Does making a conversation asynchronous reduce the negative impact of phone call on driving?

Mobile phone use at the wheel has a proven negative impact on driving. This paper aims to assess whether using an answerphone instead of a normal phone reduces this negative impact. The answerphone makes communication asynchronous and splits it into three disconnected and successive phases: interaction with the voice interface, listening to the message and answering, which have been evaluated separately.The experiment was conducted on a fixed base simulator, with 30 participants (half male and female, aged from 18 to 50 years, driving at least 5000 km per year).The results show better scores for correct responses to stimuli for answerphone communications than for phone communications, although response times were higher in both communication conditions than in the driving alone condition. When the three phases of answerphone use were compared, interacting with the answerphone and listening to the message were found to be significantly less disturbing than answering, in terms of correct responses and response times.By making the conversation asynchronous, the answerphone avoids direct interaction between driver and caller. The fact that communication is under the driver’s control allows him/her to pace the interaction better. Lastly, splitting up the conversation into different phases decreases the overall task difficulty.     

Further examination of the convergent and discriminant validity of the student–teacher relationship scale

Two studies extended psychometric research on the Student–Teacher Relationship Scale (STRS) with kindergarten and preschool children (N₁ = 60–71; N₂ = 35) and their teachers. These studies used a multi‐method approach to replicate and extend previous findings concerning the convergent validity of the STRS Closeness, Conflict, and Dependency scale and to further examine the discriminant validity of the STRS. Study 1 investigated convergence between the STRS scales and child‐ and peer‐reports of the same constructs based on a multi‐trait multi‐method approach. Study 2 examined the pattern of associations between the STRS and indicators of teacher–child relationship quality rated by external observers. Support was found for the convergent validity and to a lesser extent the discriminant validity of the STRS Closeness and Conflict scale. For the STRS Dependency scale, additional research remains necessary. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

How Can Decision Making Be Improved?

ABSTRACT— The optimal moment to address the question of how to improve human decision making has arrived. Thanks to 50 years of research by judgment and decision-making scholars, psychologists have developed a detailed picture of the ways in which human judgment is bounded. This article argues that the time has come to focus attention on the search for strategies that will improve bounded judgment because decision-making errors are costly and are growing more costly, decision makers are receptive, and academic insights are sure to follow from research on improvement. In addition to calling for research on improvement strategies, this article organizes the existing literature pertaining to improvement strategies and highlights promising directions for future research.     

On the logic of event-causation Jaśkowski-style systems of causal logic

Causality is a concept which is sometimes claimed to be easy to illustrate, but hard to explain. It is not quite clear whether the former part of this claim is as obvious as the latter one. I will not present any specific theory of causation. Our aim is much less ambitious; to investigate the formal counterparts of causal relations between events, i.e. to propose a formal framework which enables us to construct metamathematical counterparts of causal relations between singular events. This should be a good starting point to define formal counterparts for concepts like causal law, causal explanation and so on.Children in their simplicity keep asking why. The person of understanding has given this up; every why, he has long found out, is merely the end of a thread that vanishes into the thick snare of infinity, which no one can truly unravel, let him tug and worry at it as much as he likes.W. Busch,The Butterfly, translated by W. ArndtThe work on this paper was supported by grants from the Humboldt-Foundation, the Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh and from the Fulbright-Foundation.This paper concerns a larger project on causal logic, Uwe Scheffler from Humboldt-University and I have been working on for several months. This collaboration explains the usage of plural forms wherever they occur in section 1 and 6. However, all results of this paper, if not stated explicitely otherwise, are due to its (single) author.Presented byJan Zygmunt;     

How Masculine Ought I Be? Men's Masculinity and Aggression

Male undergraduates completed the Bem Sex RoleInventory (BSRI) as they are (actual), as others thoughtthey should be (ought), as they thought they should beideally (ideal), and then rated the importance of each item. Discrepancy scores were derivedby subtracting actual from either ought (oughtdiscrepancy) or from ideal (ideal discrepancy) andweighting scores by the importance of each item. BSRImasculine items provided the basis for masculinitydiscrepancies, and filler items, for generaldiscrepancies. With only two or three exceptions,participants were Caucasian. Each man competed againsta bogus competitor on a computer version of the Taylorreaction-time aggression paradigm that yielded a measureof both overt (intensity of the noise blast putativelydelivered to the opponent) and covert (noise blastduration) aggression. Men with high masculine"ought" discrepancies engaged in morecovert-and not more overt — aggression than didlows, an effect not moderated by provocation level.Those with high masculinity scores were more overtly aggressive than werelow masculinity men.