University students' felt alienation and their attitudes toward African-Americans, women and homosexuals.

177 respondents attending a midwestern state university reported greater alienation from the wider society when they held more positive attitudes than negative ones toward women and homosexuals. Alienation and attitudes toward African-Americans, women, and homosexuals were not influenced by gender or religiosity.     

A critical role for "affective neuroscience" in resolving what is basic about basic emotions.

Ortony and Turner (1990) asked "What's Basic About Basic Emotions," and they concluded "very little." They proceeded to advocate a "componential" or "mosaic" view of how emotional systems should be analyzed. Their thesis was flawed by their failure to consider the available neurobehavioral data. Genetically dictated brain systems that mediate affective-emotional processes do exist, even though there are bound to be semantic ambiguities in how we speak about these systems. This commentary summarizes key lines of evidence for coherently operating emotional systems in the brain and advocates the position that the issue of basic emotions can no longer be credibly discussed without adequate consideration of the relevant brain research in the area. The type of conceptual, logical analysis pursued by Ortony and Turner, in the absence of a thorough analysis of the available neurological data, is not an adequate basis for resolving what is basic about basic emotions.     

ALCOVE: an exemplar-based connectionist model of category learning.

ALCOVE (attention learning covering map) is a connectionist model of category learning that incorporates an exemplar-based representation (Medin & Schaffer, 1978; Nosofsky, 1986) with error-driven learning (Gluck & Bower, 1988; Rumelhart, Hinton, & Williams, 1986). Alcove selectively attends to relevant stimulus dimensions, is sensitive to correlated dimensions, can account for a form of base-rate neglect, does not suffer catastrophic forgetting, and can exhibit 3-stage (U-shaped) learning of high-frequency exceptions to rules, whereas such effects are not easily accounted for by models using other combinations of representation and learning method.     

Disorder as harmful dysfunction: a conceptual critique of DSM-III-R's definition of mental disorder.

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (3rd ed., rev.; DSM-III-R) operationally defines disorder essentially as "statistically unexpectable distress or disability." This definition is an attempt to operationalize 2 basic principles: that a disorder is harmful and that a disorder is a dysfunction (i.e., an inability of some internal mechanism to perform its natural function). However, the definition fails to capture the idea of "dysfunction" and so fails to validly distinguish disorders from nondisorders, leading to invalidities in many of DSM-III-R's specific diagnostic criteria. These problems with validity are traced to DSM-III-R's strategies for increasing reliability.     

The Effects of Decision Outcome Dispersion Upon Organizational Decision Making

The effects of varying decision outcome dispersion on organizational decision making were investigated under individual and group decision making conditions. Thirty-six female and pg]36 male subjects made decisions for organizational decision scenarios in which outcomes affected primarily the decision maker, people other than the decision maker, or a group of which the decision maker was a member. Subjects rated their levels of perceived risk and confidence in their decisions and made decisions within a simulated context of either a small or a large organization. Results indicated that subjects perceived significantly less risk and more confidence in their decisions when outcomes affected primarily themselves rather than others regardless of whether the decisions were made individually or by a group. Males perceived their decisions as significantly more risky than females. Induced organizational size did not significantly influence decision making.

     

Premenstrual symptoms: the role of irrational thinking.

104 women, between the ages of 18 and 45 years, were surveyed to investigate the relationship between premenstrual symptomatology, as measured by the Modified Menstrual Distress Questionnaire, and irrational thinking, as measured by the General Attitude and Belief Scale. The women who reported greater premenstrual symptomatology also reported significantly higher scores in the "need for comfort" irrationality subscale. This indicated that these women had particular difficulty dealing with hassles and the resulting feelings of tension and irritability in the premenstruum. It was suggested that the absence of significant effects for other rationality-irrationality subscales could be associated with testing at different times during the menstrual cycle. Irrationality, like other conditions (such as anxiety and depression) prevalent in the premenstruum, could change in intensity across phases of the menstrual cycle.     

Demographic and intellectual correlates of the Short-term Memory Test.

This study examined the effect of demographic variables and intellectual factors on the Short-term Memory Test. Subjects were 20 patients neurologically diagnosed as brain-damaged. There was only one significant correlation between Verbal IQ and the Short-term Memory Test. Demographic variables of age, education, and sex did not correlate significantly with scores of the Short-term Memory Test.     

Assessing the likelihood of reliable workplace behavior: further contributions to the validation of the Employee Reliability Inventory.

This paper summarizes a number of studies in which the validity of the Employee Reliability Inventory, a preemployment screening instrument designed to assess the likelihood of reliable and productive workplace behavior, was examined. Criterion-related studies compared the scores of a broadly diverse group of job applicants with those obtained from an array of criterion and comparison groups, for whom there was documented evidence of reliable or unreliable behavior. Criterion-related evidence indicates that the six scales are effective in differentiating a variety of criterion groups with unreliable behavior from a number of different job applicant comparison groups. Construct-related evidence for the validity of an emotional adjustment scale is reported as well. The issue of response distortion in preemployment inventories is discussed, and data are reported which indicate that scores on all six scales appear to be functionally free from the potentially confounding effects of response distortion. These results are consistent with the original validation and cross-validation findings, which supported the validity of the six scales when assessing the likelihood of reliable behavior in a population of job applicants.     

Depression, suicide ideation, and aggression among high school students whose parents are divorced and use alcohol at home.

106 high school students from a small rural high school completed the Children of Alcoholics Scale, Zaks and Walters' Aggression Scale, Beck Depression Scale, and a modified version of the Beck Scale of Suicide Ideation. Analyses of variance showed boys were not experiencing suicide ideation any more than girls; suicide ideation was similar across the four grades, but on aggression alcohol-dependent boys scored significantly higher than girls, and in Grade 9 boys' scores were significantly higher than those in Grade 10. The sophomores' scores on alcohol dependency were significantly lower than the freshmen's scores. Boys and children from divorced homes had higher scores on aggression than girls and children from nondivorced homes. Children from homes in which alcohol was used had higher depression scores than children from nonalcoholic homes. Freshman girls and sophomore boys had higher depression scores than senior boys and girls. A Pearson r of 0.28 between scores on alcohol dependency and suicide ideation was significant, but research is needed to understand better the associations of thoughts of suicide and drug-alcohol dependency among these high school students so strategies for prevention and intervention can be focused.