Simplified Models Establishing some of Né:zondet's Results on Erdös–Woods Conjecture

The first step of the construction of Nézondet's models of finite arithmetics which are counter-models to Erdös–Woods conjecture is to add to the natural numbers the non-standard numbers generated by one of them, using addition, multiplication and divisions by a natural factor allowed in an ultrapower construction. After a review of some properties of such a structure, we show that the choice of the ultrafilter can be managed, using just the Chinese remainder's theorem, so that a model as desired is obtained as early as at the first time.     

Coping With Vicarious Trauma in the Aftermath of a Natural Disaster

This study documents the vicarious psychological impact of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti on Haitians living in the United States. The role of coping resources—family, religious, and community support—was explored. The results highlight the importance of family and community as coping strategies to manage such trauma. Este estudio documenta el impacto psicológico vicario que tuvo el terremoto de 2010 en Haití sobre los residentes haitianos que viven en Estados Unidos. Se explora el papel de los recursos de afrontamiento—apoyo familiar, religioso y comunitario. Lo resultados destacan la importancia de la familia y la comunidad como estrategias de afrontamiento para superar un trauma de esas características.     

The World at 7:00: Comparing the Experience of Situations Across 20 Countries

The purpose of this research is to quantitatively compare everyday situational experience around the world. Local collaborators recruited 5,447 members of college communities in 20 countries, who provided data via a Web site in 14 languages. Using the 89 items of the Riverside Situational Q‐sort (RSQ), participants described the situation they experienced the previous evening at 7:00 p.m. Correlations among the average situational profiles of each country ranged from r = .73 to r = .95; the typical situation was described as largely pleasant. Most similar were the United States/Canada; least similar were South Korea/Denmark. Japan had the most homogenous situational experience; South Korea, the least. The 15 RSQ items varying the most across countries described relatively negative aspects of situational experience; the 15 least varying items were more positive. Further analyses correlated RSQ items with national scores on six value dimensions, the Big Five traits, economic output, and population. Individualism, Neuroticism, Openness, and Gross Domestic Product yielded more significant correlations than expected by chance. Psychological research traditionally has paid more attention to the assessment of persons than of situations, a discrepancy that extends to cross‐cultural psychology. The present study demonstrates how cultures vary in situational experience in psychologically meaningful ways.     

The time course of visual influences in letter recognition

This study builds on a specific characteristic of letters of the Roman alphabet—namely, that each letter name is associated with two visual formats, corresponding to their uppercase and lowercase versions. Participants had to read aloud the names of single letters, and event-related potentials (ERPs) for six pairs of visually dissimilar upper- and lowercase letters were recorded. Assuming that the end product of processing is the same for upper- and lowercase letters sharing the same vocal response, ERPs were compared backward, starting from the onset of articulatory responses, and the first significant divergence was observed 120 ms before response onset. Given that naming responses were produced at around 414 ms, on average, these results suggest that letter processing is influenced by visual information until 294 ms after stimulus onset. This therefore provides new empirical evidence regarding the time course and interactive nature of visual letter perception processes.     

Impact of intention on the ERP correlates of face recognition

The present study investigated the impact of study-test similarity on face recognition by manipulating, in the same experiment, the expression change (same vs. different) and the task-processing context (inclusion vs. exclusion instructions) as within-subject variables. Consistent with the dual-process framework, the present results showed that participants performed better on the inclusion task than on the exclusion task, with no response bias. A mid-frontal FN400 old/new effect and a parietal old/new effect were found in both tasks. However, modulations of the ERP old/new effects generated by the expression change on recognized faces differed across tasks. The modulations of the ERP old/new effects were proportional to the degree of matching between the study face and the recognition face in the inclusion task, but not in the exclusion task. The observed modulation of the FN400 old/new effect by the task instructions when familiarity and conceptual priming were kept constant indicates that these early ERP correlates of recognition depend on voluntary task-related control. The present results question the idea that FN400 reflects implicit memory processes such as conceptual priming and show that the extent to which the FN400 discriminates between conditions depends on the retrieval orientation at test. They are discussed in relation to recent controversies about the ERP correlates of familiarity in face recognition. This study suggests that while both conceptual and perceptual information can contribute to the familiarity signal reflected by the FN400 effect, their relative contributions vary with the task demands.     

