Procrastination Revisited: A Commentary

This commentary connects two studies of academic procrastination, Beswick, Rothblum and Mann (1988), which studied the antecedents of academic procrastination, and Steel (2016), which focuses on the personality correlates of academic procrastination. The author identifies reasons for growth in the field of procrastination research, discusses definitions of procrastination, and then comments on the two studies of academic procrastination identified above. In assessing current status and future directions in the field of procrastination research, the author discusses the relationship between and measurement of behavioural and decisional procrastination, the domain specificity or domain generality of procrastination, and the need for the field to move beyond studies of academic procrastination into other domains such as illness and health where procrastination is a major problem, then ends with a comment on cross‐cultural differences in procrastination and a summary conclusion about the field.     

Children’s Influence on Their Parent’s Adult Development: Mothers’ and Fathers’ Receptivity to Children’s Requests for Change

This mixed-method study examined parents’ experiences of their children’s influence on parent’s continuing adult development. Mothers and fathers from 30 families were separately interviewed regarding two of their children who were between 8 and 14 years old. Parents reported on recent events when their younger and older child successfully requested that parents change their preferences, attitudes, and personal behaviors. Mothers reported more direct child influence than fathers, and both parents reported that they were more receptive to influence from their older children. Thematic analyses revealed that parents were generally comfortable with child influence and constructed their children as actors and agents. Parents attributed their receptivity to agentic qualities of children’s requests, goals for empowering children, and maintaining their mutual relationship. The findings provided insight into the transactional and relational nature of children’s influence and the direct and indirect impact of children on the adult development of parents.     

Parametric analysis of delayed primary and conditioned reinforcers

We examined the effects of delayed reinforcement on the responding of individuals with intellectual disabilities. Three conditions were evaluated: (a) food reinforcement, (b) token reinforcement with a postsession exchange opportunity, and (c) token reinforcement with a posttrial exchange opportunity. Within each condition, we assessed responding given (a) a no‐reinforcement baseline, (b) immediate reinforcement, and (c) delayed reinforcement, in which responses produced a reinforcer after 1 of 6 delays. Results suggest that delayed food produced greater response persistence than did delayed tokens.     

Freedom and Determinism: The Importance of Method

The question of the relation between freedom and determinism elicits contrasting intuitions. It is clear to incompatibilists that freedom requires the falsity of determinism. And it is clear to compatibilists that freedom is compatible with (certain) forms of determinism. Compatibilists and incompatibilists differ not only with respect to the content of their accounts, but also with respect to their “method”. Whereas, compatibilists could be represented as (typically) elucidating our ordinary notion of freedom, incompatibilists could be represented as (typically) offering a revision of that notion. I argue that if we get the methodological point right, we can be free and determined.     

Confirmatory factor analysis of the Behavior Rating Inventory of Executive Functioning (BRIEF) in children and adolescents with ADHD

The Behavior Rating Inventory of Executive Functioning (BRIEF) is a parent report measure designed to assess executive skills in everyday life. The present study employed a confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) to evaluate three alternative models of the factor structure of the BRIEF. Given the executive functioning difficulties that commonly co-occur with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), the participants included 181 children and adolescents with a diagnosis of ADHD. The results indicated that an oblique two-factor model, in which the Monitor subscale loaded on both factors (i.e., Behavioral Regulation, Metacognition) and measurement errors for the Monitor and Inhibit subscales were allowed to correlate, provided an acceptable goodness-of-fit to the data. This two-factor model is consistent with previous research indicating that the Monitor subscale reflects two dimensions (i.e., monitoring of task-related activities and monitoring of personal behavioral activities) and thus loads on multiple factors. These findings support the clinical relevance of the BRIEF in children with ADHD, as well as the multidimensional nature of executive functioning.     

