Legal Bans on Pro‐Suicide Web Sites: An Early Retrospective from Australia

There are worldwide concerns that pro‐suicide web sites may trigger suicidal behaviors among vulnerable individuals. In 2006, A ustralia became the first country to criminalize such sites, sparking heated debate. Concerns were expressed that the law casts the criminal net too widely; inappropriately interferes with the autonomy of those who wish to die; and has jurisdictional limitations, with off‐shore web sites remaining largely immune. Conversely, proponents point out that the law may limit access to domestic pro‐suicide web sites, raise awareness of Internet‐related suicide, mobilize community efforts to combat it, and serve as a powerful expression of societal norms about the promotion of suicidal behavior.     

An Ideal Student Factor and the validity of noncognitive measures of student potential

The presence of a general factor has been found in previous research on the utilization of personality tests in selection contexts. Termed the Ideal Employee Factor (IEF), this factor is thought to represent an effort to present oneself as an ideal employee to some degree on all items in the test. Examining the responses to biodata and situational judgment items, we provide evidence for the existence of a factor similar to the IEF within the college admissions context, termed the Ideal Student Factor (ISF), but the magnitude of this factor relative to specific factors was small. Mixed support was found for the hypothesized differences in the factor loadings on the ISF for different constructs included in the model. The presence of the ISF was not found to substantially impact the validity of other predictors within this study. The overall conclusion is that this general factor would not impact the use of these biodata and situational judgment items in college admissions.     

A note on the geometric interpretation of the EM algorithm in estimating item characteristics and student abilities

This note uses the EM-algorithm in an item response model as an illustration of a general method of parameter estimation, which geometrically can be described as an alternating projection method. The research was initiated by a series of lectures on alternating projection methods given by Imre Csiszar in 1993 at Stanford University where the first author was a graduate student.     

Attributing Problem-Solving to God,Receiving Social Support,and Stress-Moderation

This research note explores the stress-moderating effects of attributing a problem-solving role to God among a nationwide sample of 2,260 Americans. Specifically, the ways in which the perception of “God-as-a-problem-solver” moderates stress is explored for Americans reporting low and high levels of social support from other people. Within a model that interacts two moderators (i.e., a moderated moderation analysis), two predictions are tested that extend from social support and sense of control frameworks. Consistent with one prediction, viewing God-as-a-problem-solver had a stress-buffering effect (i.e., a reduction of the negative impact of life stressors on a depressive symptomology outcome measure) among those receiving low social support. Consistent with a second prediction, viewing God-as-a-problem-solver served as a stress-exacerbator among those already receiving high levels of social support. Findings suggest that the optimal count of supportive sets of entities (be it God or other people) is no fewer or no more than one.     

Against Relative Timing Invariance in Movement Kinematics

The kinematics of stair climbing were examined to test the assertion that relative timing is an invariant feature of human gait. Six male and four female subjects were video-recorded (at 60 Hz) while they climbed a flight of stairs 10 times at each of three speeds. Each gait cycle was divided into three segments by the maximum and minimum angular displacement of the left knee and left foot contact. Gentner's (1987) analysis methods were applied to the individual subject data to determine whether the duration of the segments remained a fixed proportion of gait cycle duration across changes in stair-climbing speed. A similar analysis was performed using knee velocity maxima to partition the gait cycle. Regardless of how the gait cycle was divided, relative timing was not found to remain strictly invariant across changes in speed. This conclusion is contrary to previous studies of relative timing that involved less conservative analysis but is consistent with the wider gait literature. Strict invariant relative timing may not be a fundamental feature of movement kinematics.     

Estimating Trait and Situational Variance in a Situational Judgment Test

In organizational research, situational judgment tests (SJTs) consistently demonstrate incremental validity, yet our theoretical understanding of SJTs is limited. Our knowledge could be advanced by decomposing the variance of SJT items into trait variance and situation variance; we do that by applying statistical methods used to analyze multitrait–multimethod matrices. A college-student sample (N = 2,747) was administered an SJT of goal orientation traits (i.e., mastery, performance-approach, and performance-avoid). Structural equation modeling was used to estimate the proportions of item variance to attributable to situational differences (across students) and to trait-based differences in students (across situations). Situation factors accounted for over three times the amount of variance as did individual difference factors. We conclude with general implications for the design of SJTs in organizational research.     

The effects of marker-related temporal cues on auditory gap-duration discrimination

In three experiments, we examined the ability of listeners to discriminate the duration of temporal gaps (silent intervals) and the influence of other temporal stimulus properties on their performance. In the first experiment, gap-duration discrimination thresholds were measured either in continuous noise or with noise markers with durations of 3 and 300 ms. Thresholds measured with 300-ms markers differed from those measured in continuous noise or with 3-ms markers. In the second experiment, stimuli consisting of a gap between two discrete markers were generated such that the gap duration, the onset-to-onset duration between markers, and the duration of the first marker were pseudorandomized across trials. Listeners’ responses generally were consistent with the cue that was identified as the target cue from among the three cues in each block of trials, but the data suggested that the onset-to-onset cue was particularly salient in all conditions. Using a modified method-of-adjustment procedure in the third experiment, subjects were instructed to discriminate between the durations of gaps in discrete markers of different durations in two intervals, where the gap duration in one interval was adapted to measure the point of subjective equality. Without feedback, listeners tended to equate the onset-to-onset times of the markers rather than the gap durations. Overall, the results indicated that listeners’ judgments of silent gaps between two discrete markers are strongly influenced by the onset-to-onset time, or rhythm, of the markers.     

Hard Luck: How Luck Undermines Free Will and Moral Responsibility

I reconcile the spatiotemporal location of repeatable artworks and impure sets with the non-location of natural numbers despite all three being varieties of abstract objects. This is possible because, while the identity conditions for all three can be given by abstraction principles, in the former two cases spatiotemporal location is a congruence for the equivalence relation featuring in the relevant principle, whereas in the latter it is not. I then generalize this to other ‘physical’ properties like shape, mass, and causal powers.     

The obligatory effects of memory on eye movements

Previous work has shown that eye movement behaviour is affected by previous experience, such that alterations in viewing patterns can be observed to previously viewed compared to novel displays. The current work addresses the extent to which such effects of memory on eye movement behaviour are obligatory; that is, we examined whether prior experience could alter subsequent eye movement behaviour under a variety of testing conditions, for stimuli that varied on the nature of the prior exposure. While task demands influenced whether viewing was predominantly directed to the novel versus familiar faces, viewing of the familiar faces was distinguished from viewing of the novel faces, regardless of whether the task required incidental encoding or intentional retrieval. Changes in scanning of previously viewed over novel faces emerged early in viewing; in particular, viewing duration of the first fixation to the familiar faces was often significantly different from the duration of the first fixation directed to the novel faces, regardless of whether prior exposure was solely in the context of the experiment or due to real-world exposure. These findings suggest that representations maintained in memory may be retrieved and compared with presented information obligatorily.     

Lifetime Trauma,Prayer, and Psychological Distress in Late Life

The purpose of this study is to see whether prayer helps older people cope more effectively with the adverse effects of lifetime trauma. Data from a nationwide survey of older adults reveal that the size of the relationship between traumatic events and depressive symptoms is reduced for older people who believe that only God knows when it is best to answer a prayer and when they believe that only God knows the best way to answer it. The findings further reveal that these beliefs about prayer outcomes are especially likely to offset the effects of traumatic events that arose during childhood.