Perceptions of Ethical Behaviour among Business Faculty in Canada

Faculty members at Canadian business schools were surveyed regarding their ethical perceptions of behaviours related to undergraduate instruction. Fifty-five behavioural statements were listed and respondents were asked to rate the extent to which they felt each behaviour was ethical or unethical. The only item that respondents endorsed as unequivocally unethical (90% indicated it was definitely unethical) was Becoming sexually involved with an undergraduate in one of your classes. We also compared the results of our sample to those of an American sample. Overall, an interesting pattern of differences emerged between the responses obtained in Canada and the U.S. In general, the direction of the significant differences was such that Canadian professors viewed the behaviours in question as less ethical than did their American counterparts.     

School-age children's perceptions of a person who stutters

The present study examined the perceptions school-age children have of stutterers. Four groups of fourth and fifth grade students viewed a videotape with either the speaker stuttering or not stuttering while reading a poem. A semantic differential scale of bi-polar adjective pairs was used to rate the speaker on intelligence and personality traits. The current study found that there is a significant difference between school-age children's perceptions of stutterers and nonstutterers with the ratings for the disfluent speaker more negative than the ratings for the fluent speaker. It was found that children did not rate personality and intelligence related traits differently. This information can be used to validate the need for education regarding stuttering for children and those who work with children. EDUCATIONAL OBJECTIVES: The reader will learn about and be able to (1). identify perceptions of stutterers by a variety of groups; (2). discuss the implications of research on perceptions of stutterers; and (3). compare/contrast children and adults and their perceptions.     

Customers' perceptions of salespersons' orientation and susceptibility to salespersons' influence

This study examined correlations of scores for salespersons' and customers' orientation, as indicated by a modified Salesperson Orientation-Customer Orientation scale, with self-reported consumers' susceptibility to salespersons' information, recommendations, and relational influence. Vehicle purchasers provided 508 useable survey responses. Correlations for customers' perceptions of both salespersons' orientation (-.39 and -.21) and customers' orientation (.39 and .24) were related to self-reports of susceptibility to salespersons' information and relational influence.     

Cortical morphology associated with language function in neurofibromatosis,type I

Neurofibromatosis, type I (NF-I) is associated with verbal and nonverbal neuropsychological deficits and neuroanatomical anomalies. Few relationships between CNS abnormalities and cognitive function in this population, however, have been found. Reading disabilities and developmental language impairments in the general population have been associated with particular morphologic features in inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) and Heschl's gyrus (HG). We compared the morphology of these regions in children with NF-I and controls. Verbal skills in NF-I were related to IFG morphology, such that individuals with NF-I who showed "typical" gyral patterns in the right hemisphere performed worse across language measures than those showing an extra "atypical" gyrus. A doubling of HG in the left and right hemispheres was also significantly associated with performance on several neuropsychological measures. This is the first study to link regional gyral morphology with language function in NF-I. A possible molecular basis for the observed relationships is discussed.     

Now you feel it, now you don't: frontal brain electrical asymmetry and individual differences in emotion regulation

Recent theoretical accounts of emotion regulation assign an important role in this process to the prefrontal cortex, yet there is little relevant data available to support this hypothesis. The current study assessed the relation between individual differences in asymmetric prefrontal activation and an objective measure of uninstructed emotion regulation. Forty-seven participants 57 to 60 years old viewed emotionally arousing and neutral visual stimuli while eyeblink startle data were collected. Startle probes were also presented after picture presentation to capture the persistence or attenuation of affect following the offset of an emotional stimulus. Subjects with greater relative left-sided anterior activation in scalp-recorded brain electrical signals displayed attenuated startle magnitude after the offset of negative stimuli. This relation between resting frontal activation and recovery following an aversive event supports the idea of a frontally mediated mechanism involved in one form of automatic emotion regulation.     

Facts,values, and policies: a comment on Howard H. Kendler (2002)

In a recent article, Howard H. Kendler (2002) criticized Kenneth B. Clark and the other social scientists who worked in Brown v. Board of Education for polluting their science with value judgments. This article argues that Kendler's critique is misguided because it conflates a policy judgment with a value judgment. In addition, Kendler inconsistently applied his own standard of objectivity when he examined in the social science used in Brown.     

