Attitudes toward sex, arousal, and the retention of contraceptive information

Previous research has suggested that women with a negative emotional orientation toward sexuality (i.e., erotophobia) have difficulty learning and retaining sexually relevant material such as contraceptive information. It has been hypothesized that these women become aroused by this material and that this arousal interferes with their ability to learn it. The importance of this issue led us to conduct the current study. Erotophobic and erotophilic women viewed presentations about contraception while their physiological responses were being monitored. In addition, they were tested on the information contained in the presentation before, immediately after, and again 4-6 weeks after the presentation. The results indicated that the erotophobic women knew less contraceptive information before the presentation and were more aroused by the presentation. This arousal, however, did not interfere with retention of the material. These results are discussed in terms of individual differences in reactions to sexual material and the ability to learn, retain, and use contraceptive information.     

Sample size determinations for the two rater kappa statistic

This paper gives a method for determining a sample size that will achieve a prespecified bound on confidence interval width for the interrater agreement measure,. The same results can be used when a prespecified power is desired for testing hypotheses about the value of kappa. An example from the literature is used to illustrate the methods proposed here.     

Generalized approaches to the maxbet problem and the maxdiff problem,with applications to canonical correlations

Van de Geer has reviewed various criteria for transforming two or more matrices to maximal agreement, subject to orthogonality constraints. The criteria have applications in the context of matching factor or configuration matrices and in the context of canonical correlation analysis for two or more matrices. The present paper summarizes and gives a unified treatment of fully general computational solutions for two of these criteria, Maxbet and Maxdiff. These solutions will be shown to encompass various well-known methods as special cases. It will be argued that the Maxdiff solution should be preferred to the Maxbet solution whenever the two criteria coincide. Horst's Maxcor method will be shown to lack the property of monotone convergence. Finally, simultaneous and successive versions of the Maxbet and Maxdiff solutions will be treated as special cases of a fully flexible approach where the columns of the rotation matrices are obtained in successive blocks.The author is obliged to Henk Kiers for computational assistance and helpful comments.