The Variation of Hand Steadiness with Physical Stress

The performance of 12 subjects in a hand steadiness task was compared at different work loads. Hand steadiness expressed in the form of values of hand shakiness was found not to increase linearly with work intensity. On the contrary, the relation between hand shakiness and activation level, induced by physical work, was found to be positively accelerated by an exponent of 1.6. Subjective effort measured by a ratio estimation method grew, likewise, according to a positively accelerating function with an exponent of about 1.6, while subjective effort according to the “RPE” category scale, like heart rate, grew linearly with work load.     

Modification of performance on the Span of Apprehension Task in a group of young people with early onset psychosis

The aim of the study was to examine the effect of contingent monetary reinforcement and enhanced instructions on Span of Apprehension (SPAN) performance in a group of young people with early onset psychosis. Twenty-five participants (mean age 16.7) received a 3- and 12-letter version of the SPAN task six times: baseline, three x intervention, post-test, and 10-day follow-up. No significant effects of time were found in the 3-letter condition, indicating a ceiling effect for accuracy. In the 12-letter condition detection rates improved significantly reaching a maximum at the third intervention (p < 0.001). Performance showed a temporary decline at post-test, but performance returned to the maximum level at the 10-day follow-up. The study suggests that SPAN performance can be improved in young people with early onset psychosis using relatively simple interventions and that performance gains are relatively durable.     

Engaging Diversity's Underbelly: A Story from an Immigrant Parish Community

: This story explores an intervention conducted in a Catholic parish community in New York City. The intervention, conducted by the author and a Jesuit priest, focused on issues of unity and diversity among the various Chinese immigrant subgroups in the parish (primarily Cantonese- and Mandarin-speakers). Issues of class, power, and a history of colonialism in the Catholic Church are explored as central to the relations among culturally diverse Chinese American community members and between the members and the practitioners and the church authority. The author especially focuses on how the dynamics that played out in the intervention reflected wider issues of economics, labor practices, and political elitism in the wider Chinatown community. A central part of the author's argument is about power relationships between this parish community and Chinatown and how these power relationships are embedded within broader racial and economic oppression within the United States.     

Revisiting Thurstone's and Coombs' scales on the seriousness of crimes and offences

The classical studies by Thurstone (1927b) and Coombs (1967) on the seriousness of crimes and offences are replicated here for a sample of male and female students. Eighty subjects used both forced choice and graded dominance ratios to assess all pairs of 10 crimes/offences. The direct ratio estimates correlate very highly with pair-comparison probabilities, thus making it possible to interpret the former as direct estimates of dominance probabilities. These data can be scaled with excellent fit in Thurstone's sense. The resulting scales are quite similar to those obtained by Thurstone and Coombs. An analysis of the individual data shows, however, that 69 per cent of the average data are aggregated over a variety of distinct subgroups of individuals who partition the crimes/offences into subsets that are incomparable in their seriousness. Thurstone's and Coombs' seriousness scales must therefore be considered a population lawfulness.     

A direct approach to individual differences scaling using increasingly complex transformations

A family of models for the representation and assessment of individual differences for multivariate data is embodied in a hierarchically organized and sequentially applied procedure called PINDIS. The two principal models used for directly fitting individual configurations to some common or hypothesized space are the dimensional salience and perspective models. By systematically increasing the complexity of transformations one can better determine the validities of the various models and assess the patterns and commonalities of individual differences. PINDIS sheds some new light on the interpretability and general applicability of the dimension weighting approach implemented by the commonly used INDSCAL procedure.     

A procedure for analyzing metric asymmetric proximity matrices (author's transl)

A method is discussed and illustrated which yields a geometric representation of asymmetric proximity matrices. Assuming the observations are metric the data matrix is uniquely decomposed into a symmetric and a skew-symmetric matrix-valued component. The former entails a spatial configuration vis some MDS technique; the formation contained in the latter can then be integrated into this space in various ways.     

Local vs. global pragmatics

In ‘Local pragmatics in a Gricean framework’, Mandy Simons argues that, contrary to the received view, it is possible to accommodate local pragmatic effects utilising just the mechanisms for pragmatic reasoning provided by Grice. Although I agree with this overarching claim, this paper argues that we need to be careful in our understanding of ‘what is said’, and the nature of communicated content in general, when deciding between local and global accounts of pragmatic effects.     

Does the Value Circle Exist Within Persons or Only Across Persons?

This study tests whether the Schwartz (1992) value circle exists within individuals, not only across individuals, thereby providing evidence for the within‐person rationale underlying the value circle. We analyze responses from five samples (a representative sample in Britain, a general population sample in the United States, and university students in Britain and Iran) varying in value measures of the Schwartz value theory (SVS, PVQ40, PVQ21). An unfolding model is used to map each person's value profile into a two‐dimensional space representing both persons and values. In all samples, clear value circles were found, with values ordered around the circle largely according to the theory. The model also represents most individuals well. The value circle exists within individuals, providing strong support for the underlying within‐person rationale for the Schwartz (1992) value theory. The unfolding analysis allows identifying which persons fit the model less well and in which way, identifying how meaningful subgroups differ in their value profiles, and testing whether meaningful subgroups have different value structures. The model opens up many new possibilities for research linking values to other variables.