Visual perspective taking for avatars in a Simon task

In modern digital applications, users often interact with virtual representations of themselves or others, called avatars. We examined how these avatars and their perspectives influence stimulus–response compatibility in a Simon task. Participants responded to light/dark blue stimuli with left/right key presses in the presence of a task-irrelevant avatar. Changes in stimulus–response compatibility were used to quantify changes in the mental representation of the task and perspective taking toward this avatar. Experiments 1 and 2 showed that perspective taking for an avatar occurred in orthogonal stimulus–response mappings, causing a compatibility effect from the avatar’s point of view. In the following two experiments we introduced a larger variety of angular disparities between the participant and avatar. In Experiment 3, the Simon effect with lateralized stimulus positions remained largely unaffected by the avatar, pointing toward an absence of perspective taking. In Experiment 4, after avatar hand movements were added in order to strengthen the participants’ sense of agency over the avatar, a spatial compatibility effect from the avatar’s perspective was observed again, and hints of the selective use of perspective taking on a trial-by-trial basis were found. Overall, the results indicate that users can incorporate the perspective of an avatar into their mental representation of a situation, even when this perspective is unnecessary to complete a task, but that certain contextual requirements have to be met.     

Differences in psychosocial experiences of employed, unemployed, and student samples of young adults

The author conducted this cross-sectional study to assess the extent to which employed, unemployed, and student samples of young adults could be differentiated on the basis of psychosocial experiences. Forty-four employed, 41 unemployed, and 42 student volunteers completed measures of emotional distress, time structure, financial strain, skill use, task variety, social support, and demographic information. After the effects of educational and income differences were statistically controlled, results indicated that unemployed participants reported poorer functioning than employed and student respondents on most measures. In a discriminant function analysis, 66% of the sample was correctly identified from scores on psychosocial measures, with higher classification rates for employed and unemployed participants. The findings provide additional support for contextual models of mental health and suggest that full-time education partially buffers the negative psychological consequences of unemployment when opportunities for employment are absent.     

Knowledge level learning and the power law: A soar model of skill acquisition in scheduling

Zusammenfassung. Das hier vorgestellte Modell lernt graduell, Planungsaufgaben aus der Klasse der Maschinenbelegungsprobleme (job-shop-scheduling problems) zu lösen. Mit Hilfe des Chunking-Mechanismus von Soar wird episodisches Wissen über die Belegungsreihenfolge von Aufträgen auf Maschinen memoriert. Bei der Entwicklung des Modells wurden zahlreiche qualitative (z. B. Transfereffekte) und quantitative Befunde (z. B. Bearbeitungszeiten) aus einer früheren empirischen Untersuchung berücksichtigt. In einer Validierungsstudie wurden dieselben Aufgaben von 14 Probanden und dem Modell bearbeitet. Die Passung von Simulationsdaten und empirischen Ergebnissen fiel insgesamt gut aus. Allerdings löst das Modell die Aufgaben schneller und zeigt auch einen etwas besseren Lernverlauf als die Probanden. Das Modell liefert eine Erklärung für das Rauschen, das typischerweise bei Bearbeitungszeiten zu beobachten ist: es handelt sich um erworbenes Wissen, das mehr oder weniger gut und auch unterschiedlich häufig auf neue Situationen übertragen wird. Der Lernverlauf der Probanden entspricht nur für aggregierte Daten einer Potenzfunktion (power law). Der vorgestellte Mechanismus zeigt, wie ein symbolisches Modell der Informationsverarbeitung graduelle Verhaltensänderungen generiert und wie der offensichtliche Erwerb allgemeiner Prozeduren ohne explizites Lernen von deklarativen Regeln erfolgen kann. Es wird nahegelegt, daß es sich hier um die Modellierung einer Form impliziten Lernens handelt. Summary. The model presented here gradually learns how to perform a job-shop scheduling task. It uses Soar's chunking mechanism to acquire episodic memories about the order to schedule jobs. The model was based on many qualitative (e.g., transfer effects) and quantitative (e.g., solution time) regularities found in previously collected data. The model was tested with new data where scheduling tasks were given to the model and to 14 subjects. The model generally fit these data with the restrictions that the model performs the task (in simulated time) faster than the subjects, and its performance improves somewhat more quickly than the subjects' performance. The model provides an explanation of the noise typically found in problem solving times - it is the result of learning actual pieces of knowledge that transfer more or less to new situations but rarely by an average amount. Only when the data are averaged (i.e., over subjects) does the smooth power law appear. This mechanism demonstrates how symbolic models can exhibit a gradual change in behavior and how the apparent acquisition of general procedures can be performed without resorting to explicit declarative rule generation. We suggest that this may represent a type of implicit learning.