Attitudes toward sex-roles: Traditional or egalitarian?

This article reports on the development of a Likert-type scale measuring attitudes toward egalitarian-traditional sex roles. A total of 484 undergraduates participated in six phases of the study. An item analysis study yielded 20 items with part-whole correlations <.48. The corrected split-half reliability coefficient is .91 (p.001). Five other phases of research show promising concurrent and construct validity. In particular, traditional attitudes are related to rigidity as measured by authoritarian, religious, same-sex touching, rape acceptance, divorce, and conservative attitudes. Overall, a varimax rotated factor analysis revealed one major factor accounting for 84.6% of the variance. Further, females were shown to have higher levels of egalitarian attitudes as compared to males.     

Paper and plastic in daily diary research: Comment on Green, Rafaeli, Bolger, Shrout, and Reis (2006)

The authors applaud A. S. Green, E. Rafaeli, N. Bolger, P. E. Shrout, and H. T. Reis's (2006) response to one-sided comparisons of paper versus electronic (plastic) diary methods and hope that it will stimulate more balanced considerations of the issues involved. The authors begin by highlighting areas of agreement and disagreement with Green et al. The authors review briefly the broader literature that has compared paper and plastic diaries, noting how recent comparisons have relied on study designs and methods that favor investigators' allegiances. The authors note some sorely needed data for the evaluation of the implications of paper versus plastic for the internal and external validity of research. To facilitate evaluation of the existing literature and assist in the design of future studies, the authors offer a balanced comparison of paper and electronic diary methods across a range of applications. Finally, the authors propose 2 study designs that offer fair comparisons of paper and plastic diary methods.     

Therapists' emotional reactions to patients as a mediator in cognitive behavioural treatment of panic disorder with agoraphobia

The aims of this study were to examine whether therapists' emotional reactions to their patients mediate the effect of personality disorders and interpersonal problem behaviours on the outcome of treatment, focusing on an Axis I disorder; and whether therapists' reactions mediate the effect of personality disorders on the course of interpersonal problems. Therapists completed a checklist of emotional reactions to individual patients after the end of residential cognitive or guided mastery therapy for 46 inpatients with panic disorder with agoraphobia. The severity of DSM-III-R personality disorder was related to therapists' insecurity feelings, but not to interest and anger. A higher level of therapists' insecurity feelings was related to less reduction in self-reported agoraphobic avoidance during treatment, whereas therapists' emotions were unrelated to symptomatic course after treatment. Therapists' insecurity feelings appeared partly to mediate the relationship between patients' severity of personality disorder and persistence of patients' interpersonal dominance and nurturance problems.     

A template-matching pandemonium recognizes unconstrained handwritten characters with high accuracy

Psychological data suggest that internal representations such as mental images can be used as templates in visual pattern recognition. But computational studies suggest that traditional template matching is insufficient for high-accuracy recognition of real-life patterns such as handwritten characters. Here we explore a model for visual pattern recognition that combines a template-matching and a feature-analysis approach: Character classification is based on weighted evidence from a number of analyzers (demons), each of which computes the degree of match between the input character and a stored template (a copy of a previously presented character). The template-matching pandemonium was trained to recognize totally unconstrained handwritten digits. With a mean of 37 templates per type of digit, the system has attained a recognition rate of 95.3%, which falls short of human performance by only 2%–3%.     

Reconstructive memory in the dating of personal and public news events

Two experiments investigated memory for the dates of events selected and recorded by subjects in diaries. In Experiment 1, personal events and public news events were compared, with retention time varying from 1 week up to 9 months. It was found that the day of the week was more accurately identified for personal events than for news events, that day-of-the-week (DOW) accuracy did not decrease with increasing retention time, and that memory of the personal context of both event types was more important for DOW accuracy than was memory of the core of the events. These results support our view that memory of the day of the week is mainly reconstructed by reference to a temporal week schema based on personal experiences, and that the relation of news events to the week schema is mediated by memory of personal context. The distribution of DOW errors was modeled as the outcome of a process of guessing constrained by subdivisions of the week schema, without assuming any special temporal memory trace. In Experiment 2, the model was shown to fit independently collected data from a different subject pool and country equally well.     

The Satisfaction With Life Scale

This article reports the development and validation of a scale to measure global life satisfaction, the Satisfaction With Life Scale (SWLS). Among the various components of subjective well-being, the SWLS is narrowly focused to assess global life satisfaction and does not tap related constructs such as positive affect or loneliness. The SWLS is shown to have favorable psychometric properties, including high internal consistency and high temporal reliability. Scores on the SWLS correlate moderately to highly with other measures of subjective well-being, and correlate predictably with specific personality characteristics. It is noted that the SWLS is Suited for use with different age groups, and other potential uses of the scale are discussed.     

A multitrait-multimethod examination of affect structure: hedonic level and emotional intensity

Past research on the personality structure of affect suggests that hedonic level and emotional intensity are two separate major dimensions. The present study employed a multitrait-multimethod approach to verify this finding. Seventy-four University of Illinois students completed daily mood reports and self-report questionnaires, and their parents completed a questionnaire about them. Both hedonic level and intensity measures were used. The convergent validities (monotrait-multimethod correlations) were all significant and tended to be highest for emotional intensity. The multitrait-monomethod coefficients were nonsignificant, as were the correlations based on different measures of different traits. The data were interpreted as supporting the distinction between hedonic level and affect intensity, as well as supporting the validity of the measures.