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.     

A Contrastive Analysis of Emotional Terms in Bed-Night Stories Across Two Languages: Does it Affect Learners' Pragmatic Knowledge of Controlling Emotions? Seeking Implications to Teach English to EFL Learners

Journal of Psycholinguistic Research - The present investigation aimed at studying emotional terms (ETs) in Persian and English bed-night stories for children by adopting a contrastive analysis...     

Phenomenal conservatism, classical foundationalism, and internalist justification

In “Compassionate Phenomenal Conservatism” (2007), “Phenomenal Conservatism and the Internalist Intuition” (2006), and Skepticism and the Veil of Perception (2001), Michael Huemer endorses the principle of phenomenal conservatism, according to which appearances or seemings constitute a fundamental source of (defeasible) justification for belief. He claims that those who deny phenomenal conservatism, including classical foundationalists, are in a self-defeating position, for their views cannot be both true and justified; that classical foundationalists have difficulty accommodating false introspective beliefs; and that phenomenal conservatism is most faithful to the central internalist intuition. I argue that Huemer’s self-defeat argument fails, that classical foundationalism is able to accommodate fallible introspective beliefs, and that classical foundationalism has no difficulty accommodating a relatively clear internalist intuition. I also show that the motivation for phenomenal conservatism is less than clear.     

AN INTERDISCIPLINARY FRAMEWORK FOR ISLAMIC COGNITIVE THEORIES

The Islamic psychology (IP) community in Europe has recently witnessed a heated debate about the credentials required to participate in the theoretical substantiation of IP and Islamically integrated psychotherapy and counseling. This debate has provided convenient circumstances for Muslim psychologists and Islamic scholars alike to rethink their roles within the flourishing movement. Specifically, the discussions hint toward the importance of adopting a collaborative research methodology for IP, in particular for basic research. The methodology of choice will need to define the necessary qualifications and responsibilities of scholars and psychologists in a collaborative research process (personal collaboration) and evince its capability to appropriately marry knowledge and data, diverging research methods, and perspectives, concepts, and theories from Islamic studies and contemporary psychology (content‐related collaboration). Here, we devise and offer a case illustration of an Islamic Psychology Basic Research Framework (coined the SALAAM Framework). This framework uses the Institute for Interdisciplinary Studies (IIS) Model of Interdisciplinary Research, developed by the IIS at the University of Amsterdam. Our first aim is to appropriate the IIS model for the IP literature by applying the model's research process phases and technique for the integration of disparate bodies of knowledge—that is, the identification of common ground—to methodological approaches in the contemporary IP literature. Our second aim is to exemplify the devised SALAAM Framework using the relatively unexplored area of Islamic cognitive theories (ICTs), which remain underdeveloped in contemporary psychological literature, primarily because of a lack of commensurability with the nomenclature of contemporary psychology. We thus provide a primer on the potential scope of ICTs. Toward the end of this article, we discuss the potential of the project of interdisciplinary construction of Islamic psychological theory, and the ability of the SALAAM Framework to establish a research program in IP that centers on cognition. We finally offer our reflections on the distinctiveness of Islamic psychologies in comparison to mainstream and Christian psychology.     

Interrelations between virtual-world and real-world activities: comparison of genders, age groups, and pathological and nonpathological Internet users

After the Internet Revolution, people have started to spend most of their everyday time online carrying out virtual activities. A limited number of studies tried to answer whether virtual activities match our real-world (RW) activities. Moreover, to our knowledge, there was no study that dealt with these interrelations between virtual and RW activities among the pathological and nonpathological users of the Internet (i.e. PIUs and NPIUs). The primary aim of this study was to fill this gap and to investigate the correlations between virtual-world (VW) and RW activities among PIUs and NPIUs. The secondary aim was to examine the perceptions of the Internet and motivations to go online for PIUs and NPIUs. The third aim was to compare virtual and RW activities across gender and age groups. The results indicated that correlations between most of the activities in RW and VW were high among men and women, among age groups, and also among PIUs and NPUs. However, beyond these similarities, perceptions of the Internet and motivations to browse into VW were differed among PIUs and NPIUs. In other words, PIUs, but not NPIUs, perceived VW activities more gratified and had motivations to go online for gratified functions.     

