Examining Associations Among Emotional Intelligence,Creativity, Self-efficacy,and Simultaneous Interpreting Practice Through the Mediating Effect of Field Dependence/Independence: A Path Analysis Approach

Journal of Psycholinguistic Research - Simultaneous interpreting (SI) is a cognitively complex activity due to the concurrent nature of receiving and producing messages. Previous research confirms...     

Efficiently checking propositional refutations in HOL theorem provers

This paper describes the integration of zChaff and MiniSat, currently two leading SAT solvers, with Higher Order Logic (HOL) theorem provers. Both SAT solvers generate resolution-style proofs for (instances of) propositional tautologies. These proofs are verified by the theorem provers. The presented approach significantly improves the provers' performance on propositional problems, and exhibits counterexamples for unprovable conjectures. It is also shown that LCF-style theorem provers can serve as viable proof checkers even for large SAT problems. An efficient representation of the propositional problem in the theorem prover turns out to be crucial; several possible solutions are discussed.     

Meaning of work among a sample of Kuwaiti workers

The study tested the meaning of work among 340 Kuwaiti workers in the public sector. A questionnaire was constructed to measure meaning of work by drawing 46 items from existing scales and from the meaning of work literature. They were put together, translated into Arabic, and adapted to be relevant to Kuwaiti society. Analysis showed the developed scale has acceptable reliability and validity coefficients for Kuwaiti workers. Also, Kuwaiti workers gave priority to extrinsic rewards from work, then intrinsic rewards, whereas Work Centrality had the lowest priority. Sex, occupation, and the intention not to change one's job in the future were significantly related to the meaning which these workers attributed to their work.     

Relation of Repetitive Thinking Styles with Anxiety and Depression in Patients with Inflammatory Bowel Disease

In this study, we aimed to evaluate the relationship between the repetitive thinking styles and anxiety and depression in patients with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). One hundred IBD outpatients (39 active and 61 remission) attending the gastroenterology clinic and 100 healthy controls were included.The rumination and worry scores of IBD patients, particularly in their active period, were significantly higher than controls. Additionally, the correlation of rumination and worry with anxiety and depression was statistically significant. Our results suggest that psychological interventions targeting repetitive thinking would alleviate depression and anxiety as well as GI symptoms in people with IBD which should be confirmed by further studies.

     

Viewing the world through “blood-red tinted glasses”: The hostile expectation bias mediates the link between violent video game exposure and aggression

Research has clearly shown that violent video games can increase aggression. It is less clear why they do. This study investigates the mediating effect of the hostile expectation bias (i.e., tendency to perceive hostile intent on the part of others) on the link between violent video game exposure and aggression. French college students (N = 136) played either a violent or nonviolent game for 20 minutes. Afterwards, they read ambiguous story stems about potential interpersonal conflicts, and listed what they thought the main characters would do or say, think, and feel as the story continued. Aggression was measured using a competitive computer game in which the winner could blast the loser with loud noise through headphones. As hypothesized, video game violence increased the hostile expectation bias, which, in turn, increased aggression. Effects were larger for men than women. Thus one reason why violent games increase aggression is because they increase hostile expectations.     

Perceptual Integration of Timing and Intensity Variations in the Perception of Musical Accents

The author investigated the detection of timing and intensity variations in tone sequences within the framework of perceptual independence or integration. The participants listened to sequences of tones that contained variations in timing, intensity, or both. Each participant tried to detect variations in the dimension that was declared relevant, which was either timing or intensity. The irrelevant dimension was held constant, or varied in a manner uncorrelated with the relevant dimension, or varied in a correlated manner. When the variations in the 2 dimensions were correlated, the correlation could be either positive (i.e., timing and intensity created accents in the same sequences) or negative (i.e., timing and intensity created accents in different sequences). Uncorrelated variation in the irrelevant dimension interfered with the detection of variations in the relevant dimension. In the case of a positive correlation between the 2 dimensions, the detection of variations was better than it was with the absence of variation in the irrelevant dimension only for participants who attended to timing. In the case of a negative correlation, the effect was the opposite. The results showed that timing and intensity accents were not processed by completely independent channels. Rather, information from the 2 dimensions combined at a late stage of processing.     