Managing diversity in organizations: An integrative model and agenda for future research

The literature on policies, procedures, and practices of diversity management in organizations is currently fragmented and often contradictory in highlighting what is effective diversity management, and which organizational and societal factors facilitate or hinder its implementation. In order to provide a comprehensive and cohesive view of diversity management in organizations, we develop a multilevel model informed by the social identity approach that explains, on the basis of a work motivation logic, the processes by, and the conditions under which employee dissimilarity within diverse work groups is related to innovation, effectiveness, and well-being. Building on this new model, we then identify those work group factors (e.g., climate for inclusion and supervisory leadership), organizational factors (e.g., diversity management policies and procedures, and top management's diversity beliefs), and societal factors (e.g., legislation, socioeconomic situation, and culture) that are likely to contribute to the effective management of diversity in organizations. In our discussion of the theoretical implications of the proposed model, we offer a set of propositions to serve as a guide for future research. We conclude with a discussion of possible limitations of the model and practical implications for managing diversity in organizations.     

The Creative Process in Visual Art: A Longitudinal Multivariate Study

The purpose of this research was to study the creative process in real-life settings and in a multicomponential perspective of creativity. Relations between the creative process and other important variables (mood, personality, and the creative product) were investigated. The data analyzed were collected in four applied art schools (n = 41) in Switzerland, during mandatory workshops. The creative process was operationalized through 2 subprocesses: generation (idea production) and selection (idea evaluation), both repeatedly measured across the workshops. The trajectories of theses subprocesses were modeled with a commonly used statistical model for longitudinal data (Latent Growth Models). Results showed that generation had an overall decreasing pattern through time, whereas selection had an inverted U-shaped pattern. Important individual differences in both subprocesses and related variables were also found, many of which had strong predictive validity. Indeed, process and personality variables explained 70% of the variance of the evaluation of the final product.     

Vocal Imitations and the Identification of Sound Events

It is commonly observed that a speaker vocally imitates a sound that she or he intends to communicate to an interlocutor. We report on an experiment that examined the assumption that vocal imitations can effectively communicate a referent sound and that they do so by conveying the features necessary for the identification of the referent sound event. Participants were required to sort a set of vocal imitations of everyday sounds. The resulting clusters corresponded in most of the cases to the categories of the referent sound events, indicating that the imitations enabled the listeners to recover what was imitated. Furthermore, a binary decision tree analysis showed that a few characteristic acoustic features predicted the clusters. These features also predicted the classification of the referent sounds but did not generalize to the categorization of other sounds. This showed that, for the speaker, vocally imitating a sound consists of conveying the acoustic features important for recognition, within the constraints of human vocal production. As such vocal imitations prove to be a phenomenon potentially useful to study sound identification.     

Regime-Switching Bivariate Dual Change Score Model

Mixture structural equation model with regime switching (MSEM-RS) provides one possible way of representing over-time heterogeneities in dynamic processes by allowing a system to manifest qualitatively or quantitatively distinct change processes conditional on the latent “regime” the system is in at a particular time point. Unlike standard mixture structural equation models such as growth mixture models, MSEM-RS allows individuals to transition between latent classes over time. This class of models, often referred to as regime-switching models in the time series and econometric applications, can be specified as regime-switching mixture structural equation models when the number of repeated measures involved is not large. We illustrate the empirical utility of such models using one special case—a regime-switching bivariate dual change score model in which two growth processes are allowed to manifest regime-dependent coupling relations with one another. The proposed model is illustrated using a set of longitudinal reading and arithmetic performance data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 1998–99 study (ECLS-K; U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, 2010).