Reference Group Effects in the Measurement of Personality and Attitudes

Reference-group effects (discovered in cross-cultural settings) occur when responses to self-report items are based not on respondents’ absolute level of a construct but rather on their level relative to a salient comparison group. In this article, we examine the impact of reference-group effects on the assessment of self-reported personality and attitudes. Two studies illustrate that a reference-group effect can be induced by small changes to instruction sets, changes that mirror the instruction sets of commonly used measures of personality. Scales that specified different reference groups showed substantial reductions in criterion-related validities for academic performance, self-reported counterproductive behaviors, and self-reported health outcomes relative to reference-group-free versions of those scales.     

C. I. Lewis on Intensional Predicate Logic: A Letter Dated May 11, 1960

The idea of an ‘inversion principle’, and the name itself, originated in the work of Paul Lorenzen in the 1950s, as a method to generate new admissible rules within a certain syntactic context. Some fifteen years later, the idea was taken up by Dag Prawitz to devise a strategy of normalization for natural deduction calculi (this being an analogue of Gentzen's cut-elimination theorem for sequent calculi). Later, Prawitz used the inversion principle again, attributing it with a semantic role. Still working in natural deduction calculi, he formulated a general type of schematic introduction rules to be matched – thanks to the idea supporting the inversion principle – by a corresponding general schematic Elimination rule. This was an attempt to provide a solution to the problem suggested by the often quoted note of Gentzen. According to Gentzen ‘it should be possible to display the elimination rules as unique functions of the corresponding introduction rules on the basis of certain requirements’. Many people have since worked on this topic, which can be appropriately seen as the birthplace of what are now referred to as “general elimination rules”, recently studied thoroughly by Sara Negri and Jan von Plato. In this study, we retrace the main threads of this chapter of proof-theoretical investigation, using Lorenzen's original framework as a general guide.     

Shifting senses in lexical semantic development

Most words are associated with multiple senses. A DVD can be round (when describing a disc), and a DVD can be an hour long (when describing a movie), and in each case DVD means something different. The possible senses of a word are often predictable, and also constrained, as words cannot take just any meaning: for example, although a movie can be an hour long, it cannot sensibly be described as round (unlike a DVD). Learning the scope and limits of word meaning is vital for the comprehension of natural language, but poses a potentially difficult learnability problem for children. By testing what senses children are willing to assign to a variety of words, we demonstrate that, in comprehension, the problem is solved using a productive learning strategy. Children are perfectly capable of assigning different senses to a word; indeed they are essentially adult-like at assigning licensed meanings. But difficulties arise in determining which senses are assignable: children systematically overestimate the possible senses of a word, allowing meanings that adults rule unlicensed (e.g., taking round movie to refer to a disc). By contrast, this strategy does not extend to production, in which children use licensed, but not unlicensed, senses. Children’s productive comprehension strategy suggests an early emerging facility for using context in sense resolution (a difficult task for natural language processing algorithms), but leaves an intriguing question as to the mechanisms children use to learn a restricted, adult-like set of senses.     

Anxiety and Depression in Children with HFASDs: Symptom Levels and Source Differences

The purpose of this study was to: (1) examine symptom levels of anxiety and depression in children with high-functioning autism spectrum disorders (HFASDs) compared with matched control children using child self-reports and parent ratings; and (2) examine source differences within the two condition groups. An overall multivariate effect indicated significantly elevated depression and anxiety symptoms for children with HFASDs based on parent reports; however no significant between-group differences based on child self-reports. Within-condition source comparisons (parent vs. child) revealed a significant multivariate effect indicating a significant difference in symptoms of depression and anxiety for the HFASD group but none for the control. Correlations between parent and child reports for the HFASD group suggested some positive association between child-reports and parent-reports for depressive symptoms only; however, the difference in average scores reflected a substantial discrepancy in the magnitude of symptoms by rater. Implications for clinical assessment and future research are provided.     

