Lifestyles of virtual world residents: living in the on-line game "lineage".

This study was conducted to explore the lifestyles of online game players who have adopted the virtual world as part of their life. An online survey was conducted on players of an Internet-based game, Lineage. Lineage is the largest online game where people assume new identities and play various roles in a virtual environment, accommodating over 6 million users worldwide. A total of 4,786 game players participated in this survey, and their lifestyles were compared with their values and attitudes in the virtual world. Upon classification of their real-world lifestyles, their tendencies and desires were compared to lifestyles in the virtual world. This study showed that game players have developed their own distinctive lifestyles, and their lifestyles were a strong criterion for explaining behavior patterns and desires in the virtual world. Lifestyles were classified into three general categories: (1) single-oriented player, (2) community-oriented player, and (3) off-Real world player. Each group displayed distinct differences in their values and game activities, as well as in their anti-social behavior tendencies. The differences reflected not only their personality but also their socio-economic status within the virtual world, which is constructed through game activities. This study serves as a model to understand how players from different real-life backgrounds will behave in various game features and how they adopt the virtual world for their new social identities.     

Benefit System Effects on Employees’ Benefit Knowledge,Use, and Organizational Commitment

We identified four attributes of benefit systems thought to influence employee attitudes and behavior: employee participation, system quality, communication quality, and benefit importance. Survey data from 974 employees of a Fortune 500 energy industry firm supported a partially mediated model in which these benefit system features exerted both indirect and direct effects on benefit knowledge and use, as well as on affective and continuance commitment. However, the findings differed across benefit system features and across types of benefits. Specifically, improving organizational communications about benefits appears more useful than increasing employee participation or improving benefit system service quality.     

Using Big Data and Machine Learning in Personality Measurement: Opportunities and Challenges

This conceptual paper examines the promises and critical challenges posed by contemporary personality measurement using big data. More specifically, the paper provides (i) an introduction to the type of technologies that give rise to big data, (ii) an overview of how big data is used in personality research and how it might be used in the future, (iii) a framework for approaching big data in personality science, (iv) an exploration of ideas that connect psychometric reliability and validity, as well as principles of fairness and privacy, to measures of personality that use big data, (v) a discussion emphasizing the importance of collaboration with other disciplines for personality psychologists seeking to adopt big data methods, and finally, (vi) a list of practical considerations for researchers seeking to move forward with big data personality measurement and research. It is expected that this paper will provide insights, guidance, and inspiration that helps personality researchers navigate the challenges and opportunities posed by using big data methods in personality measurement. © 2020 European Association of Personality Psychology     

Johnson on the Metaphysics of Argument

This paper responds to two aspects of Ralph Johnson's Manifest Rationality (2000). The first is his critique of deductivism. The second is his failure to make room for some species of argument (e.g., visual and kisceral arguments) proposed by recent commentators. In the first case, Johnson holds that argumentation theorists have adopted a notion of argument which is too narrow. In the second, that they have adopted one which is too broad. I discuss the case Johnson makes for both claims, and possible objections to his analysis.     

The importance of body satisfaction to physical self‐concept and body mass index in Spanish adolescents

This research examines the association between measured body mass index (BMI) and the perception of BMI by young students. Moreover, this research tests the importance of BMI and self‐concept, in order to predict body dissatisfaction in high school students. The sample consisted of 2087 individuals from different high schools in Extremadura, Spain, both males (n = 1046) and females (n = 1041), ranging in age from 15 to 17 years old (M = 15.42; SD = 0.86). Initially, participants' BMIs were assessed through anthropometry. Later, all individuals were asked about their weight and height, and their self‐reported BMI was calculated. Participants also answered a questionnaire about their perception of self‐concept, as well as completed a test about body image perception using Stunkard images. Outcomes revealed that factors concerning self‐concept and perceived BMI explained body dissatisfaction. Finally, results are discussed with the aim of improving knowledge in body dissatisfaction context.     

Responsivity to stress in chronic posttraumatic stress disorder due to childhood sexual abuse

The purpose of this study was to investigate psychological, cardiovascular, and neuroendocrine reactivity to standardized stress tests (orthostatic challenge, Stroop Color Word Test) in drug-free adult women with chronic PTSD due to repetitive childhood sexual abuse. At baseline, the 11 patients showed significantly higher mean scores on the Symptom Check List-90 and the Profile of Mood States than 13 healthy female controls, whereas baseline cardiovascular or hormonal parameters showed no differences between the groups. Also, no significant differences were found between the two groups in cardiovascular and hormonal responsivity to the stress tests. Thus, in the presence of robust psychological differences, the patients with chronic PTSD due to childhood sexual abuse did not show alterations in baseline values of neurobiological parameters, nor did they react differently to a physical and mental stress test when compared to healthy controls.     

The fragile nature of the speech-perception deficit in dyslexia: natural vs synthetic speech

A number of studies reported that developmental dyslexics are impaired in speech perception, especially for speech signals consisting of rapid auditory transitions. These studies mostly made use of a categorical-perception task with synthetic-speech samples. In this study, we show that deficits in the perception of synthetic speech do not generalise to the perception of more naturally sounding speech, even if the same experimental paradigm is used. This contrasts with the assumption that dyslexics are impaired in the perception of rapid auditory transitions.     

The role of perceptual integration in the recognition of assimilated word forms

We investigated how spoken words are recognized when they have been altered by phonological assimilation. Previous research has shown that there is a process of perceptual compensation for phonological assimilations. Three recently formulated proposals regarding the mechanisms for compensation for assimilation make different predictions with regard to the level at which compensation is supposed to occur as well as regarding the role of specific language experience. In the present study, Hungarian words and nonwords, in which a viable and an unviable liquid assimilation was applied, were presented to Hungarian and Dutch listeners in an identification task and a discrimination task. Results indicate that viably changed forms are difficult to distinguish from canonical forms independent of experience with the assimilation rule applied in the utterances. This reveals that auditory processing contributes to perceptual compensation for assimilation, while language experience has only a minor role to play when identification is required.     

Knowledge partitioning in categorization: Boundary conditions

Knowledge partitioning refers to the notion that knowledge can be held in independent and nonoverlapping parcels. Partitioned knowledge may cause people to make contradictory decisions for identical problems in different circumstances. We report two experiments that explored the boundary conditions of knowledge partitioning in categorization. The studies examined whether or not people would partition their knowledge (1) when categorization rules were or were not verbalizable and (2) when the to-be-categorized stimuli comprised perceptually separable or integral dimensions. When learning difficulty was controlled, partitioning occurred across all combinations of verbalizability and integrality/separability, underscoring the generality of knowledge partitioning. Partitioning was absent only when the task was rapidly learned and people reached a high level of proficiency, suggesting that task difficulty plays a critical role in the emergence of partitioned knowledge.