Attraction Toward and Nonverbal Stigmatization of Gay Males and Persons With AIDS Evidence of Symbolic Over Instrumental Attirudinal Structures

AIDS, the disease, has become highly associated with gays in our society. In fact, so much so that homosexual tolerance is more predictive of nonverbal involvement with persons with AIDS (PWAs) than it is of nonverbal involvement with gays. Additionally, fear of AIDS contraction is just as predictive of greater nonverbal involvement with gays and PWAs as is homosexual tolerance. This adds evidence to the claim that symbolic (anti-gay) and instrumental (fear of contraction) factors both must be considered when predicting attitudes and behaviors toward PWAs. Finally, these findings add further evidence to the claim that one's true attitudes are not always discernible from one's actions. This three-part investigation examines Stigmatization toward gays and persons with AIDS as more a symbolic than instrumental process, through the expression of attraction (task, social, and physical) and desire for future interaction, and through nonverbal expressions of involvement.     

Persistence in a Putting Task During Perceived Failure: Influence of State-attributions and Attributional Style

Dans cette étude, on a examiné l’influence de l’état des attributions et le style attributionnel (AS) sur la persistance à court‐terme d’un échec perçu à une tâche de putting. 101 élèves débutants en golf ont participéà cette recherche. Deux épreuves de 8 putts ont été interrompues chacune pendant trois minutes. Durant cette période, on a mesuré la persistance individuelle en comptant le nombre de fois que le sujet essayait de putter. L’analyse des résultats montre que le style attributionnel influence la persistance à court‐terme contrairement à l’état des attributions. Les sujets ayant un AS “fort contrôle personnel” font montre de plus de persistance que ceux ayant un AS “faible contrôle personnel”. Ces résultats confirment ceux obtenus lors de recherches antérieures sur les bénéfices motivationnels d’un style attributionnel “optimiste” dans des situations d’échec lors de la réalisation d’une tâche. Des attributions instables sont particulièrement bénéfiques aux sujets ayant un AS externe/incontrôlable. Ces derniers ont un niveau significativement plus élevé de persistance que les sujets ayant un AS externe/incontrôlable mais qui ont fait des attributions causales stables. This study investigated the influence of state‐attributions and attributional style (AS) on short‐term persistence in a putting task during perceived failure. Participants were 101 novice golf students. Two trials of eight putts each were interrupted by a 3‐minute free period during which individual persistence was measured by calculating the number of putts attempted in the free period. Analyses revealed that attributional style influenced short‐term putting persistence but state‐attributions did not. Participants with a “high personal control” AS showed greater persistence than those with a “low personal control” AS, which supports past research on the positive motivational benefits of a more “optimistic” attributional style in task failure situations. Moreover, unstable attributions were particularly protective for individuals with an external/uncontrollable AS, in that they promoted significantly higher levels of persistence than was shown by external/uncontrollable AS individuals who made stable causal attributions.     

Specific Aptitude Theory Revisited: Is There Incremental Validity for Training Performance?

There has been controversy over the years about whether specific mental abilities increment validity for predicting performance above and beyond the validity for general mental ability (GMA). Despite its appeal, specific aptitude theory has received only sporadic empirical support. Using more exact statistical and measurement methods and a larger data set than previous studies, this study provides further evidence that specific aptitude theory is not tenable with regard to training performance. Across 10 jobs, differential weighting of specific aptitudes and specific aptitude tests were found not to improve the prediction of training performance over the validity of GMA. Implications of this finding for training research and practice are discussed.     

Biased extensive measurement: The general case

We develop a theory of biased extensive measurement which allows us to prove the existence of a ratio-scale without transitivity of indifference and with a property of homothetic invariance weaker than independence. These representations, which cover the cases of interval orders and of semiorders, reveal a unique biasing function smaller or equal to 1 that distorts extensive measurement and explains departures from its standard axioms. We interpret this biasing function as characterizing the qualitative influence of the underlying measurement process and we show that it induces a proportional indifference threshold.     

Incertitudes au cours de la carrière et construction des perspectives temporelles

The increasing uncertainty context, in which individuals' professional paths are taking form today, is the occasion to a critical renewal of career course analysis models. In the first part of the article, we argue with the model propounded by Power and Rothausen (2003), which aims to analyse and support mid-career professional orientation behaviours, by extending the Super's career maintenance stage. We partly break free with them, defending the conception of an active socialisation, which analysis of orientation behaviours is based on the conjoined study of temporal perspectives and of exchanges between life domains. This point of view is supported by results from a research dealing with future temporal perspectives reconstruction processes of individuals confronted with the unemployment uncertainty. They show that individuals do not project in the future only by striving for yielding “employable”. Their projects do not only result from the rational control of the information related to the anticipated professional environment. Ascribed to peculiar paths, those projects summon up processes of values confrontation and comparisons with others, in the plurality of individuals' life fields.     

不同背景噪音干扰下的数字短时记忆研究

以三种类型(交通噪音、生活噪音、舒缓乐音)三种声级(40.7dBA、56.4dBA、73.3dBA)的环境噪音作为无关声音刺激,考察其对数字短时记忆广度和Sternberg任务的影响,发现:(1)背景噪音的不同对个体数字短时记忆广度影响没有显著差异;(2)背景噪音声级的不同对个体删除极端数值后正确反应的反应时及对“极错总比率”都有显著的影响;(3)对于删除极端数值后的正确反应来说,在不同背景噪音存在下,随着记忆集的增大,反应时仍然呈直线上升趋势。     

Syntactic transfer in artificial grammar learning

In an artificial grammar learning (AGL) experiment, participants were trained with instances of one grammatical structure before completing a test phase in which they were required to discriminate grammatical from randomly created strings. Importantly, the underlying structure used to generate test strings was different from that used to generate the training strings. Despite the fact that grammatical training strings were more similar to nongrammatical test strings than they were to grammatical test strings, this manipulation resulted in a positive transfer effect, as compared with controls trained with nongrammatical strings. It is suggested that training with grammatical strings leads to an appreciation of set variance that aids the detection of grammatical test strings in AGL tasks. The analysis presented demonstrates that it is useful to conceptualize test performance in AGL as a form of unsupervised category learning.