Development and validation of a questionnaire about the main variables affecting the individual investor's behavior in the Stock Exchange

Development and validation of a questionnaire about the main variables affecting the individual investor's behavior in the Stock Exchange. There is a considerable lack of information about the methodology usually used in most of the studies about individual investor's behavior. The studies reviewed do not show the method used in the selection of the items or the psychometric properties of the questionnaires. Because of the importance of investment in the Stock Exchange nowadays, it seems relevant to obtain a reliable instrument to understand individual investor's behavior in the Stock Exchange. Therefore, the goal of the present work is to validate a questionnaire about the main variables involved in individual investors' behavior in the Stock Exchange. Based on previous studies, we elaborated a questionnaire using the Delphi methodology with a group of experts. The internal consistency (Cronbach alpha=.934) and validity evidence of the questionnaire show that it may be an effective instrument and can be applied with some assurance.     

The role of animacy in European Portuguese relative clause attachment: evidence from production and comprehension tasks

This work presents an analysis of the role of animacy in attachment preferences of relative clauses to complex noun phrases in European Portuguese (EP). The study of how the human parser solves this kind of syntactic ambiguities has been focus of extensive research. However, what is known about EP is both limited and puzzling. Additionally, as recent studies have stressed the importance of extra-syntactic variables in this process, two experiments were carried out to assess EP attachment preferences considering four animacy conditions: Study 1 used a sentence-completion-task, and Study 2 a self-paced reading task. Both studies indicate a significant preference for high attachment in EP. Furthermore, they showed that this preference was modulated by the animacy of the host NP: if the first host was inanimate and the second one was animate, the parser's preference changed to low attachment preference. These findings shed light on previous results regarding EP and strengthen the idea that, even in early stages of processing, the parser seems to be sensitive to extra-syntactic information.     

Keeping an eye on the violinist: motor experts show superior timing consistency in a visual perception task

Common coding theory states that perception and action may reciprocally induce each other. Consequently, motor expertise should map onto perceptual consistency in specific tasks such as predicting the exact timing of a musical entry. To test this hypothesis, ten string musicians (motor experts), ten non-string musicians (visual experts), and ten non-musicians were asked to watch progressively occluded video recordings of a first violinist indicating entries to fellow members of a string quartet. Participants synchronised with the perceived timing of the musical entries. Results revealed significant effects of motor expertise on perception. Compared to visual experts and non-musicians, string players not only responded more accurately, but also with less timing variability. These findings provide evidence that motor experts’ consistency in movement execution—a key characteristic of expert motor performance—is mirrored in lower variability in perceptual judgements, indicating close links between action competence and perception.     

The Division of Household Labor in Spanish Dual Earner Couples: Testing Three Theories

Although the participation of men in household activities has increased, this has not prompted an equitable division of household activities among men and women, since Spanish women continue to perform a greater share of these activities than Spanish men. This article explores the explanatory potential of three theoretical approaches (traditional gender division, role-strain and the resource-bargaining approach) to account for the emergence of different patterns in the division of unpaid work among Spanish dual earner couples. Using a representative sample of 2,877 Spanish workers and through logit ordered models, our study reveals that the three models contribute to the explanation of the different patterns of household labor and, therefore, may be regarded as complementary.     

Spatial Stroop and spatial orienting: the role of onset versus offset cues

The present study investigated whether offset cues have the same attentional consequences in the spatial Stroop effect as onset cues. Experiments 1 and 2 compared the attentional effects of onset–offset cues versus offset cues on the spatial Stroop effect, whereas Experiment 3 compared the attentional effects of onset versus offset cues. Across these experiments, independent of cue type (onset–offset or onset vs. offset) and even at long stimulus-onset asynchrony, attentional cueing did not revert into inhibition of return and was modulated by spatial Stroop with greater cueing effects for incongruent arrow’s direction and position. In addition, onset–offset or onset and offset cues produced comparable cueing effects in the location-direction congruent condition, and onset–offset or onset cues produced greater facilitation than offset cues in the incongruent condition. From a different perspective, peripheral cueing modulated the spatial Stroop effect in the same direction for onset–offset or onset and offset cues, although the reduction in spatial Stroop at cued locations was smaller with offset than with onset–offset or onset cues.     

The big carrot: High‐stakes incentives revisited

Using an international dataset of about 35 000 subjects, this paper provides an empirical example of high‐stakes incentives in relation to religious practice. First, we show that incentives (based on absolute belief) play a salient role in religious performance. Second, we find that when both positive (heaven) and negative (hell) incentives are available the former are more effective than the latter. Specifically, it is shown that beliefs in heaven are much more relevant than beliefs in hell when estimating the production of religious commodities (church‐attendance and praying equations). Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

How Benefit Information and Demographics Influence Employee Recruiting in Mexico

Purpose  

To examine the impact of benefit information in recruitment advertisements on job pursuit intentions.     

Religion与宗教:分析范畴与本土概念

我国古代并无相当于现代意义的religion一词。"宗教"的现代含义来自日语借词。Religion的现代意义是17、18世纪西方社会日益了解异文化的结果。源于基督教背景,religion被界定为以信仰为核心的信仰与仪式的二元组合,由此确立宗教研究的基本范式。但在中国宗教研究中,此一理论研究范式亦显出诸多困境。本文通过初步梳理比较religion、宗教、道等概念范畴在西方和中国的话语史,探讨理解中国宗教实践新的理论出发点与可能性。     

Emergence of self-organized symbol-based communication in artificial creatures

In this paper, we describe a digital scenario where we simulated the emergence of self-organized symbol-based communication among artificial creatures inhabiting a virtual world of unpredictable predatory events. In our experiment, creatures are autonomous agents that learn symbolic relations in an unsupervised manner, with no explicit feedback, and are able to engage in dynamical and autonomous communicative interactions with other creatures, even simultaneously. In order to synthesize a behavioral ecology and infer the minimum organizational constraints for the design of our creatures, we examined the well-studied case of communication in vervet monkeys. Our results show that the creatures, assuming the role of sign users and learners, behave collectively as a complex adaptive system, where self-organized communicative interactions play a major role in the emergence of symbol-based communication. We also strive in this paper for a careful use of the theoretical concepts involved, including the concepts of symbol and emergence, and we make use of a multi-level model for explaining the emergence of symbols in semiotic systems as a basis for the interpretation of inter-level relationships in the semiotic processes we are studying.     

A new device to present textured stimuli to touch with simultaneous EEG recording

The study of touch has recently grown, due mainly to the extensive use of several types of actuators that stimulate several subsystems of touch. There is a widespread interest in applying these mechanisms to the study of the neurophysiological correlates of tactual perception. In this article, we present a new device (the tactile spinning wheel [TSW]) for delivering textured surfaces to the finger pad. The TSW allows one to control several parameters of the stimulation (angular speed, texture, etc.) and, connected to an EEG recording system, makes it possible to study neural electrophysiological events. The device consists of a rotating platform on which the tactile stimuli are fixed, a system that synchronizes stimuli onset with the EEG system, and an electronic interface that controls the platform. We present the technical details of the TSW, its calibration, and some experimental results we have obtained with this device.