Returning to Work Following Childbirth: The Relationship Between Intentions and Behavior

College women's intentions to return to work following childbirth were compared to behavior 10 years later. Using an Ajzen-Fishbein model, college intentions were significantly related to how soon a mother returned to work after the birth of her first child. The amount of variance explained was significant for intentions and behavior. College intentions were influenced by perceived consequences, approval of significant referents, and personal control. Return to work was predicted by intention to do so, even though the behavior occurred an average of seven years after the intention was declared. This behavior was more likely to occur among those who had a sense of personal control.     

On P-compatible hybrid identities and hyperidentities

P-compatible identities are built up from terms with a special structure. We investigate a variety defined by a set ofP-compatible hybrid identities and answer the question whether a variety defined by a set ofP-compatible hyperidentities can be solid.Presented byJan Zygmunt;     

Extracting thresholds from noisy psychophysical data

Psychophysical studies with infants or with patients often are unable to use pilot data, training, or large numbers of trials. To evaluate threshold estimates under these conditions, computer simulations of experiments with small numbers of trials were performed by using psychometric functions based on a model of two types of noise:stimulus-related noise (affecting slope) andextraneous noise (affecting upper asymptote). Threshold estimates were biased and imprecise when extraneous noise was high, as were the estimates of extraneous noise. Strategies were developed for rejecting data sets as too noisy for unbiased and precise threshold estimation; these strategies were most successful when extraneous noise was low for most of the data sets. An analysis of 1,026 data sets from visual function tests of infants and toddlers showed that extraneous noise is often considerable, that experimental paradigms can be developed that minimize extraneous noise, and that data analysis that does not consider the effects of extraneous noise may underestimate test-retest reliability and overestimate interocular differences.     

EFFECTS OF REINFORCEMENT FOR ALTERNATIVE BEHAVIOR DURING PUNISHMENT OF SELF-INJURY

A number of variables influence the effectiveness of punishment and may determine the extent to which less intrusive forms of punishment may be used as alternatives to more intrusive interventions. For example, it has been suggested that response suppression during punishment may be facilitated if reinforcement is concurrently available for an alternative response. However, results of basic research demonstrating this finding have not been replicated with interventions more commonly prescribed as treatments for problem behavior. We evaluated the effects of relatively benign punishment procedures (reprimands or brief manual restraint) on the self-injurious behavior of 4 individuals who had been diagnosed with mental retardation, when access to reinforcement for alternative behavior (manipulation of leisure materials) was and was not available. In all cases, punishment produced greater response suppression when reinforcement for an alternative response was available.     

Phonological recoding and lexical access

Four experiments are reported that examine the effects of homophony (e.g., SAIL/SALE) on response latency in a lexical decision task. The results indicated that an effect of homophony was evident only if the nonword distractors consisted of legal, pronounceable strings (e.g., SLINT), but that this effect disappeared if the nonwords sounded like English words (e.g., BRANE). An optional encoding strategy is proposed to account for this differential effect. It is suggested that while both graphemic and phonemic encoding occurred simultaneously, naive subjects tended to rely on the outcome of the phonological route. However, when such reliance produced a high error rate (i.e., when the nonwords sounded like English words),. these subjects were able to abandon a phonological strategy and rely on the graphemic encoding procedure instead. Two further aspects of the results are of interest. First, the less frequent member of a homophone pair was slower when compared with a control item if the nonword distractors were of the SLINT type, but not different if they were of the BRANE type. The high-frequency members did not differ from their controls in either nonword environment. Second, in a homophone “repetition” experiment, the frequency order of presentation within pairs of homophones (i.e., the high-frequency member followed by the low-frequency member, or vice versa) had a substantial effect. A spelling recheck procedure and a response-inhibitory mechanism are postulated to incorporate these effects into a dual-encoding direct-access model of word recognition.     

A note on the system of propositional calculus with primitive rule of extensionality

Summary The present paper deals with a systemS of propositional calculus, conjunction, equivalence and falsum being its primitive terms. The only primitive rule inS is the rule of extensionality defined by the scheme:      

Effects of consumer perceptions of brand experience on the web: brand familiarity,satisfaction and brand trust

Creating a customer experience that is synonymous with a particular (website) brand is becoming increasingly recognised as a vital driver of e‐performance. E‐tailors are just as likely to try to influence consumers' shopping behaviour, through atmospherics and service, as brick‐and‐mortar stores. This study investigates several questions that have been left unanswered in recent studies of consumer behaviour in the context of internet‐based marketing. Its focus lies in addressing the issue of whether there is a direct relationship between brand experience and brand trust or whether there is an indirect relationship via satisfaction or brand familiarity. The results of an empirical study of e‐consumer behaviour show that brand trust is achieved through the following dimensions operating and interrelating as antecedent constructs: first, various brand experiences and the search for information, secondly, a high level of brand familiarity, and thirdly, customer satisfaction based on cognitive and emotional factors. These findings should assist marketers and academics in their understanding of the development of brand trust in an internet‐based environment. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

That’s the man who did it,or was it a woman? Actor similarity and binding errors in event memory

Mistakes in eyewitness identification frequently occur when incorrect associations are made between a familiar person and the actions of another person. The present research demonstrates that actors do not need to be similar in appearance for such conjunction errors to occur. The actors can, in fact, be very different in appearance, even of different sexes. Participants attempted to remember a series of brief everyday events, each involving an actor performing an action. Increases in actor similarity led to increases in conjunction errors in which participants incorrectly associated a familiar actor with a familiar action that was actually performed by someone else, but conjunction errors frequently occurred even when the familiar actor was of a different sex than the original actor, arguing against the hypothesis that these conjunction errors are due solely to mistaken identity.