The influence of decision heuristics and overconfidence on multiattribute choice: A process-tracing study

In the present study it was shown that decision heuristics and confidence judgements play important roles in the building of preferences. Based on a dual-process account of thinking, the study compared people who did well versus poorly on a series of decision heuristics and overconfidence judgement tasks. The two groups were found to differ with regard to their information search behaviour in introduced multiattribute choice tasks. High performers on the judgemental tasks were less influenced in their decision processes by numerical information format (probabilities vs. frequencies) compared to low performers. They also looked at more attributes and spent more time on the multiattribute choice tasks. The results reveal that performance on decision heuristics and overconfidence tasks has a bearing both on heuristic and analytic processes in multiattribute decision making.     

Spirituality and Religiousness Among American Jews

In this article we examine the association between spirituality and religiousness for Jews in the United States. Using data from the most recent National Jewish Population Survey of 2000–2001, a large national sample, we examined the extent to which these two concepts correlate. In addition, we compared the relative importance of sociodemographic factors, stressors, and Jewish contextual factors in predicting spirituality and religiousness. We found that spirituality and religiousness correlated, but modestly; some variables were predictive of both concepts (less education, younger age, experienced anti-Semitism in last year, ethnic identity, social identity), some of being highly spiritual only (female, not living in the Northeast), and others of being highly religious only (being married, having a child at home, living in the Northeast, not living in the West, and Jewish background). The differences in sociodemographic characteristics and Jewish background suggest that family life (marriage, having children at home), knowledge about Judaism, and living in a geographic area where there is a high population of Jews are conducive to religiousness as a framework for meaning. Jewish contextual factors were salient for both spiritual and religious pathways.     

Effects of imagined stress intensity on responses in a stress coping inventory

We investigated whether and how different imagined stress intensities modify responses in a stress coping inventory, the SVF78. In the original non-specific version of the test, subjects just decide for each item how probable the reaction presented corresponds to his or her way of reacting, when he/she is “…disturbed, irritated or upset by something or someone...”. We compared this non-specific version of the SVF78 with three intensity variants containing reformulations of the introductory instruction: “When I am disturbed, irritated, or upset to a low degree/considerable degree/very high degree [italics added] by something or someone...”. Each subject filled in the non-specific version and two of the three intensity variants according to a balanced permutation design. Results showed good internal consistency as well as split-half-reliability for all subtests. The factorial structure was similar for the non-specific and the considerable- and high-intensity versions, but altered for the low-intensity version. The mean values changed monotonically with imagined stress intensity for some, but not all of the subtests of the SVF78, with the non-specific version matching best with the considerable-intensity level. It can be concluded that coping questionnaires like the one used in this study, based on a dispositional approach and asking for the normal way of reacting in stressful situations, are valid for a certain range of stress intensities mostly covering the considerable range of the intensity dimension.     

Recruiting Young Adult Cancer Survivors for Behavioral Research

Young adults have been dramatically underrepresented in cancer survivorship research. One contributing factor is the difficulty recruiting this population. To identify effective recruitment strategies, the current study assessed the yield of strategies used to recruit young survivors for an exercise intervention including: clinic-based recruitment, recruitment at cancer-related events, mailings, telephone-based recruitment, advertising on the internet, radio, television and social networking media, distributing brochures and word-of-mouth referrals. When taking into account the strategies for which we could track the number of survivors approached, recruitment at an oncology clinic was the most productive: 38 % of those approached were screened and 8 % enrolled. When evaluating which strategy yielded the greatest percentage of the sample, however, mailings were the most productive. Given widespread use of the internet and social networking by young adults, investigators should also consider these low-cost recruitment strategies.     

Clergy Who Experience Trauma as a Result of Forced Termination

Forced termination of clergy is a demeaning and psychologically distressing experience. Clergy who experience a forced termination are subjected to mobbing (psychological harassment) and other activities meant to publicly or privately demean a minister in such a way that they resign their ministry position. In a purposive convenience sample of 55 ministers who had been forcibly terminated, participants scored above the known cut-off score for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and scored high on a measure of burnout and generalized anxiety disorder (GAD). Forced termination has been anecdotally connected to PTSD and GAD, this project sought to empirically link PTSD and GAD to the forced termination of clergy. This study raises concern for the long-term mental health effects of ministers who have been forcibly terminated and provides implications for future clinical study on this group of clergy. Findings in this research indicate there may be a process to forced termination, which could be developed into a theory on forced termination of clergy.