Abstract Valuation Semantics

We define and study abstract valuation semantics for logics, an algebraically well-behaved version of valuation semantics. Then, in the context of the behavioral approach to the algebraization of logics, we show, by means of meaningful bridge theorems and application examples, that abstract valuations are suited to play a role similar to the one played by logical matrices in the traditional approach to algebraization.     

The history of religions and francophone research in Europe: Main disciplinary trends in Switzerland,France, Belgium and Luxemburg

This article provides an overview (as of September, 2008) of the state of the field of l’histoire des religions in the four french-speaking countries of Europe. It discusses the pioneers, along with their followers and influence, the position of principle institutions regarding teaching in the field, and the general orientations of each university, along with distinct emphases that reflect recent socio-political and cultural developments. This detailed panorama brings to light the relative weakness of french-speaking research in the field of l’histoire générale des religions. It calls attention to tensions between the former high status of this academic area, more than half of a century ago, and the disrepute into which its comparativist project has fallen over the last decades. It asks how French secularism ‐ and the growing secularization of western societies more generally ‐ may have influenced perceptions of the discipline, its orientations, and its position in today's academic market academic market. It also considers the impact of declining comprehension of religious phenomena among younger generations and correlated concerns with popularisation.     

The Factor Structure of the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory: An Alternative View

Wagner and Copper (1963) reported high discriminative power for one score (the ACTivity score) of the Wagner Hand Test between (unskilled and semi-skilled) workers at Goodwill Industries, Akron, Ohio who had been rated “Satisfactory” or “Unsatisfactory” by their superiors.

An attempt to crossvalidate this finding, in a three-group design, in a large Western Canadian Plywood mill failed to produce the expected relationship; neither the ACT score, nor any of the other scores derived from this test showed any consistent trend in terms of postdicting activity level, or general acceptability of the 18 Ss involved in this study.     

The Balance-Scale Dilemma: Either the Subject or the Experimenter Muddles Through

We examined two critiques of rule-assessment methodology: (a) the method does not take into consideration other rules that subjects use to solve problems, and (b) its multiple-choice format misrepresents subjects' cognitive level. In Study 1, high school students completed a paper-and-pencil, multiple-choice balance scale questionnaire. Their performance was assessed with Siegler's original rules and a revised set of rules that included an addition and a qualitative proportionality rule. Results showed that Siegler's Rule 3 was not homogeneous and that distinguishing specific patterns of answers among Rule 3 subjects increased the diagnostic value of the rule-assessment methodology. In Study 2, we compared rule-assessment methodology to the Piagetian clinical model. High school students solved balance-scale problems within each method. Results indicated an overall match between Piagetian levels and Siegler's rules, with the exception of Rule 3, suggesting again the pertinence of specifying alternative rules.     

Deduction from if-then personality signatures

Personality signatures are sets of if-then rules describing how a given person would feel or act in a specific situation. These rules can be used as the major premise of a deductive argument, but they are mostly processed for social cognition purposes; and this common usage is likely to leak into the way they are processed in a deductive reasoning context. It is hypothesised that agreement with a Modus Ponens argument featuring a personality signature as its major premise is affected by the reasoner's own propensity to display this personality signature. To test this prediction, Modus Ponens arguments were constructed from conditionally phrased items extracted from available personality scales. This allowed recording of (a) agreement with the conclusion of these arguments, and (b) the reasoner's propensity to display the personality signature, using as a proxy this reasoner's score on the personality scale without the items used in the argument. Three experiments (N = 256, N = 318, N = 298) applied this procedure to Fairness, Responsive Joy, and Self-Control. These experiments yielded very comparable effects, establishing that a reasoner's propensity to display a given personality signature determines this reasoner's agreement with the conclusion of a Modus Ponens argument featuring the personality signature.     

The effect of noun phrase type on working memory saturation during sentence comprehension

Double centre-embedded structures such as “the rat the cat the boy chased ate was brown” seem ungrammatical to many human subjects. Using an offline complexity judgement task, Gibson and Thomas (1999) demonstrated that people found such sentences no more difficult to understand when the second verb phrase (VP) was omitted, relative to a condition where all the required VPs were present. According to the Syntactic Prediction Locality Theory (SPLT; Gibson, 1998), this syntactic illusion is determined by the high working memory cost associated with the integration of the second VP. This cost could be reduced by replacing the third noun phrase (the boy) by a pronoun, making the reader more sensitive to the omission of the second VP. This hypothesis was tested in two experiments using French sentences. Both experiments confirmed the syntactic illusion when the second VP was not a pronoun. The second experiment measured the reading times of the VPs and showed that the pronoun induced a longer reading time of the final VP when the second VP was omitted. The overall results indicate a condition under which human subjects could process the most complex part of a sentence with more than one embedded relative clause. The overall results are consistent with most of the hypotheses derived from the SPLT although offline complexity judgements could not be the most sensitive measure to test some of these hypotheses.     

Illness perceptions and self-care behaviours in the first years of living with type 2 diabetes; does the presence of complications matter?

Objective: To assess illness perceptions, self-care behaviours and their relationship in recently diagnosed type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) patients with and without diabetes-related complications.

Design: Cross-sectional survey among 192 recently diagnosed T2DM patients of whom 23% reported the presence of diabetes-related complications. Illness perceptions and self-care were assessed by the Revised Illness Perception Questionnaire (IPQ-R) and the revised Summary of Diabetes Self-Care Activities (SDSCA) measure.

Results: Generally, participating patients perceived T2DM as a chronic, but relatively controllable condition with minor consequences. In the presence of complications, however, T2DM was perceived as more unpredictable with more (serious) consequences and less controllable by self-care or medical treatment. Furthermore, engagement in exercise and foot care was reported more often by patients with complications. Self-care was related to certain illness perception dimensions, and interactions between perceptions and complications were found.

Conclusion: T2DM patients in the first years of their illness are often recommended to make lifestyle changes in the absence of noticeable diabetes-related symptoms or complaints. As many T2DM patients do not seem to perceive their condition to be serious and postpone lifestyle changes until diabetes-related complications appear, a major challenge for professionals is to convince asymptomatic patients of the importance of self-care.