Individuals and environments: Linking ability and skill ratings with interests

Holland's (1997) theory of corresponding person and work environment structures was evaluated by comparing the integration of individual and occupational ratings of interests, abilities, and skills. Occupational ratings were obtained from the U.S. Department of Labor's O*NET database (U.S. Department of Labor, 2007). College students (494 women, 526 men) provided self-ratings of their interests, abilities, and skills. Property vector fitting was used to embed ability and skill ratings into the Realistic, Investigative, Artistic, Social, Enterprising, and Conventional (RIASEC) interest structure, and bootstrapping was used to generate confidence intervals for the angles of the vectors and the magnitude of their fit to the Holland model. Across the individual and occupational ratings, 18 of 45 (40%) ability vectors and 41 of 48 (85%) skill vectors were fit into the RIASEC model. No significant gender differences were found in the integration of self-rated abilities and skills into the RIASEC circumplex; however, some differences were found between individual and environmental ratings. Obtained results highlight the potential utility and limitations of using Holland's model for representing both individual and occupational data in a common structure.     

Distinctiveness in serial memory for spatial information

Several studies have shown that recall performance depends on the extent to which an item differs from other items in a sequence (the distinctiveness effect; see, e.g., Kelley & Nairne, 2001). Distinctiveness effects, however, have been demonstrated mainly in the verbal domain. The present study extends distinctiveness effects to the spatial domain. In two experiments, participants recalled the order in which series of spatially located dots had been presented. Item discriminability was varied within the sequence by manipulating the duration of the interval inserted between the presentation of the dots (Experiment 1) and the perceptual characteristics of the stimuli (Experiment 2). The results showed that these manipulations in the spatial domain produce distinctiveness effects similar to those observed with verbal material (see, e.g., Neath & Crowder, 1990) and suggest that distinctiveness models of memory should take into account the processing of spatial information.     

Reply to: A comment on and : How to investigate whether personality items form a hierarchical scale?

We reply to the comment by Meijer (2009) on our recent papers investigating the hierarchical properties of personality scale items. We conclude that Mokken scaling is an appropriate method for investigating the existence of hierarchical scales in general and, specifically, addresses the issue of invariant item ordering in polychotomous data.     

Lip colour affects perceived sex typicality and attractiveness of human faces

The luminance contrast between facial features and facial skin is greater in women than in men, and women's use of make-up enhances this contrast. In black-and-white photographs, increased luminance contrast enhances femininity and attractiveness in women's faces, but reduces masculinity and attractiveness in men's faces. In Caucasians, much of the contrast between the lips and facial skin is in redness. Red lips have been considered attractive in women in geographically and temporally diverse cultures, possibly because they mimic vasodilation associated with sexual arousal. Here, we investigate the effects of lip luminance and colour contrast on the attractiveness and sex typicality (masculinity/femininity) of human faces. In a Caucasian sample, we allowed participants to manipulate the colour of the lips in colour-calibrated face photographs along CIELab L* (light--dark), a* (red--green), and b* (yellow--blue) axes to enhance apparent attractiveness and sex typicality. Participants increased redness contrast to enhance femininity and attractiveness of female faces, but reduced redness contrast to enhance masculinity of men's faces. Lip blueness was reduced more in female than male faces. Increased lightness contrast enhanced the attractiveness of both sexes, and had little effect on perceptions of sex typicality. The association between lip colour contrast and attractiveness in women's faces may be attributable to its association with oxygenated blood perfusion indicating oestrogen levels, sexual arousal, and cardiac and respiratory health.     

Climate change: the evidence and our options

Glaciers serve as early indicators of climate change. Over the last 35 years, our research team has recovered ice-core records of climatic and environmental variations from the polar regions and from low-latitude high-elevation ice fields from 16 countries. The ongoing widespread melting of high-elevation glaciers and ice caps, particularly in low to middle latitudes, provides some of the strongest evidence to date that a large-scale, pervasive, and, in some cases, rapid change in Earth''s climate system is underway. This paper highlights observations of 20th and 21st century glacier shrinkage in the Andes, the Himalayas, and on Mount Kilimanjaro. Ice cores retrieved from shrinking glaciers around the world confirm their continuous existence for periods ranging from hundreds of years to multiple millennia, suggesting that climatological conditions that dominate those regions today are different from those under which these ice fields originally accumulated and have been sustained. The current warming is therefore unusual when viewed from the millennial perspective provided by multiple lines of proxy evidence and the 160-year record of direct temperature measurements. Despite all this evidence, plus the well-documented continual increase in atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations, societies have taken little action to address this global-scale problem. Hence, the rate of global carbon dioxide emissions continues to accelerate. As a result of our inaction, we have three options: mitigation, adaptation, and suffering.     

