Adolescent Substance Use and Sexual Debut

The purpose of this study was to examine associations among parental bonding factors and the early onset of sexual behaviors and substance use. Significant differences were found in the levels of care among the parental status groups and among the ages of onset for alcohol use.     

A theory of sulcal-gap signalization

Two sulcal-gap signalization systems are hypothesized to have evolved as emergent functional "exaptations" having the capacity to transmit two-way cortex-to-cortex signals across tissues embedded in opposing sulcal banks. Hypothesis 1 posits that a primary sulcal-gap signalization system evolved the capacity to transmit nonlanguage signals within hierarchically lower-order sensory, motor, and perceptual functional areas of the neocortex having elemental functional units consisting of columns of about 110 neurons. Hypothesis 2 posits that a secondary sulcal-gap signalization system evolved the capacity to transmit language signals within hierarchically higher-order cognitive functional areas of the "neo-neocortex" having elemental functional units consisting of modules of about 4,000 neurons. Neuroanatomical, neurophysiological neuroevolutionary, and neurodevelopmental evidence is presented in support of these two sulcal-gap hypotheses. It is speculated that the combined cognitive capacities of these two sulcal-gap signalization systems may contribute to the transduction of physiological brain into psychological mind.     

Can small lesions induce language reorganization as large lesions do?

Shift of the cortical mechanisms of language from the usually dominant left to the non-dominant right hemisphere has been demonstrated in the presence of large brain lesions. Here, we report a similar phenomenon in a patient with a cavernoma over the anterolateral superior temporal gyrus associated with epilepsy. Language mapping was performed by two complementary procedures, magnetoencephalography, and electrocorticography. The maps, indicated right temporal lobe dominance for receptive language and left frontal lobe dominance for expressive language. These results indicate that a small lesion, associated with epilepsy, may produce selective shifting of receptive language mechanisms as large lesions have been known to produce.     

Hypothesis testing for coefficient alpha: An SEM approach

We show how to test hypotheses for coefficient alpha in three different situations: (1) hypothesis tests of whether coefficient alpha equals a prespecified value, (2) hypothesis tests involving two statistically independent sample alphas as may arise when testing the equality of coefficient alpha across groups, and (3) hypothesis tests involving two statistically dependent sample alphas as may arise when testing the equality of alpha across time or when testing the equality of alpha for two test scores within the same sample. We illustrate how these hypotheses may be tested in a structural equation-modeling framework under the assumption of normally distributed responses and also under asymptotically distribution free assumptions. The formulas for the hypothesis tests and computer code are given for four different applied examples. Supplemental materials for this article may be downloaded from http://brm.psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental.     

Effects of chronic cocaine administration on spatial learning and hippocampal spine density in two genetically different strains of rats

Lewis and Fischer-344 rats have been proposed as an addiction model because of their differences in addiction behaviour. It has been suggested that drug addiction is related to learning and memory processes and depends on individual genetic background. We have evaluated learning performance using the eight-arm radial maze (RAM) in Lewis and Fischer-344 adult rats undergoing a chronic treatment with cocaine. In order to study whether morphological alterations were involved in the possible changes in learning after chronic cocaine treatment, we counted the spine density in hippocampal CA1 neurons from animals after the RAM protocol. Our results showed that Fischer-344 rats significantly took more time to carry out test acquisition and made a greater number of errors than Lewis animals. Nevertheless, cocaine treatment did not induce changes in learning and memory processes in both strains of rats. These facts indicate that there are genetic differences in spatial learning and memory that are not modified by the chronic treatment with cocaine. Moreover, hippocampal spine density is cocaine-modulated in both strains of rats. In conclusion, cocaine induces similar changes in hippocampal neurons morphology that are not related to genetic differences in spatial learning in the RAM protocol used here.     

Relationship Between Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty on the Internet

Purpose  

Although the relationship between satisfaction and loyalty has been the focus of a good deal of research, the complex nature of that relationship continues to pose a good many unanswered questions. The present study proposes a four-way classification of the perspectives that tend to be taken by researchers on the said relationship. By theoretically and empirically reviewing these four approximations in an on-line context, the study aims to clarify the nature and strength of the relationship between these two variables.     

Indistinguishability, Choices, and Logics of Agency

This paper deals with structures ${\langle{\bf T}, I\rangle}$ in which T is a tree and I is a function assigning each moment a partition of the set of histories passing through it. The function I is called indistinguishability and generalizes the notion of undividedness. Belnap’s choices are particular indistinguishability functions. Structures ${\langle{\bf T}, I\rangle}$ provide a semantics for a language ${\mathcal{L}}$ with tense and modal operators. The first part of the paper investigates the set-theoretical properties of the set of indistinguishability classes, which has a tree structure. The significant relations between this tree and T are established within a general theory of trees. The aim of second part is testing the expressive power of the language ${\mathcal{L}}$ . The natural environment for this kind of investigations is Belnap’s seeing to it that (stit). It will be proved that the hybrid extension of ${\mathcal{L}}$ (with a simultaneity operator) is suitable for expressing stit concepts in a purely temporal language.