Interaction in ANOVA: misconceptions

Although interaction in analysis of variance has an unequivocal theoretical meaning (and so it appears in the statistic literature), frequent misconceptions are found in empirical research, which, in many cases, lead to wrong conclusions. In this paper, 150 articles are reviewed: in 12.7% of them, no attention is paid to the interaction (either because it is not analysed or because it is analysed but not discussed); in 79.1%, interaction is studied through simple effects analysis; and only in 8.2% of the cases, interaction is correctly discussed. It could be that psychology researchers tend to analyse and interpret the interaction between factors incorrectly because the most widespread statistic packages (with SPSS in the lead) do not allow performing the comparisons needed to analyse a significant interaction in factorial designs with randomized groups. In order to contribute to eradicating this problem, we herein show how to design some of the linear comparisons that allow isolating the interaction effect, and we explain how to use SPSS to compute these comparisons.     

Evaluation of a Spanish version of the Buss and Perry aggression questionnaire: Some personal and situational factors related to the aggression scores of young subjects

The psychometric properties of a Spanish translation of the Buss and Perry aggression questionnaire adapted for pre-adolescents and adolescents have been studied. A maximum-likelihood confirmatory factor analysis corroborates Buss and Perry’s four-factor structure. The internal consistency of each factor and of the total score has proved to be satisfactory. The four factors are more closely interrelated in pre-adolescents than in adolescents.A second aim of this work has been to further our understanding of the possible relationship between aggression scores and certain outside-school activities of the subjects studied. Two thousand two hundred and eight students filled in the questionnaire together with a self-report concerning their habits. The results show that the aggression scores rise concomitantly with time spent watching television and playing video games and decrease the greater the time devoted to extra-curricular reading or moderate amounts of homework. Statistically significant differences relating to age and gender were also found.     

Successful and Unsuccessful Multicultural Supervisory Behaviors: A Delphi Poll

Using the Delphi method, university counseling center supervisors with significant experience in multicultural supervision generated and ranked elements of successful and unsuccessful multicultural supervision. Twenty‐seven of 35 successful elements and 24 of 33 unsuccessful elements involved cultural considerations. Multicultural supervision was defined as a supervisory situation in which the individuals in the supervisory dyad differed in their ethnicity. Empleando el método Delphi, los supervisores de un centro universitario de consejería con amplia experiencia en supervisión multicultural generaron y clasificaron elementos de supervisión multicultural fructuosos e infructuosos. Veintisiete de los 35 elementos fructuosos y 24 de los 35 infructuosos implicaron consideraciones culturales. La supervisión multicultural se definió como una situación de supervisión en la cual las personas que forman la díada tienen etnicidades distintas.     

Psychometric properties of the State-Trait Inventory for Cognitive and Somatic Anxiety (STICSA): comparison to the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI)

The State-Trait Inventory for Cognitive and Somatic Anxiety (STICSA; M. J. Ree, C. MacLeod, D. French, & V. Locke, 2000) was designed to assess cognitive and somatic symptoms of anxiety as they pertain to one's mood in the moment (state) and in general (trait). This study extended the previous psychometric findings to a clinical sample and validated the STICSA against a well-published measure of anxiety, the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI; C. D. Spielberger, 1983). Patients (N=567) at an anxiety disorders clinic were administered a battery of questionnaires. The results of confirmatory factor analyses (Bentler-Bonnett nonnormed fit index, comparative fit index, and Bollen fit index>.90; root-mean-square error of approximation<.05); convergent and discriminant validity analyses; and group comparisons supported the reliability and validity of the STICSA as a measure of state and trait cognitive and somatic anxiety. In addition, compared with the STAI (anxiety: rs/=.64), the STICSA was more strongly correlated with another measure of anxiety (rs>/=.67) and was less strongly correlated with a measure of depression (rs相似文献   

The role of mechanism and covariation information in causal belief updating

The present study is aimed at identifying how prior causal beliefs and covariation information contribute to belief updating when evidence, either compatible or contradictory with those beliefs, is provided. Participants were presented with a cover story with which it was intended to activate or generate a causal belief. Variables related to the prior belief (the type of information, the strength of the cause-effect causal link, and how confident the participant was that the link existed) were assessed. Subsequently, participants were presented with covariational information and were asked to update their beliefs in light of the new evidence. Information reliability, prior belief's causal influence magnitude, and the cause-effect level of contingency portrayed by the new information--but not the type of the prior belief--are shown to directly determine belief updating.     

