Female voices of aggression in Tonga

Tonga, a Polynesian society, is characterized by a social order and by Christian beliefs that work to constrain aggressive action and conflict. Violence does take place in Tonga but there is active discouragement of any behavior that may be socially disruptive. Tongan women in particular are allowed only a limited number of contexts in which acceptable expression of aggression can take place. In response, Tongan women rely on rather covert forms of aggression in processes of competition and conflict. A speech given during an inter-denominational religious feast controlled by the women of one village provides an example of a woman aggressively empowering herself through discourse clothed within the language of Tongan charity and Christian love.     

Recurrent Personality Factors Based on Trait Ratings

Intercorrelations among ratings on 35 personality traits, selected as representative of the personality domain, were obtained for eight samples. These samples differed in length of acquaintanceship from 3 days to more than a year; in kind of acquaintanceship from assessment programs in a military training course to a fraternity house situation; in type of subject from airmen with only a high-school education to male and female undergraduate students to first-year graduate students; and in type of rater from very naive persons to clinical psychologists and psychiatrists with years of experience in the evaluation of personality. Centroid or multiple-group factors were extracted and rotated orthogonally to simple structure. For one study, an independent solution was obtained in which analytic rotations were accomplished on an IBM 650 computer using Kaiser's normal varimax criterion. Five fairly strong and recurrent factors emerged from each analysis, labeled as (a) Surgency, (b) Agreeableness, (c) Dependability, (d) Emotional Stability, and (e) Culture.     

The Lost Letter Technique Revisited1

The present study used the Lost Letter Technique (LLT) to explore the use of personalized letters in assessing community attitudes in a large western metropolitan area. Response to one of the attitude issues was independently validated by subsequent election returns. Results confirm the usefulness of the LLT as a survey tool for sensitive social issues, even with a small sample size, when the envelopes are hand-addressed and hand-stamped and drop locations are carefully selected.     

Perception of radial distance as a function of magnification and truncation of depicted spatial layout

A 2×2 factorial design requiring judgments of interobject distance was utilized which separated the effects of magnification per se from the concomitant truncation of the visual field normally effected by optically produced magnification. Only the main effect of magnification was significant, and this was much less than the decreases optically specified by the decreased perspective and texture gradients.     

On the theory of biased bisection operations and their inverses

A theory of fundamental measurement involving multiple operations is presented. The operations are bisection, and two inverses of the bisection operation called right and left displacement, analogous to “displacement” of an interval “up” or “down” a scale. Following Pfanzagl, “biased” operations are permitted, and linear, reflexive representations are presented for the biased operations. Results are obtained on the constructability of unbiased scaling operations, and several methods of constructing standard sequences of equally spaced stimuli using biased operations, are described. A striking property of biased linear representation models is derived, showing that if bias is present, indefinite iterations of one or the other of the two displacement operations will converge to asymptote. Preliminary data support this surprising convergence property.