Long‐Term Effects of Social Investment: The Case of Partnering in Young Adulthood

ABSTRACT On the basis of the assumptions of the dynamic transactional paradigm, the current study investigates the effects of success and failure of social investment on personality development across young adulthood. Using longitudinal data from the Michigan Study of Adolescent and Adult Life Transitions (MSALT), the authors demonstrate that entering into the first long‐term romantic relationship was accompanied by decreases in facets of neuroticism, thereby fully replicating findings by Neyer and Lehnart (2007) based on a German longitudinal study. In addition, remaining single over 8 years was related to decreasing self‐esteem, especially for men. These results demonstrate long‐term effects of investment and lack of investment in social roles and provide further evidence of the interrelatedness of social or relationship experiences and personality development.     

Contrasting the Theory of Planned Behavior With the Value‐Belief‐Norm Model in Explaining Conservation Behavior1

In this paper, we contrast the value‐belief‐norm (VBN) model and the theory of planned behavior (TPB) for the first time regarding their ability to explain conservation behavior. The participants represent a convenience sample of 468 university students. Using survey data and adopting previously established compound measures, structural equation analyses revealed a remarkable explanatory power for both theories: TPB's intention accounted for 95% of people's conservation behavior and VBN's personal norms accounted for 64%. Compared to the VBN model, the TPB covered its concepts more fully in terms of proportions of explained variance. More importantly, the fit statistics revealed that only the TPB depicts the relations among its concepts appropriately, whereas the VBN model does not.     

Approval-directed agency and the decision theory of Newcomb-like problems

Decision theorists disagree about how instrumentally rational agents, i.e., agents trying to achieve some goal, should behave in so-called Newcomb-like problems, with the main contenders being causal and evidential decision theory. Since the main goal of artificial intelligence research is to create machines that make instrumentally rational decisions, the disagreement pertains to this field. In addition to the more philosophical question of what the right decision theory is, the goal of AI poses the question of how to implement any given decision theory in an AI. For example, how would one go about building an AI whose behavior matches evidential decision theory’s recommendations? Conversely, we can ask which decision theories (if any) describe the behavior of any existing AI design. In this paper, we study what decision theory an approval-directed agent, i.e., an agent whose goal it is to maximize the score it receives from an overseer, implements. If we assume that the overseer rewards the agent based on the expected value of some von Neumann–Morgenstern utility function, then such an approval-directed agent is guided by two decision theories: the one used by the agent to decide which action to choose in order to maximize the reward and the one used by the overseer to compute the expected utility of a chosen action. We show which of these two decision theories describes the agent’s behavior in which situations.

     

关于上帝存在问题的理论及其实践的意义

一、任何人在开始作一个系列讲座的时候,都一定会首先阐明讲座主题的重要性,以引起读者对这项探索性研究的兴趣.有时候这是需要的,但就我们目前的讲座而言,这一点肯定是不必要的.     

Effects of unilateral distractors: A comparison of eye movement and key press responses

We compared the effects of a unilateral distractor on the latencies of voluntary eye movements and key press responses in order to elucidate some of the differences between these two types of response with respect to processing distractors. On each trial, participants indicated the colour of a central patch by making a left or a right response. The colour of the distractor either matched the target colour or matched the colour associated with the incorrect response. Similarly, the side of the distractor corresponded to the side of either the correct or the incorrect response. The results showed that side congruency exerted a main effect only on eye movement responses, but colour congruency affected eye movement and key press responses similarly. Moreover, when we made the target more distinct from the distractor, only distractors that appeared on the same side as the response elicited a colour congruency effect, for both response modalities. Wepropose that (1) the appearance of the distractor activates oculomotor cells, which facilitate a subsequent eye movement with the same direction vector, (2) the distinctiveness of the target determines whether colour and side congruency interact, and (3) spatial codes mediate the interaction between colour and side congruency that occurs when the target is sufficiently distinct from the distractor.     

The influence of emotional awareness and expressiveness on care-giving burden and health complaints in women and men

This study was designed to investigate the role of emotional awareness and expressiveness as influences on the experience of burden and impaired health for women and men maintaining a spouse or relative at home who had been diagnosed as having dementia. One hundred and thirty-one Caucasian care givers, 41 males and 90 females, participated in the study. Multivariate analysis of variance indicated that women scored higher than men on measures of burden, health complaints, and awareness of others' emotions. Regression analysis indicated that self-awareness of emotions interacted with care-giver gender to decrease health complaints for female care givers but increased health complaints for male care givers. Self-awareness of emotions also increased feelings of burden for male care givers in general and for female care givers experiencing low levels of burden. Awareness of others' emotions tended to reduce feelings of burden. Emotional expressiveness did not influence burden or health complaint scores.This research was funded by grants from the Health Research Funds of Quebec, the Quebec Council for Social Research, and the Montreal Alzheimer Society. The authors would like to express their gratitude to Valerie Takeda, Charlene Stamegna, and Helene Fyfe for their work on the project, and to the families, patients, and staff of the various referral agencies for their cooperation with the study.To whom reprint requests should be addressed at Centre for Research in Human Development, Concordia University, 1455 de Maisonneuve Boulevard West, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, H3G 1M8.     

Motor Performance of Stutterers and Nonstutterers on Timing and Force Control Tasks

Recently it has been suggested that speech and manual timing tasks share a common central process (Franz, Zelaznik, & Smith, 1992): Because stuttering is thought to be related to deficits in motoric processes such as timing, stutterers (n = 15) were compared with a set of age-, education-, and sex-matched nonstutterers on timing and isometric force-production tasks. In the timing tasks, subjects flexed and extended the right index finger at the metacarpophalangeal joint at cycle durations of 600, 500, 400, 300, and 200 ms. In the force-production tasks, subjects generated isometric forces to match target force levels displayed on a cathode-ray tube (CRT) screen. There were five levels of force, ranging from.11 to 7.85 newtons. Overall, there were no differences in timing and force-production performance between stutterers and nonstutterers. These results are similar to those obtained recently by Hulstijn, Summers, van Lieshout, and Peters (1992). We suggest that stuttering is not characterized by a general deficit in rhythmic timing. Instead, the motor deficit associated with stuttering should be viewed as speech specific.