The Melbourne decision making questionnaire: an instrument for measuring patterns for coping with decisional conflict

A study was conducted to examine the factorial validity of the Flinders Decision Making Questionnaire (Mann, 1982), a 31-item self-report inventory designed to measure tendencies to use three major coping patterns identified in the conflict theory of decision making (Janis and Mann, 1977): vigilance, hypervigilance, and defensive avoidance (procrastination, buck-passing, and rationalization). A sample of 2051 university students, comprising samples from Australia (n=262), New Zealand (n=260), the USA (n=475), Japan (n=359), Hong Kong (n=281) and Taiwan (n=414) was administered the DMQ. Factorial validity of the instrument was tested by confirmatory factor analysis with LISREL. Five different substantive models, representing different structural relationships between the decision-coping patterns had unsatisfactory fit to the data and could not be validated. A shortened instrument, containing 22 items, yielded a revised model comprising four identifiable factors–vigilance, hypervigilance, buck-passing, and procrastination. The revised model had adequate fit with data for each country sample and for the total sample, and was confirmed. It is recommended that the 22-item instrument, named the Melbourne DMQ, replace the Flinders DMQ for measurement of decision-coping patterns. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

No Future

The difficulties with formalizing the intensional notions necessity, knowability and omniscience, and rational belief are well-known. If these notions are formalized as predicates applying to (codes of) sentences, then from apparently weak and uncontroversial logical principles governing these notions, outright contradictions can be derived. Tense logic is one of the best understood and most extensively developed branches of intensional logic. In tense logic, the temporal notions future and past are formalized as sentential operators rather than as predicates. The question therefore arises whether the notions that are investigated in tense logic can be consistently formalized as predicates. In this paper it is shown that the answer to this question is negative. The logical treatment of the notions of future and past as predicates gives rise to paradoxes due the specific interplay between both notions. For this reason, the tense paradoxes that will be presented are not identical to the paradoxes referred to above.     

The Undecidability of Propositional Adaptive Logic

We investigate and classify the notion of final derivability of two basic inconsistency-adaptive logics. Specifically, the maximal complexity of the set of final consequences of decidable sets of premises formulated in the language of propositional logic is described. Our results show that taking the consequences of a decidable propositional theory is a complicated operation. The set of final consequences according to either the Reliability Calculus or the Minimal Abnormality Calculus of a decidable propositional premise set is in general undecidable, and can be -complete. These classifications are exact. For first order theories even finite sets of premises can generate such consequence sets in either calculus.     

Type of Job Loss and its Impact on Decision Control,Mastery, and Depression: Comparison of Employee and Company-Stated Reasons

In the present study, we explore agreement between company versus self-reported reasons for job loss and the degree of perceived control employees report over the job loss, looking to see if either job loss type or perceived control is related to subsequent levels of mastery and depression. Two thousand two hundred seventy-nine of 3,700 (61%) employees responded to a survey at Time One; of these participants, 310 later lost their jobs and were mailed a Time Two survey. Comparison of self- versus company-reported reasons for the job loss from the 171 usable surveys (55% response rate) revealed relatively good agreement. Roughly one third of the former employees, however, categorized the job loss in more than one way. There was also a very strong tendency for employees to report that they had very high control over the decision to leave the company, and nearly all employees reported improvements to their levels of mastery and depression; exceptions to this pattern were observed for those losing their jobs due to “rule violation” or “involuntary layoff.” Control over the job loss was related to Time Two levels of mastery and depression, but only weakly related to changes in these outcomes moving from Time One to Time Two.     

Why Sin?—A Test and an Exploration of the Social and Psychological Context of Resentment and Desire

This article focuses on the theory put forward by Donald Capps in his The Depleted Self (Sin in a narcissistic age. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993) that there is a particular link between some forms of narcissism and the commitment of particular deadly sins. The data in the research reported in this paper robustly validate the idea that the psychological consequences of the bureaucratic consumer society, understood as a lack of individual well-being leading to a narcissistic defense, show the theological relevance of the deadly sins in understanding those conditions in society which on a global scale appear to threaten the individuality of the single person. Narcissism, both in its covert and overt mode, seems to be the most important variable in explaining the two factors of sin: resentment and desire. In addition to the effects already accounted for by well-being and narcissism, the possible contribution of religion and biography is explored.