Philosophy of Education as an Academic Discipline in Turkey: The Past and the Present

This article aims to present the past and present state and future possibilities of philosophy of education as an academic discipline in Turkey as related to teacher training programs and academic studies in higher education institutions. It takes philosophy of education as consisting of the approaches that have emerged in its history. It has come to Turkey as a part of the modernization of education. It seems that during the Republican era in Turkey before World War II, mainly due to the dominance of the German conception of educational studies, the pedagogy and the history of pedagogy courses and the textbooks for them, which were central to the curricula of teacher training schools, contained the subjects of philosophy of education in its continental form; and after World War II philosophy of education is mostly understood, primarily due to Turkey’s changing international relations and the spread of American influence, as the isms and the doctrines approaches as found in the USA between the 1940s and 1960s, while other approaches in the field have been less influential. The article identifies how the restructuring of the teacher training system and the curricula of Faculties of Education in 1998 was a serious blow to the discipline, since it excluded philosophy of education from the curricula of teacher preparation schools, and the flourishing discipline thus lost its hold and importance in the undergraduate programs, and then in graduate programs. But the 2006 revision of the curricula has given a kiss of life to the discipline. There are reasons to think that it can recover in the coming period.

Maze Suite 1.0: A complete set of tools to prepare, present, and analyze navigational and spatial cognitive neuroscience experiments

Maze Suite is a complete set of tools that enables researchers to perform spatial and navigational behavioral experiments within interactive, easy-to-create, and extendable (e.g., multiple rooms) 3-D virtual environments. Maze Suite can be used to design and edit adapted 3-D environments, as well as to track subjects' behavioral performance. Maze Suite consists of three main applications: an editing program for constructing maze environments (MazeMaker), a visualization/rendering module (MazeWalker), and an analysis and mapping tool (MazeViewer). Each of these tools is run and used from a graphical user interface, thus making editing, execution, and analysis user friendly. MazeMaker is a .NET architecture application that can easily be used to create new 3-D environments and to edit objects (e.g., geometric shapes, pictures, landscapes, etc.) or add them to the environment effortlessly. In addition, Maze Suite has the capability of sending signal-out pulses to physiological recording devices, using standard computer ports. Maze Suite, with all three applications, is a unique and complete toolset for researchers who want to easily and rapidly deploy interactive 3-D environments.     

On verifying and engineering the wellgradedness of a union-closed family

Current techniques for generating a knowledge space, such as QUERY, guarantee that the resulting structure is closed under union, but not that it satisfies wellgradedness, which is one of the defining conditions for a learning space. We give necessary and sufficient conditions on the base of a union-closed set family that ensures that the family is well-graded. We consider two cases, depending on whether or not the family contains the empty set. We also provide algorithms for efficiently testing these conditions, and for augmenting a set family in a minimal way, to one that satisfies these conditions.     

Time course of chord priming

The time course of chord priming was explored in four experiments. In chord priming, a chord (a typical combination of simultaneously sounded tones) primes other chords that are musically related. In the present study, the prime duration and the stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) between the prime chord and the chord to be judged were varied. Priming occurred at an SOA and prime duration as short as 50 msec, the shortest tested. When the prime duration was held constant at 50 msec, priming occurred at an SOA as long as 2,500 msec, the longest tested, and the magnitude of the priming effect did not diminish. To eliminate a possible role of sensory memory in maintaining the priming effect during the silence following the prime, a 250-msec noise mask was presented immediately following the 50-msec prime. The interpolated noise mask did not eliminate priming, thereby supporting the view that chord priming is the consequence of associative activation.