Tscope: A C library for programming cognitive experiments on the MS Windows platform

Tscope is a C/C11 programming library designed for programming experiments that run on Windows 2000/XP. It is intended for a public of experimental psychologists with moderate programming skills, who are accustomed to writing their own experimental programs for DOS but have not made the step to Windows-based programming yet. It provides molecular functions for graphics, sound, timing, randomization, and response registration. Together with ANSI-C standard library functions and the powerful C syntax, this set of functions gives the experimenter the opportunity to program virtually any experiment one can come up with. Tscope is completely based on free software, is distributed under the GNU General Public License, and is available at expsy.ugent.be/tscope. An integrated development environment for compiling and running Tscope programs is also freely available.     

The effects of meritocracy beliefs on women's well-being after first-time gender discrimination

This study examined how meritocracy beliefs may buffer women from the negative psychological effects of an acute situation of gender discrimination. Although some research indirectly suggests that believing that meritocracy exists may increase wellbeing, group consciousness theories suggest that disbelieving that meritocracy exists will enhance psychological adjustment to gender discrimination. Women who reported little past experience with discrimination, and either believed or disbelieved that meritocracy exists, were exposed to either a laboratory situation of discrimination or a nondiscrimination failure (control) condition. Consistent with group consciousness theories, women experiencing discrimination reported greater well-being if they disbelieved that meritocracy exists than if they were believers. In contrast, women in the control condition reported greater wellbeing if they believed that meritocracy exists than if they were disbelievers. Implications for coping with discrimination are discussed.     

Letter visibility and the viewing position effect in visual word recognition

The ease with which printed words are recognized depends on the position at which the eyes initially fixate the word. In this study, we examined to what extent recognition performance for each fixation position depends on the average visibility of the word's constituent letters. Experiment 1 measured recognition performance to single letters embedded in strings of Xs (lengths of 5 and 7) for all combinations of letter position and initial fixation position in the string. In Experiment 2, recognition performance was measured for five-letter and seven-letter words as a function of initial fixation position in the word. Whereas average letter visibility showed a symmetric function in Experiment 1, the word recognition data of Experiment 2 showed the typical asymmetric curve. Combining the letter visibility data with measures of lexical constraint using absolute letter-in-string positions failed to capture the pattern in the word data. An alternative measure of constraint based on relative position coding of letters generated more accurate predictions.     

A processing model for children's sentence comprehension: A discussion of two studies by Janellen Huttenlocher

Huttenlocher and coworkers studied children's comprehension of sentences by looking at the times required by these children to put an object in the place specifiec by the sentence. The explanations offered by these investigators for their data are discussed. A model which assumes that three processing stages are involved in comprehension is proposed to explain Huttenlocher's data. In these stages, the experimenter's sentence is transformed so as to derive an active sentence in which the to-be-moved object is the grammatical subject, and which specifies the relative position to which this object has to be moved. The model yields reaction time predictions which seem to fit the data well.     

On the Relation Between Religiosity and the Endorsement of Conspiracy Theories: The Role of Political Orientation

Religious and conspiracy beliefs share the feature of assuming powerful forces that determine the fate of the world. Correspondingly, they have been theorized to address similar psychological needs and to be based on similar cognitions, but there exist little authoritative answers about their relationship. We delineate two theory-driven possibilities. If conspiracy theories and religions serve as surrogates for each other by fulfilling similar needs, the two beliefs should be negatively correlated. If conspiracy and religious beliefs stem from the same values and cognitions, this would speak for a positive correlation that might be diminished—for example—by controlling for shared political ideologies. We approached the question with a meta-analysis (N = 10,242), partial correlations from large Christian-dominated datasets from Germany, Poland, and the United States (N = 12,612), and a preregistered U.S. study (N = 500). The results indicate that the correlations between religiosity and conspiracy theory endorsement were positive, and political orientation shared large parts of this covariance. Correlations of religiosity with the more need-related conspiracy mentality differed between countries. We conclude that similarities in the explanatory style and ideologies seem to be central for the relation between intrinsic religiosity and endorsing conspiracy theories, but psychological needs only play a minor role.     

The Development of Charismatic Leaders

This paper explores the origins of leadership potential and motivation for leadership, primarily with regard to two types of leaders: personalized and socialized charismatic leaders. Bowlby's attachment theory (1969, 1973) provides a theoretical basis for determining an individual's potential to be in leadership positions. The "internal working model," formed (according to Bowlby) in the course of attachment processes in infancy, has a considerable impact on self-perception, which may later affect the development of "ego resources" required for leadership. The motivation to be a leader is analyzed with the help of various psychodynamic concepts and models.     

Relationship of Inglehart's and Schwartz's value dimensions revisited

This study examines the relationship between Inglehart's and Schwartz's value dimensions—both at the individual and the country levels. By rotating one set of items towards the other, we show that these value dimensions have more in common than previously reported. The ranking of countries (N = 47) based on Schwartz's Embeddedness—Autonomy and the Survival—Self‐Expression dimensions reached a maximum of similarity, r = .82, after rotating Inglehart's factor scores 27 degrees clockwise. The correlation between the other pair of dimensions (Schwartz's Hierarchy‐Mastery—Egalitarianism‐Harmony and Inglehart's Traditional—Secular‐Rational values) was near zero before and after rotation. At the individual level (N = 46,444), positive correlations were found for Schwartz's Conservation—Openness dimension with both of Inglehart's dimensions (Survival—Self‐Expression and Traditional—Secular‐Rational values). The highest correlation with this Schwartz dimension was obtained at the Secular‐Rational/Self‐Expression diagonal, r = .24, after rotating the factor scores 45 degrees clockwise. We conclude that Schwartz's and Inglehart's originally proposed two‐dimensional value structures share one dimension at the country level and some commonality at the individual level, whereas the respective other pair of dimensions seem to be more or less unrelated.     

Propositional discourse logic

A novel normal form for propositional theories underlies the logic pdl, which captures some essential features of natural discourse, independent from any particular subject matter and related only to its referential structure. In particular, pdlallows to distinguish vicious circularity from the innocent one, and to reason in the presence of inconsistency using a minimal number of extraneous assumptions, beyond the classical ones. Several, formally equivalent decision problems are identified as potential applications: non-paradoxical character of discourses, admissibility of arguments in argumentation networks, propositional satisfiability, and the existence of kernels of directed graphs. Directed graphs provide the basis for the semantics of pdl and the paper concludes by an overview of relevant graph-theoretical results and their applications in diagnosing paradoxical character of natural discourses.