Process arrangements for variety,retention, and selection

This article argues that process management aimed at introducing variety, retention, and selection into complex decision-making processes can make a substantial contribution to improving them. It also describes process arrangements for variety, retention, and selection. He received his Ph. D. in public administration at Erasmus University, Rotterdam. He is also program director at the Netherlands School of Public Administration and director of the TUD research program on multi actor systems. His research concerns networks and network-organizations, with a strong focus on governance and management issues in networks. He is the author on a number of internationally recognized books on these issues. His conceptual approach of these issues has been applied in research on the open source movement, frequency allocation, the design of policy instruments and mediation (e.g. interconnection disputes). He is program leader of the Bsik research program Next Generation Infrastructures. He holds the post of chair research within the faculty.     

Antecedents and Components of Majority Attitudes toward Multiculturalism in the Netherlands

Les prédicteurs et les composantes des attitudes envers le multiculturalisme ont étéétudies chez 341 Néerlandais tout‐venant. Les attitudes relèvent d’une structure unidimensionnelle, mais le niveau d’adhésion au multiculturalisme varie significativement selon les domaines. Le niveau culturel et le fait de vivre en ville avec peu d’immigrés étaient les seules variables positivement corrélées avec l’adhésion au multiculturalisme. Un modèle en pistes causales s’est révélé pertinent, les attitudes et les comportements dépendant des variables psychologiques suivantes; connaissances, satisfaction générale, perspectives d’avenir, désirabilité sociale et perception des normes sociales favorables au multiculturalisme ou en faisant au contraire une menace. Globalement, l’exclusion était désapprouvée par la majorité des Néerlandais, mais le pluralisme culturel nétait pas ressenti comme étant un atout précieux pour leur société, et ils nétaient pas disposés à faire beaucoup d’efforts pour faciliter l’intégration des minorités. Predictors and components of attitudes toward multiculturalism were studied in 341 native Dutch people. Attitudes were found to have a unidimensional structure, but the level of support for multiculturalism was found to vary significantly over societal domains. Level of education and living in city districts with few non‐natives were the only background variables that were (positively) related to support for multiculturalism. A path model, with psychological background variables (knowledge, life satisfaction, life opportunities, perceived social norms about multiculturalism as a threat and support for multiculturalism, and social desirability) predicting attitudes and behavior, showed a good fit. Generally, exclusionist positions were not endorsed by majority Dutch, but cultural pluralism was not seen as a valuable asset of their society, and they are not inclined to put much effort into minority integration.     

Review Essay Ethnicity, Identity and Nationality in Latin America

This essay surveys recent scholarship on the history of ethnicity in Latin America and the Atlantic World, exploring ways in which Jewish, Japanese and Middle Eastern minorities have transacted nationhood, identity and integration. This historiography of ethnicity offers compelling paths for understanding how transnational identities are negotiated. These include the analysis of patterns of slaveholding by Jewish communities on both sides of the Atlantic and the ways in which these communities understood blackness; the use of memory in understanding experiences of immigration; the relationships between national foreign policy and domestic ethnic politics; and the extent to which the issues of negotiating identity and asserting ethnicity are shared by a variety of immigrant ethnic groups. Together, this body of literature reflects the substantial ways in which ethnic histories interplay with other facets of national histories and with the process of historical analysis.     

Analysis of the factor structure of the Sociocultural Attitudes Towards Appearance Questionnaire (SATAQ-3) in Spanish secondary-school students through exploratory structural equation modeling

The aims of the present study were: (1) to assess the factor structure of the SATAQ-3 in Spanish secondary-school students by means of exploratory factor analysis (EFA), confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and exploratory structural equation modeling (ESEM) models; and (2) to study its invariance by sex and school grade. ESEM is a technique that has been proposed for the analysis of internal structure that overcomes some of the limitations of EFA and CFA. Participants were 1559 boys and girls in grades seventh to tenth. The results support the four-factor solution of the original version, and reveal that the best fit was obtained with ESEM, excluding Item 20 and with correlated uniqueness between reverse-keyed items. Our version shows invariance by sex and grade. The differences between scores of different groups are in the expected direction, and support the validity of the questionnaire. We recommend a version excluding Item 20 and without reverse-keyed items.     

Examining talker effects in the perception of native- and foreign-accented speech

Understanding the circumstances under which talker (and other types of) variability affects language perception represents an important area of research in the field of spoken word recognition. Previous work has demonstrated that talker effects are more likely when processing is relatively slow (M^cLennan & Luce, 2005). Given that listeners may take longer to process foreign-accented speech than native-accented speech (Munro & Derwing, Language and Speech, 38, 289?C306 1995), talker effects should be more likely when listeners are presented with words spoken in a foreign accent than when they are presented with those same words spoken in a native accent. The results of two experiments, conducted in two different countries and in two different languages, are consistent with this prediction.     

