Duration of hospitalization and post discharge suicide

A retrospective cohort of discharged patients from all public psychiatric hospitals in Hong Kong (1997-1999) was linked to suicide data from Coroner's court. Patients hospitalized shorter than 15 days had significantly lower suicide rates than longer stay patients. The results were fairly consistent across immediate/late post discharge periods, gender, age, diagnoses, and narrow/wide definitions of suicide. This finding was opposite of what has been reported in the literature. Short hospitalization carried different suicide risks in different service settings.     

Confirmatory factor analysis of the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children--Third Edition in an Australian clinical sample

A confirmatory factor analysis was conducted on the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-Third Edition (WISC-III; D. Wechsler, 1991) with a sample of 579 Australian children referred for assessment because of academic difficulties in the classroom. The children were administered the WISC-III as part of the initial eligibility determination process for funding of special education services. The children were aged between 6 years and 16 years 7 months. One-, two-, three-, and four-factor models were tested. The four-factor model proposed in the WISC-III manual fit the data significantly better than all other models tested.     

Sharing tips with strangers: exploiting gift culture in computer gaming.

The aim of this study was to look at motivations behind altruistic behavior in virtual communities by studying the sharing of game tips by experienced gamers. We examine several possible motivations (pure altruism, generalized reciprocity, and reputation) and qualitatively analyze tip types in terms of usefulness, visibility, and skill level. We found that in games that do not support a "performance stage" for skill demonstration, players often share game tips as a strategy to attract attention. To a certain degree, reciprocity can be used to explain small favor exchanges, but earning social reputation is often a much stronger motivating factor.     

Assessing the automaticity of intramodal and crossmodal spatial attentional orienting

Clark and Chalmers (1998) have argued that mental states can be extended outside an organism's skin. In response to some worries about the availability, reliability and portability of such extended resources, Clark (2005) offers a set of rough criteria that non-biological objects must fulfil to legitimately ground mental states. One such criterion is that the information retrieved from these non-biological sources be (more or less) automatically endorsed. But Sterelny (2003, 2005) has persuasively argued that the extended sphere is epistemologically opaque: a domain of contested truth and deliberate deception. As such, retrieving information from this domain requires the deployment of social guards for the information to remain reliable. But deploying such guards would seem to endanger endorsability by increasing cognitive load. Here I demonstrate that deploying social guards does not increase cognitive load if the guards are implemented in a highly distributed connectionist economy or off-loaded to the external environment.     

Information search in the testing of quantified hypotheses: how "all," "most," "some," "few," and "none" hypotheses are tested

A series of experiments examined how the search for information in the testing of hypotheses is affected by quantifiers that specify the frequency of the test relation. The experiments showed that a positive search is used more in the testing of propositions in which some instances are predicted to have the test relation than in the testing of propositions in which most or few instances are predicted to have the test relation. In addition, the studies demonstrated that a negative or disconfirmatory search is more likely to characterize tests of absolute hypotheses than tests of hypotheses of the majority or minority form. Finally, the findings indicated that a negative search also is more common in tests of hypotheses predicting the absence rather than the presence of a phenomenon. Thus, as expected, participants generally engaged in a diagnostic search rather than the confirmatory search for information that has been so ubiquitous in previous research.     

An alternative perspective on von Winterfeldt et al.'s (1997) test of consequence monotonicity

D. von Winterfeldt, N.-K. Chung, R. D. Luce, and Y. Cho (1997) provided several tests for consequence monotonicity of choice or judgment, using certainty equivalents of gambles. The authors reaxiomatized consequence monotonicity in a probabilistic framework and reanalyzed von Winterfeldt et al.'s main experiment via a bootstrap method. Their application offers new insights into consequence monotonicity as well as into von Winterfeldt et al.'s 3 experimental paradigms: judged certainty equivalents (JCE), QUICKINDIFF, and parameter estimation by sequential testing (PEST). For QUICKINDIFF, the authors found no indication of violations of "random consequence monotonicity." This sharply contrasts the findings of von Winterfeldt et al., who concluded that axiom violations were the most pronounced under that procedure. The authors found potential evidence for violations in JCE and certainty equivalents derived from PEST.     

Temporal distance and veracity effects on the level of detail in statements about intentions

Construal level theory states that future events that are nearer in the future and events that are more likely to happen have lower construal levels, and therefore have less detail, than events that are further away and/or less likely to happen. Consistent with this theory, the number of details in a statement can be a moderately good cue to deception. If veracity and temporal distance both affect detail, detail may only be a good cue to deception about events that occur at certain temporal distances. This paper describes a study on whether temporal distance and veracity affect detail levels in statements about intentions. The results suggest that temporal distance and veracity do not affect detail levels in this dataset. Intentions that were completed also did not differ from uncompleted intentions. Overall, the study found no support for the hypothesised effects of temporal distance and veracity on level of detail.     

Conscientiousness and (un)healthy eating: The role of impulsive eating and age in the consumption of daily main meals

The present study aims to explore the relationship between conscientiousness and the consumption of healthy versus unhealthy main meals. Impulsive eating was tested as a mediator in this relationship, as well as direct effects of age on those constructs. A nationwide representative sample of 1,006 Norwegian adults (18–70 years) within a prospective design was used to test a theoretical model. The structural equation model (SEM), in combination with bootstrapping procedures in AMOS, was the principal analytical method. Conscientiousness was negatively associated with unhealthy and impulsive eating. Impulsive eating was a partial mediator between conscientiousness and unhealthy eating and a full mediator between conscientiousness and healthy eating. Age was positively correlated with conscientiousness and this relationship had an inverted U‐shape form. Finally, age was negatively associated with unhealthy and impulsive eating, and positively associated with healthy eating. This study confirmed the relevance of conscientiousness for healthy, unhealthy, and impulsive eating.