Defending a possibilist insight in consequentialist thought

There is a heated dispute among consequentialists concerning the following deontic principle:

How psychological momentum changes in athletes during a sport competition

ObjectivesThe present research sought to examine changes in psychological momentum (PM) during sport competitions through the lens of a dynamical systems approach.DesignMale regional-level cyclists competed in cycling duels on home trainers.MethodImages of moving avatars of the cyclists were projected on a wall, and were manipulated so that one cyclist was exposed to an ascending performance scenario (i.e., positive momentum) and the other to a descending performance scenario (i.e., negative momentum). Every 3 min, the cyclists answered PM items by using a keyboard that was placed on the handlebars of their bicycles. Additionally, exerted power was continuously recorded.ResultsResults revealed an asymmetrical critical boundary pattern for PM perceptions indicating that negative PM was triggered more easily than positive PM. Exerted power was generally higher during the negative momentum scenario than during the positive momentum scenario. In addition, exerted power slowly decreased over both momentum scenarios, and this decrease was faster at the very beginning of the negative momentum scenario.ConclusionResults indicate that PM perceptions possess the dynamical properties of nonlinearity and history-dependence. Moreover, the finding that exerted power was higher in the negative momentum scenario was interpreted as a resistance behavior that occurs while experiencing negative momentum. The anticipated decreases in both exerted power and PM perceptions in the negative momentum scenario converge to support the notion that negative PM is a stronger attractor than positive PM. The present study confirms that PM is a dynamical phenomenon and offers fruitful avenues for future research.     

Health-Related Quality of Life is Associated with Positive Affect in Patients with Coronary Heart Disease Entering Cardiac Rehabilitation

Health-related quality of life (QoL) is an important and widely used outcome measure in cardiac populations. We examined the relationship between positive affect and health-related quality of life, controlling for traditional cardiovascular risk factors, clinical variables and negative affect. We further investigated the role of gender in this relationship given the well-known gender differences in cardiovascular health. We enrolled 746 patients with coronary heart disease (CHD) before they entered outpatient cardiac rehabilitation. All patients completed the Global Mood Scale and the SF-36 Health Survey. Positive affect was independently associated with mental (p < .001) and physical QoL (p < .001) after controlling for control variables. Gender moderated the relationship between positive affect and physical QoL (p = .009) but not mental QoL (p = .60). Positive affect was positively associated with physical QoL in men (p < .001) but not in women (p = .44). The health-related QoL of patients with CHD is associated with a person’s level of positive affect.     

Photovoice as a Methodological Tool to Address HIV and AIDS and Gender Violence amongst Girls on the Street in Rwanda

There has been limited international and South African research on the career development of rural and socioeconomically disadvantaged children. The present research provides baseline information on the career development of rural, low socioeconomic status, Black upper elementary school children (N = 292; 154 girls and 138 boys) in relation to their occupational interests and aspirations. Interests and aspirations were classified in terms of Holland's typology and status level. The results revealed that the children were more interested in and aspired more towards professional status level occupations in Social (i.e., people) and Investigative (i.e., scientific) type categories. Several significant gender differences were found. Girls aspired more to Social type occupations and boys more to Investigative type occupations, with the children's occupational aspirations reflecting gender traditionality. The implications of the present findings present the field with challenges in terms of career theory, research and practice     

Counterfactuals for Consequentialists

That all subjunctive conditionals with true antecedents and trueconsequents are themselves also true is implied by every plausibleand popularly endorsed account. But I am wary of endorsing thisimplication. I argue that all presently endorsed accounts fail tocapture the nature of certain subjunctive conditionals in contextsof consequentialist reasoning. I attempt to show that we must allowfor the possibility that some subjunctive conditionals with trueantecedents and true consequents are false, if we are to believethat certain types of straightforward consequentialist reasoningare coherent. I begin by evaluating a pair of morally releventcounterfactuals in a case via David Lewis's account. I then turnto a slight modification of the case, arguing that Lewis'ssemantics fails to generate the correct truth values of thesubjunctive conditionals in the modified case. Finally, I presenta modified version of Lewis's semantics that generates the correctresults in all of the cases.     

Interaction with a high-versus low-competence influence source in inductive reasoning

Literature on inductive reasoning shows that when testing hypotheses, people are biased toward the use of confirmatory strategies (P. C. Wason, 1960). In the present article, the authors presented 2 studies showing how people use confirmation and disconfirmation strategies during actual interaction in problem solving. Study 1 showed that participants were able to learn to use disconfirmation when confronted with a low-competence, nonthreatening partner. When the partner was high in competence (thereby threatening the participant's competence), participants used confirmation, even when the partner used disconfirmation. In Study 2, the authors aimed at generalizing the aforementioned results by exploring the hypothesis that disconfirmation stems from the possibility of diverging from norms. Participants who were confronted with the violation of a conversational norm used a high proportion of disconfirmation, whatever the source of influence. When there was no violation but there was a low-competence partner, the proportion of disconfirmation was high; when there was no violation but there was a high-competence partner, the proportion of disconfirmation was low. The authors discussed the interpersonal functions of confirmation and disconfirmation.     

The repeated insertion model for rankings: Missing link between two subset choice models

Several probabilistic models for subset choice have been proposed in the literature, for example, to explain approval voting data. We show that Marley et al.'s latent scale model is subsumed by Falmagne and Regenwetter's size-independent model, in the sense that every choice probability distribution generated by the former can also be explained by the latter. Our proof relies on the construction of a probabilistic ranking model which we label the repeated insertion model. This model is a special case of Marden's orthogonal contrast model class and, in turn, includes the classical Mallows -model as a special case. We explore its basic properties as well as its relationship to Fligner and Verducci's multistage ranking model.The authors are grateful to the National Science Foundation for grants SES98-18756 to Regenwetter and Peke, and SBR97-30076 to Regenwetter. This collaborative research was carried out in the context of the conference Random Utility 2000 held at Duke University and sponsored by NSF, the Fuqua School of Business and the Center for International Business Education and Research. We thank the editor and four referees for helpful suggestions and we are grateful to Prof. J. I. Marden for providing useful information on contrast models. We thank Moon-Ho Ho for programming and running the data analyses.     

Bayesian modeling of measurement error in predictor variables using item response theory

It is shown that measurement error in predictor variables can be modeled using item response theory (IRT). The predictor variables, that may be defined at any level of an hierarchical regression model, are treated as latent variables. The normal ogive model is used to describe the relation between the latent variables and dichotomous observed variables, which may be responses to tests or questionnaires. It will be shown that the multilevel model with measurement error in the observed predictor variables can be estimated in a Bayesian framework using Gibbs sampling. In this article, handling measurement error via the normal ogive model is compared with alternative approaches using the classical true score model. Examples using real data are given.This paper is part of the dissertation by Fox (2001) that won the 2002 Psychometric Society Dissertation Award.     

On the Representation of Strong and Weak Attitudes About Policy in Memory

A priming paradigm was used to explore the representation of attitudes about government policies in memory. Participants performed pairs of tasks in quick succession. The focal tasks involved evaluating a policy or thinking of one of its consequences. The results showed that thinking of a consequence of a policy speeded up its subsequent evaluation, regardless of whether the participant held a strong or weak attitude about the policy. Evaluating the policy speeded up thinking of one of its consequences for strong attitudes but not for weak ones. In general, it took participants longer to think of a consequence of a policy than to evaluate it. The implications of these results for existing views of the representation of attitudes in memory are discussed.