How much woe when we go: A quantitative method for predicting culture shock

Culture shock is defined as the confusion and discomfort caused by the conflict in perceived motives and expected behaviors between the home culture and the foreign culture. Several quantitative and graphical methods employing techniques of cluster analysis and similarity mapping are offered for predicting the magnitude of culture shock between pairs of countries using data extracted from Hofstede's 1980–83 studies of national cultural values. Implications for business, politics, and personal stress management are discussed.     

Monogeusia for fructose,glucose, sucrose,and maltose

We investigated the ability of subjects to discriminate sugars with a whole-mouth forced-choice paradigm, in which a standard solution was compared with a test solution of varied concentration. Discrimination probabilities were U-shaped functions of test concentration: for 6 subjects and pairwise combinations of fructose, glucose, and sucrose, discriminability always declined to chance over a narrow range of test concentrations. At concentrations ≦ 100 mM, maltose was indiscriminable from fructose but discriminable at higher concentrations for 4 subjects. By analogy with themonochromacy of night vision, whereby any two lights are indiscriminable when their relative intensities are suitably adjusted, we call the gustatory indiscriminability of these sugarsmonogeusia. The simplest account of monogeusia is that all information about the indiscriminable sugars is represented by a single neural signal that varies only in magnitude. The discriminability of maltose from the other sugars at higher concentrations is consistent with the hypothesis that maltose also activates a second gustatory code.     

Gravitational acceleration as a cue for absolute size and distance?

When an object’s motion is influenced by gravity, as in the rise and fall of a thrown ball, the vertical component of acceleration is roughly constant at 9.8 m/sec². In principle, an observer could use this information to estimate the absolute size and distance of the object (Saxberg, 1987a; Watson, Banks, von Hofsten, & Royden, 1992). In five experiments, we examined people’s ability to utilize the size and distance information provided by gravitational acceleration. Observers viewed computer simulations of an object rising and falling on a trajectory aligned with the gravitational vector. The simulated objects were balls of different diameters presented across a wide range of simulated distances. Observers were asked to identify the ball that was presented and to estimate its distance. The results showed that observers were much more sensitive to average velocity than to the gravitational acceleration pattern. Likewise, verticality of the motion and visibility of the trajectory’s apex had negligible effects on the accuracy of size and distance judgments.     

A critical review of theS/L reliability index

The meaning and properties of a commonly used index of reliability, S/L,were examined critically. It was found that the index does not reflect any conventional concept of reliability. When used for an identical behavioral observation session, it is not statistically correlated with other reliability indices. Within an observation session, the standardizing measure of Lis beyond the control of the investigator. Furthermore, the reason for the choice of Las the standard is unclear. The role of chance agreement in S/Lis not known. The exact interpretation of the index depends on which observer reports L.Overall the conceptual and mathematical meaning of S/Lis dubious. It is suggested that the S/Lindex should not be used until its nature is shown to be a measure of reliability. Other approaches such as the intraclass correlations and generalizability coefficients should be used instead.The authors are indebted to Johnny Matson for his critique of an earlier version of this paper.     

Interviewer evaluations of interviewee nonverbal behavior

Personnel representatives (N = 52) were shown one of four videotaped job interviews in which the verbal content of the 16-min interview was identical, but the interviewee's nonverbal behavior was manipulated. A “low nonverbal” interviewee was defined by minimal eye contact, low energy level, lack of affect and voice modulation, and a lack of speech fluency. The “high nonverbal” interviewee demonstrated the opposite behavior on each of these components. The subjects were asked to rate the videotaped candidates on dimensions previously identified as critical in influencing a job interviewer's decisions. Nonverbal behavior was found to have a significant effect on almost every rating made by subjects in this study. After reviewing the entire 16-min interview, 23 of the 26 subjects who saw the “high nonverbal” candidate would have invited him/her for a second interview. All 26 of the subjects who saw the “low nonverbal” candidate would not have recommended a second interview.     

The contribution of sex distribution,job content,and occupational classification to job sextyping: Two studies

The distribution of males and females on a job, occupational classification, and job content as defined by the DOT analysis of job activity demands were examined as predictors of job sex stereotypes in two studies. Results indicate that the actual base rate of males and females in the job is the most important predictor of job sextypes, accounting for 48 and 70% of the adjusted variance in sextypes in the two studies. The results lend little support to the proposition that job content makes a significant contribution to the perception of job sextypes.     

Early selective-attention effect on evoked potential reinterpreted

In a dichotic listening situation stimuli were presented one at a time and at random to either ear of the subject at constant inter-stimulus intervals of 800 msec. The subject's task was to detect and count occasional slightly different stimuli in one ear. In Experiment 1, these ‘signal’ stimuli were slightly louder, and in Experiment 2 they had a slightly higher pitch, than the much more frequent, ‘standard’, stimuli. In both experiments signals occured randomly at either ear. Separate evoked potentials from three different locations were recorded for each of the four kinds of stimuli (attended signals, unattended signals, attended standards, unattended standards). Contrary to Hillyard et al. (1973), no early (N₁ component) evoked-potential enhancement was observed to stimuli to the attended ear as compared with those to the unattended ear, but there was a later negative shift superimposed on potentials elicited by the former stimuli. This negative shift was considered identical to the N₁ enhancement of Hillyard and his colleagues which in the present study was forced, by the longer inter-stimulus interval used, to demonstrate temporal dissociation with the N₁ component. The ‘Hillyard effect’ was, consequently, explained as being caused by a superimposition of a CNV kind of negative shift on the evoked potential to the attended stimuli rather than by a growth of the ‘real’ N₁ component of the evoked potential.     

Depth of processing: When the principle of congruity fails

Two factors, level of processing (Craik & Lockhart, 1972) and congruity (Schulman, 1974), known to have large effects on the recall of experimenter-provided responses to questions, were examined in a series of five incidental learning experiments using subject-generated responses. The data show that manipulation of level of processing has the same effect on recall of subjectgenerated responses as it does on experimenter-provided responses. However, the effect of congruity is reversed for subject-generated responses. The data suggest that the difficulty of generating unrelated responses (“incongruous“ items) may account, at least in part, for the failure of the “principle of congruity“ with subject-generated responses.