The Persian Version of the Personality Beliefs Questionnaire-Short-Form (PBQ-SF): A Psychometric Evaluation

Journal of Rational-Emotive & Cognitive-Behavior Therapy - The Personality Beliefs Questionnaire-Short Form (PBQ-SF) is the short-form version of PBQ (Beck and Beck in The personality belief...     

The Relationships between Knowledge Structures and Appraisals of Economically Disadvantaged Adolescents

The study's objective was to test adolescents' self‐regulation based upon Cervone, Shadel, Smith, and Fiori's (2006 ) knowledge and appraisal personality architecture model. Self‐regulation was defined as the relationships between knowledge structures (enduring mental representations of the world) and appraisal processes (dynamic meanings constructed to evaluate various events). In our study, the knowledge variables were authoritarianism and locus of control while appraisal variables were categorized as personal orientation (coping, communication, self‐esteem) and relational orientation (perspective taking, empathy, prosocial behavior tendency). The purpose of the study was to identify the relationships between these variables and compare gender differences for each indicator. The participants were 246 adolescents (125 males and 121 females) whose ages ranged between 12 and 15 and who were the inhabitants of a poor urban neighborhood in Ankara, Turkey. The results showed that external locus of control and authoritarianism were not related, while the former was negatively related to both personal and relational orientations and authoritarianism was positively related to only relational orientation. Boys' external locus of control was higher than girls', whereas girls' scores exceeded boys' in self‐reliant coping with stress, open communication, and interpersonal reactivity. No gender differences were observed for authoritarianism, prosocial behavior tendency, and self‐esteem. Notre projet était d’estimer l’autorégulation des adolescents à partir du modèle structurale de connaissances et d’évaluation de la personnalité de Cervone, Shadel, Smith et Fiori (2006). L’autorégulation recouvre les relations entre les connaissances (les représentations stables du monde) et les processus d’évaluation (les significations dynamiques élaborées pour apprécier différents évènements). Dans notre recherche, les variables de connaissances étaient l’autoritarisme et le locus of control tandis que les variables d’évaluation étaient regroupées sous les rubriques « orientation personnelle » (faire‐face, communication, estime de soi) et « orientation relationnelle » (changement de point de vue, empathie, tendance à adopter un comportement favorable aux autres). Ce travail cherchait à identifier les relations entre ces dimensions et à comparer les différences dues au genre pour chacun des indicateurs. Les sujets étaient 246 adolescents (125 garçons et 121 filles) entre douze et quinze ans qui habitent un quartier pauvre d’Ankara (Turquie). Les résultats montrent qu’un locus of control externe et l’autoritarisme ne sont pas en rapport, alors que le premier est corrélé négativement aux orientations personnelle et relationnelle ; l’autoritarisme n’est lié positivement qu’à l’orientation relationnelle. Le locus of control externe des garçons est supérieur à celui des filles alors que les scores des filles dépassent ceux des garçons dans le traitement autonome du stress, la communication libre et la sensibilité interpersonnelle. Les deux genres se rejoignent sur l’autoritarisme, la tendance à adopter un comportement favorable aux autres et l’estime de soi.     

A case of camptocormia (bent spine) secondary to early motor neuron disease

Camptocormia is a gait disorder, characterized by hyperflexion of thoracolumbar spine which increases on walking, and disappears in the supine position. A 48 year-old man developed progressive gait deterioration for one year and slight weakness and tremor of both hands for five months. It eventually became apparent that the patient had motor neuron disease, as well as symptoms of extrapyramidal disorder.