Role of sex in externally motivated self-touching gestures

Self-touching gestures can be externally induced by the verbal presentation of anxiety-inducing stimuli and the active discussion of a passage. The frequency of these self-touching gestures appears to be affected by the individual interacting with the topic, the type of discourse (listening or discussing), the type of stimulus (canaries or leeches), and the interaction between the types of discourse and stimulus. This study assessed these variables as well as the sex of the participant and the order of presentation of stimulus type, neither of which were statistically significant. Participants were read two passages, one about a topic (leeches) expected to produce anxiety and the other about a topic (canaries) not expected to do so, and asked to answer questions about the passages. The number of self-touches was counted by an observer in another room. Each participant had both types of discourse (listening and discussing) and both types of stimulus (canaries and leeches). There was no significant difference between the number of self-touches by participants with either the male or female reader. Discussion as a method of discourse was associated with a significantly greater number of self-touches than listening. The interaction between discourse type and stimulus type was also significant. The combination of the anxiety-producing stimulus and the active discourse (discussion) produced the highest average number of self-touches.     

Iterated Belief Revision and Conditional Logic

In this paper we propose a conditional logic called IBC to represent iterated belief revision systems. We propose a set of postulates for iterated revision which are a small variant of Darwiche and Pearl's ones. The conditional logic IBC has a standard semantics in terms of selection function models and provides a natural representation of epistemic states. We establish a correspondence between iterated belief revision systems and IBC-models. Our representation theorem does not entail Gärdenfors' Triviality Result.     

Empathy theory and practice: a survey of psychologists and counselors

Psychologists and counselors completed a questionnaire devised by the authors to explore the relationships between their extent of endorsement of empathy definitions, their use and views of empathy, and their identification with theories of psychotherapy. Results from 565 respondents suggested that those who identified with humanistic/experiential and psychodynamic theories seemed to have similar views of how empathy is defined and viewed and reported that they use empathy more than those with other theoretical inclinations. These findings suggest that there is some consistency between theoretical identification and definition, as well as reported use and views of empathy.     

Rebellious teens? Genetic and environmental influences on the social attitudes of adolescents

Genetic and environmental influences in social attitudes were investigated in adopted and nonadopted children (N = 654) and their biological and adoptive relatives in the Colorado Adoption Project. Conservatism and religious attitudes were measured in the children annually from ages 12 to 15 and in the parents during the 12-year-old visit. Multivariate genetic model fitting indicated that both conservatism and religious attitudes are strongly influenced by shared-family environmental factors throughout adolescence. In contrast to previous findings from twin studies, which suggest that genetic influence on social attitudes does not emerge until adulthood, the present study detected significant genetic influence in conservatism as early as age 12. There was no evidence of genetic influence, however, on religious attitudes during adolescence.     

Background beliefs in Bayesian inference

We report five experiments in which the role of background beliefs in social judgments of posterior probability was investigated. From a Bayesian perspective, people should combine prior probabilities (or base rates) and diagnostic evidence with equal weighting, although previous research shows that base rates are often underweighted. These experiments were designed so that either piece of information was supplied either by personal beliefs or by presented statistics, and regression analyses were performed on individual participants to assess the relative influence of information. We found that both prior probabilities and diagnostic information significantly influenced judgments, whether supplied by beliefs or by statistical information, but that belief-based information tended to dominate the judgments made.     

Conflict of interest: the importance of potential

The UK Medical Research Council (MRC) takes the issue of conflict of interest very seriously. The overall aim is to preserve a climate in which personal and organisational innovation can flourish while ensuring that potential conflicts are disclosed and identified and conflicts are either avoided or managed with integrity. The approach needs to encompass the MRC’s various responsibilities and the levels at which conflicts might arise: MRC staff (scientists and administrators); the governing Council; research Boards and committees; external peer-reviewers; and applicants for funding. To achieve its goals, the MRC has issued practical guidance on various aspects of conflict of interest. For the future, the MRC has identified the continuing commercialisation of science and the increasing involvement of lay people in scientific decision-making as special challenges in this area. An earlier version of this paper was presented at an International Conference on “Conflict of Interest and its Significance in Science and Medicine” held in Warsaw, Poland on 5–6 April, 2002.     

Index to Volume 23

Other Index

Index to Volume 23     

Word naming times and psycholinguistic norms for Italian nouns

The present study describes normative measures for 626 Italian simple nouns. The database (LEXVAR. XLS) is freely available for down-loading on the Web site http://wwwistc.ip.rm.cnr.it/material/ database/. For each of the 626 nouns, values for the following variables are reported: age of acquisition, familiarity, imageability, concreteness, adult written frequency, child written frequency, adult spoken frequency, number of orthographic neighbors, mean bigram frequency, length in syllables, and length in letters. A classification of lexical stress and of the type of word-initial phoneme is also provided. The intercorrelations among the variables, a factor analysis, and the effects of variables and of the extracted factors on word naming are reported. Naming latencies were affected primarily by a factor including word length and neighborhood size and by a word frequency factor. Neither a semantic factor including imageability, concreteness, and age of acquisition nor a factor defined by mean bigram frequency had significant effects on pronunciation times. These results hold for a language with shallow orthography, like Italian, for which lexical nonsemantic properties have been shown to affect reading aloud. These norms are useful in a variety of research areas involving the manipulation and control of stimulus attributes.     

Cross-cultural differences in tolerance for crowding: fact or fiction?

It is widely believed that cultures vary in their tolerance for crowding. There is, however, little evidence to substantiate this belief, coupled with serious shortcomings in the extant literature. Tolerance for crowding has been confused with cultural differences in personal space preferences along with perceived crowding. Furthermore, the few studies that have examined cultural variability in reactions to crowding have compared subgroup correlations, which is not equivalent to a statistical interaction. Although the authors found a statistical interaction indicating that Asian Americans and Latin Americans differ in the way they perceive crowding in comparison to their fellow Anglo-American and African American citizens, all four ethnic groups suffer similar, negative psychological distress sequelae of high-density housing. These results hold independently of household income.