Transient activation of the CA3 Kappa opioid system in the dorsal hippocampus modulates complex memory processing in mice

The hippocampus plays a central role in various forms of complex learning and memory. Opioid peptides and receptors are abundant in the hippocampus. These peptides are co-released with glutamate from mossy fiber- and lateral perforant path-synapses. In this study, we evaluated the functional relevance of the CA3 Kappa opioid receptors (KOR) by transient pharmacological activation or inactivation using single bilateral intrahippocampal microinjections of a selective agonist (U50,488H, 1 or 2.5 nmol), a selective antagonist (nor-binaltorphimine, norBNI 5 nmol) or a mixture of both. C57Bl/6J mice were tested in a fear conditioning paradigm (FC) or in a modified version of the water maze task thought to reveal how flexibly animals can learn and manipulate spatial information (WM). In FC, the agonist (2.5 nmol) decreased context-induced (but not tone-induced) freezing whereas norBNI had no effect. The impairment caused by the agonist U50,488H was blocked by the injection of norBNI, suggesting that overstimulation of CA3-KOR impairs the acquisition and consolidation of contextual fear-related memory. In the WM task, mice were trained repeatedly each day to find a hidden platform. After having reached this goal, the platform position was changed the next day for a new task. U50,488H injection before the last task abolished the previously acquired ability to find rapidly a new platform location, whereas adding norBNI reversed this impairment. Thus, in the mouse, even partial and topographically restricted activation of CA3-KOR entails impairments in two different hippocampus-dependent tasks, indicating functional relevance of the kappa opioid system.     

Time (also) flies from left to right

Everyday linguistic expressions in many languages suggest that back and front space is projected onto temporal concepts of past and future (as in the sentencewe are years ahead of them). The present experiment tested the psychological reality of a different space-time conceptual metaphor—projecting the past to left space and the future to right space—for which there are no linguistic traces in any language. Participants categorized words as referring to the past or to the future. Irrelevant to this task, words appeared either to the left or right of the screen, and responses were given by keypresses of the left or right hand. Judgments were facilitated when word position and response mapping were congruent with the left-past right-future conceptual metaphor. These results are discussed in the context of current claims about the embodiment of meaning and the possible mechanisms by which conceptual metaphors can be acquired.     

Underlying dimensions of ecocentric and anthropocentric environmental beliefs

This study focuses on the cognitive components of general environmental attitudes. Taking as a starting point the scale of Thompson and Barton (1994) to identify ecocentric and anthropocentric motives in environmental conservation, the beliefs that guide attitudes in the person-environment relationship are analyzed. Confirmatory factor analysis was used to contrast the tripartite structure of these beliefs--based on egoistic, socioaltruistic, and biospheric aspects-with a two-dimensional structure that confronts ecocentric and anthropocentric orientations. The results obtained from two samples, a student sample (n = 212) and a sample from the general population of Madrid (n = 205), indicate the existence of a three-dimensional structure of environmental beliefs: an anthropocentric dimension based on the instrumental value of the environment for human beings, a biospheric dimension that values the environment for its own sake, and, lastly, an egobiocentric dimension that values the human being within nature as a whole.     

Effectiveness of an improvement writing program according to students' reflexivity levels

After designing a writing program to enhance students' reflexivity and thus improve their compositions (García & de Caso, 2002a, 2002b), the aim of the research project was to show how reflexivity levels could influence the effectiveness of this program. This writing instruction through reflexivity was carried out with 5th and 6th grade students with learning disabilities (LD) and/or low achievement (LA) during 25 sessions. One hundred participants were assigned to either the experimental group (n=49), which received specific intervention in writing and reflexivity, or the control group (n=51), which simply received the ordinary curriculum. Both groups were assessed on the productivity and quality of their writing composition as well as their attitudes, self-efficacy, and reflexivity towards writing. The results show that coherence and reflexivity improved depending on the level of reflexivity, whereas the relationship with attitudes and self-efficacy is not so clear. Thus, it seems possible to improve LD and/or LA students' compositions by taking their reflexive style into account. Depending on the students' learning style, teachers should use either one or another technique.     

Web-based experiment control software for research and teaching on human learning

In this article we describe some of the experimental software we have developed for the study of associative human learning and memory. All these programs have the appearance of very simple video games. Some of them use the participants' behavioral responses to certain stimuli during the game as a dependent variable for measuring their learning of the target cue-outcome associations. Some others explicitly ask participants to rate the degree of relationship they perceive between the cues and the outcomes. These programs are implemented in Web pages using JavaScript, which allows their use both in traditional laboratory experiments as well as in Internet-based experiments.