Factorial structure of the revised mathematics anxiety rating scale for undergraduate education majors

The Mathematics Anxiety Rating Scale was developed in 1972 by Richardson and Suinn as a single construct measure. A shortened version, the Revised Mathematics Anxiety Scale (RMARS) was developed by Alexander and Martray in 1989. The latter scale was subjected to factor analysis using 357 senior undergraduates in education. Three main factors accounted for 73% of the variance, confirming the scale's multidimensional structure.     

Factor and ideal point analysis for interpersonally incomparable data

Interpersonally incomparable responses pose a significant problem for survey researchers. If the manifest responses of individuals differ from their underlying true responses by monotonic transformations which vary from person to person, then the covariances of the manifest responses tools such as factor analysis may yield incorrect results. Satisfactory results for interpersonally incomparable ordinal responses can be obtained by assuming that rankings are based upon a set of multivariate normal latent variables which satisfy the factor or ideal point models of choice. Two statistical methods based upon these assumptions are described; their statistical properties are explored; and their computational feasibility is demonstrated in some simulations. We conclude that is possible to develop methods for factor and ideal point analysis of interpersonally incomparable ordinal data.This research was begun in the supportive enviroment of the Survey Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley. Financial support was provided by Percy Tannenbaum, Director of the Center, by Allan Sindler, Dean of the Graduate School of Public Policy at Berkeley, by the Data Center of Harvard University, and by the National Science Foundation through grant number SES-84-03056. Chris Achen, Doug Rivers, and members of the Harvard-MIT econometrics seminar provided useful comments.     

EFFECTS OF HIGH-PROBABILITY REQUESTS ON THE ACQUISITION AND GENERALIZATION OF RESPONSES TO REQUESTS IN YOUNG CHILDREN WITH BEHAVIOR DISORDERS

The failure to respond to requests in young children often is maintained by the reactions of the adults that encounter this behavior. This failure to respond to requests has been identified as a primary reason for the children's exclusion from community, social, and instructional opportunities. Numerous interventions that target the failure to respond have consisted of punishment and reinforcement procedures. More recently, antecedent interventions have focused on changing the context in which a request is delivered. In the current study, high-probability requests were provided as an antecedent to delivering a low-probability request. The requests were delivered by multiple trainers in an attempt to produce generalized appropriate responding to adults who did not use the high-probability sequence. Results showed an immediate increase in appropriate responding in 2 children when the intervention was delivered. In addition, when the intervention was implemented by more than one adult, spontaneous increases in responding also were observed toward adults who had never implemented the request sequence. Improvements in responding to requests were maintained after the intervention was discontinued.     

Selectivity, scope, and simplicity of models: a lesson from fitting judgments of perceived depth.

When comparing psychological models a researcher should assess their relative selectivity, scope, and simplicity. The third of these considerations can be measured by the models' parameter counts or equation length, the second by their ability to fit random data, and the first by their differential ability to fit patterned data over random data. These conclusions are based on exploration of integration models reflecting depth judgments. Replication of Massaro's (1988a) results revealed an additive model (Bruno & Cutting, 1988), and Massaro's fuzzy-logical model of perception (FLMP) fit data equally well, but further exploration showed that the FLMP fit random data better. The FLMP's successes may reflect not its sensitivity in capturing psychological process but its scope in fitting any data and its complexity as measured by equation length.     

Symposium: Recollections of B. F. Skinner

This symposium was presented at the Annual Meeting of the Pavlovian Society, Lord Baltimore Hotel, Baltimore, Maryland, September 27, 1991.     

Gentzenization and decidability of some contraction-less relevant logics

We adopt the terminology and bracketing conventions of [3], which in turn follows Dunn in [1], pp, 381–391, and Giambrone in [4]. We acknoledge the impetus given to this paper by Jonh Slaney who showed me a key to the dedidability argument, though the simplification used in this paper obviates the need for it.     

Rat AA-26: behavioral pharmacology science pioneer.

Rat AA-26, despite 1950s "state of the art," nonetheless generated the first set of behavioral pharmacology cumulative records to appear in the weekly journal Science, the century-old publication of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The laboratory exploits of this dedicated animal called early attention to the methodological fruits of a marriage between pharmacology and the experimental analysis of behavior.     

Choice between food and heroin: effects of morphine, naloxone, and secobarbital.

Baboons responded on a choice task on which discrete trials involved choosing between an intravenous injection of heroin (.32 or 1.0 mg/kg) or the availability of food pellets. An intertrial interval of three hours followed the completion of each trial. Under baseline conditions baboons consistently completed the eight available trials each day. Typically, animals chose heroin on three or four trials a day and food on the remaining trials. Animals tended to space the selection of heroin rather than choosing heroin on consecutive trials. A series of single-day experimental manipulations was undertaken to characterize performance further. Manipulation of the heroin dose produced shifts in the relative frequency of choosing the drug option which were inversely related to dose. Manipulation of number of pellets per food trial produced little change in distribution of choices. Noncontingent administration of morphine produced dose-related decreases in relative frequency of heroin choices, and a higher dose decreased the number of trials completed. Noncontingent naloxone produced dose-related increases in the relative frequency of heroin choices. Noncontingent secobarbital had no effect on distribution of choices, and high doses reduced the number of trials completed per day. The results suggest that morphine and naloxone produce shifts in this choice behavior by selectively interacting with the reinforcing properties of the option involving heroin.     

Cardiovascular dynamics during classical appetitive and aversive conditioning in laboratory primates

This report describes changes in the rate of rise of left and right intraventricular pressures during aversive and appetitive conditioning procedures in chair-restrained rhesus monkeys. The conditioning paradigm consisted of a one-minute tone followed, in the one case, by an electric shock, and in the other, by the delivery of Purina monkey pellets. The conditional cardiovascular response was characterized by short latency, highly significant elevations in the derivatives of both ventricular pressures as well as a marked arterial pressor response and tachycardia. The magnitude of the conditional response to the classical aversive procedure was somewhat larger than that to appetitive conditioning. These alterations in the rate of development of intraventricular pressure can be attributed largely to augmentation in the sympathetic neural input to the heart and contribute to an analysis of selective aspects of the nervous regulation of the heart in intact, behaviorally conditioned animals.