Don't fear the social relations model: reply to Piper, Ogrodniczuk, Lamarche, and Joyce

By studying actual therapy groups and using a sophisticated design to determine that clients who are held in higher esteem by their fellow group members show greater improvement over the course of therapy, Piper, Ogrodniczuk, Lamarche, and Joyce (this issue) have made a significant contribution to the group psychotherapy literature. Unfortunately, Piper et al. focused much of their discussion on the difficulties they faced using the social relations model (SRM) and the statistical program SOREMO. Although the SRM is not simple and it takes practice to run SOREMO, the analytic alternative proposed by Piper et al. has a number of serious limitations that prevents it from being a viable alternative. There is much to be gained from learning the SRM; for those group therapists and researchers who do not want to learn the SRM, they can always consult or collaborate with SRM researchers.     

Orthographically Influenced Abstract Phonological Representation: Evidence from Non-rhotic Speakers

It is typically assumed that when orthography is translated silently into phonology (i.e., when reading silently), the phonological representation is equivalent to the spoken form or, at least, the surface phonemic form. The research presented here demonstrates that the phonological representation is likely to be more abstract than this, and is orthographically influenced. For example, the claim is made that the word corn has an underlying /r/ in its phonological representation, even in non-rhotic dialects. The evidence comes from difficulties observed in judgements about the homophony with a target word of a pseudohomophone whose phonology does not match the putative abstract representation of that word. For example, it is hard to say that the pseudohomophone cawn is homophonic with corn. The conclusion that orthography can shape phonological representation is antithetical to both computational models of the conversion of print to sound and linguistic accounts of phonology.The research reported in this paper was supported by a grant awarded to the author by the Australian Research Council.     

Sex differences in judgments of physical attractiveness: a social relations analysis

Men and women rated the physical attractiveness of other men and women who were sitting nearby and were rated by them in return. They also provided meta-perceptions of how they thought those others rated them. Attractiveness ratings were partly a function of both the target being rated and the perceiver providing the ratings regardless of the sex of the perceiver or target, but the highest levels of consensus occurred when men judged the attractiveness of women and the highest levels of idiosyncrasy occurred when men rated other men. Meta-perceptions were also idiosyncratic; some believed that they were consistently considered attractive, whereas others thought they were seen as unattractive. People were aware of what others thought of them and, in particular, women's meta-perceptions were highly related to men's judgments of them. People agree about others' attractiveness, and those who are attractive to others know they are pretty or handsome.     

The scope of linguistic generalizations: evidence from Hebrew word formation

Does the productive use of language stem from the manipulation of mental variables (e.g. "noun", "any consonant")? If linguistic constraints appeal to variables, rather than instances (e.g. "dog", "m"), then they should generalize to any representable novel instance, including instances that fall beyond the phonological space of a language. We test this prediction by investigating a constraint on the structure of Hebrew roots. Hebrew frequently exhibits geminates (e.g. ss) in its roots, but it strictly constraints their location: geminates are frequent at the end of the root (e.g. mss), but rare at its beginning (e.g. ssm). Symbolic accounts capture the ban on root-initial geminates as *XXY, where X and Y are variables that stand for any two distinct consonants. If the constraint on root structure appeals to the identity of abstract variables, then speakers should be able to extend it to root geminates with foreign phonemes, including phonemes with foreign feature values. We present findings from three experiments supporting this prediction. These results suggest that a complete account of linguistic processing must incorporate mechanisms for generalization outside the representational space of trained items. Mentally-represented variables would allow speakers to make such generalizations.     

Odor recognition and identification: effect of labels over time

The effect of labels on recognition and identification of odors over time was assessed. 30 men and 30 women were presented 20 odors; half of the participants were also told a name for the odor as a label. Five min. and 60 min. later, all participants were given 20 odors (10 from the original set, 10 new) and asked whether each odor was new or old (odor recognition). The group given labels was also asked to recall the label provided (odor identification). Analysis indicated a significant effect of time on recognition. Significantly more odors were recognized at 5 min. than 60 min. The effect of label was also significant, with recognition being better for the Label condition than the No-Label condition. As for odor identification, women identified more labels than did men. Overall, odor recognition was better with labels soon after exposure, and the women were better at remembering the labels than the men.     

A Swedish validation of the Berlin Numeracy Test

Recent research has highlighted the importance of considering an individual's level of numeracy, that is their numerical abilities, in a vast variety of judgment and decision making tasks. To accurately evaluate the influence of numeracy requires good and valid measures of the construct. In the present study we validate a Swedish version of the Berlin Numeracy Test (Cokely, Galesic, Schulz, Ghazal & Garcia‐Retamero, 2012). The validation was carried out on both a student sample and a sample representative of the Swedish population. The Swedish BNT showed sound psychometrical properties in both samples. Further, in both samples the BNT had satisfactory convergent and discriminant validity when correlating with other measures of numeracy, while not being significantly related to measures of personality. With respect to predictive validity the results indicated divergent patterns in the two samples. In the student sample, participants scoring highest on the BNT outperformed those in the other three levels, which did not differ in performance. In contrast, in the population sample participants scoring lowest on the BNT performed worse than those in the other three levels, which did not differ in performance. Taken together, however, the results suggest that the Swedish version of the BNT should be considered a valid measure of numeracy in both Swedish student and population representative samples.