Working memory load can both improve and impair selective attention: Evidence from the Navon paradigm

Selective attention to relevant targets has been shown to depend on the availability of working memory (WM). Under conditions of high WM load, processing of irrelevant distractors is enhanced. Here we showed that this detrimental effect of WM load on selective attention efficiency is reversed when the task requires global- rather than local-level processing. Participants were asked to attend to either the local or the global level of a hierarchical Navon stimulus while keeping either a low or a high load in WM. In line with previous findings, during attention to the local level, distractors at the global level produced more interference under high than under low WM load. By contrast, loading WM had the opposite effect of improving selective attention during attention to the global level. The findings demonstrate that the impact of WM load on selective attention is not invariant, but rather is dependent on the level of the to-be-attended information.     

Perceiving performer identity and intended expression intensity in point-light displays of dance

This study investigated agent and expression intensity recognition in point-light displays depicting dancing performances. In a first session, participants danced with two different expression intensities to music, solo or in dyads. In a subsequent session, they watched point-light displays of 1–5-s duration, depicting their own, their partner’s or another participant’s recorded actions, and were asked to identify the agent (self vs. partner vs. stranger) and the intended expression intensity (expressive vs. inexpressive) of the performer. The results indicate that performer identity and expression intensity could be discerned reliably from displays as short as 1 s. The accuracy in judgment increased with exposure duration and, for performer identification, with higher expression intensity. Judgment accuracy in agent and expression intensity recognition tasks correlated with self-report empathy indices. Accuracy correlated also with confidence in judgment, but only in the intensity recognition task. The results are discussed in relation to perceptual and neural mechanisms underlying action and intention recognition.     

Motor skill learning in the middle-aged: limited development of motor chunks and explicit sequence knowledge

The present study examined whether middle-aged participants, like young adults, learn movement patterns by preparing and executing integrated sequence representations (i.e., motor chunks) that eliminate the need for external guidance of individual movements. Twenty-four middle-aged participants (aged 55–62) practiced two fixed key press sequences, one including three and one including six key presses in the discrete sequence production task. Their performance was compared with that of 24 young adults (aged 18–28). In the middle-aged participants motor chunks as well as explicit sequence knowledge appeared to be less developed than in the young adults. This held especially with respect to the unstructured 6-key sequences in which most middle-aged did not develop independence of the key-specific stimuli and learning seems to have been based on associative learning. These results are in line with the notion that sequence learning involves several mechanisms and that aging affects the relative contribution of these mechanisms.     

Borderline personality traits in nonclinical young adults

The main purpose of this study was to explore the dimensionality of the borderline personality disorder in nonclinical young adults by means of the Borderline Personality Questionnaire (BPQ; Poreh et al., 2006). We also studied the phenotypic expression of the borderline personality traits as a function of participants' gender and age, and the relationship between BPQ subscales and measures of depressive symptoms, anxiety, stress, hallucinatory predisposition, and paranoid ideation. The sample comprised 809 young adults, 562 (69.5%) were women, with a mean age of 20.2 years (SD = 2.9). The results indicate that the BPQ self-report has adequate psychometric properties. The levels of internal consistency for the BPQ subscales ranged between .78 and .93. Analysis of the internal structure of the BPQ subscales yielded a one-dimensional solution. In contrast, second-order principal components analysis at the item level yielded a five-dimensional solution. Likewise, statistically significant differences in the mean scores of the borderline personality traits as a function of participants' gender and age were found. The BPQ subscales correlated significantly with measures of depression, anxiety, stress, paranoid ideation, and hallucinatory predisposition. These results help to improve our understanding of the dimensional structure of the borderline personality in the general population. Future research should continue to identify participants who are at risk for the development of borderline personality disorder and facilitating the development of early detection and prevention programs.     

Amniocentesis Due to Advanced Maternal Age: The Role of Marital Intimacy in Couples’ Decision-Making Process

Due to the risk of fetal anomaly, pregnant women of advanced maternal age are given the option to undergo amniocentesis. In our study we aimed to describe couples’ decision-making process regarding amniocentesis, and assess whether it is influenced by marital intimacy and men’s participation in genetic counseling. During pregnancy, 112 couples answered the Personal Assessment of Intimacy in Relationships questionnaire and scales regarding the decision to undergo amniocentesis. Most couples shared and reached an agreement regarding this decision. Higher levels of marital engagement and communication, but not men’s participation, were associated with higher agreement, influence, and decision-sharing. Clinical implications are discussed.