Understanding global climate change: paleoclimate perspective from the world's highest mountains

Glaciers are among the world's best recorders of, and first responders to, natural and anthropogenic climate change and provide a time perspective for current climatic and environmental variations. Over the last 50 years such records have been recovered from the polar regions as well as low-latitude, high-elevation ice fields. Analyses of these ice cores and of the glaciers from which they have been drilled have yielded three lines of evidence for past and present abrupt climate change: (1) the temperature and precipitation histories recorded in the glaciers as revealed by the climate records extracted from the ice cores; (2) the accelerating loss of the glaciers themselves; and (3) the uncovering of ancient fauna and flora from the margins of the glaciers as a result of their recent melting, thus illustrating the significance of the current ice loss. The current melting of high-altitude, low-latitude ice fields is consistent with model predictions for a vertical amplification of temperature in the tropics. The ongoing rapid retreat of the world's mountain glaciers, as well as the margins of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, is not only contributing to global sea level rise, but also threatening fresh-water supplies in many of the most populous regions. More recently, strong evidence has appeared for the acceleration of the rate of ice loss in the tropics, which especially presents a clear and present danger to water supplies for at-risk populations in South America and Asia. The human response to this issue, however, is not so clear, for although the evidence from both data and models becomes more compelling, the rate of global CO2 emissions continues to accelerate. Climatologically, we are in unfamiliar territory, and the world's ice cover is responding dramatically. The loss of glaciers, which can be viewed as the world's water towers, threatens water resources that are essential for hydroelectric power, crop irrigation, municipal water supplies, and even tourism. As these glaciers are disappearing, we are also losing very valuable paleoclimate archives.     

The Psychological Impact From Hurricane Katrina: Effects of Displacement and Trauma Exposure on University Students

The following study examined the reactions of university students to Hurricane Katrina. A group of 68 New Orleans area students who were displaced from their home universities as a result of the hurricane were matched on race, gender, and age to a sample of 68 students who had been enrolled at Louisiana State University (LSU) prior to the hurricane. All students were enrolled at LSU at the time they participated in an online survey, conducted 3 months following the hurricane. The survey included symptom measures of depression, anxiety, stress, posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and other variables. Results indicated displaced students experienced more trauma exposure and greater subsequent distress, more symptoms of PTSD, and more symptoms of depression. Moreover, traumatic exposure and distress from the traumatic exposure were found to fully mediate depressive symptoms and posttraumatic symptoms in the displaced students.     

ASSESSMENT OF THE RELATIVE EFFECTS OF ATTENTION AND ESCAPE ON NONCOMPLIANCE

The current study presents a method for assessing the relative effects of attention and escape on noncompliance in preschoolers. Attention and escape conditions were alternated in a multielement design, and a contingency reversal procedure, in which one test condition served as a control for the other, was used to demonstrate control. For all 3 participants, noncompliance was maintained, at least in part, by social attention. Functional analyses of noncompliance such as the one described here may be valuable for developing function‐based treatments.     

Early development of spatial‐numeric associations: evidence from spatial and quantitative performance of preschoolers

Numeric magnitudes often bias adults’ spatial performance. Partly because the direction of this bias (left‐to‐right versus right‐to‐left) is culture‐specific, it has been assumed that the orientation of spatial‐numeric associations is a late development, tied to reading practice or schooling. Challenging this assumption, we found that preschoolers expected numbers to be ordered from left‐to‐right when they searched for objects in numbered containers, when they counted, and (to a lesser extent) when they added and subtracted. Further, preschoolers who lacked these biases demonstrated more immature, logarithmic representations of numeric value than preschoolers who exhibited the directional bias, suggesting that spatial‐numeric associations aid magnitude representations for symbols denoting increasingly large numbers.