The connection between random sequences,everyday coincidences,and belief in the paranormal

This paper argues against the theory that people interpret unusual coincidences as paranormal because they misunderstand the probability of their occurring by chance. In the two studies reported here, 214 subjects were given a questionnaire on the frequency of coincidences in their lives, a series of probabilistic problems, and a scale assessing their belief in the paranormal. Believers reported more coincidences than disbelievers. Believers made more errors than disbelievers in tasks reflecting sensitivity to the relationship between expected distribution of chance events and total number of occurrences; and avoided repetitions of identical alternatives in a random sequence to a greater extent. However, the last two effects completely disappeared in a subsample of university students. It is proposed that a more frequent experience of coincidences, on the one hand, and a more biased representation of randomness, on the other, are independent consequences of a stronger propensity of believers in the paranormal to connect separate events. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Personality traits and endocrine response as possible asymmetry factors of agonistic outcome in karate athletes

Individual variations of plasma levels of hormones testosterone (T) and cortisol (C), before (pre) and after (post) Kumite (real fight) and Kata (ritualized fight) were measured in male karate athletes and analyzed in relation with the agonistic outcome (i.e. winning or losing the fight) and personality trait measures. T and C increased only during Kumite contest and pre‐ and post‐competition C levels were higher in losers than winners. Losers showed higher levels of harm avoidance and anxiety as well as lower level of novelty seeking than winners. Importantly, novelty seeking negatively correlates with pre C and the higher the level of risk assessment, emotionality and insecurity indexes the higher the pre C level. In conclusion, personality traits might be an important factor asymmetry between athletes influencing both the probability of winning or losing an agonistic interaction and the different anticipatory endocrine response to the incipient fight. Aggr. Behav. 35:324–333, 2009. © 2009 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.     

Socio‐economic,socio‐political and socio‐emotional variables explaining school bullying: a country‐wide multilevel analysis

Why do some countries, regions and schools have more bullying than others? What socio‐economic, socio‐political and other larger contextual factors predict school bullying? These open questions inspired this study with 53.316 5th‐ and 9th‐grade students (5% of the national student population in these grades), from 1,000 schools in Colombia. Students completed a national test of citizenship competencies, which included questions about bullying and about families, neighborhoods and their own socio‐emotional competencies. We combined these data with community violence and socio‐economic conditions of all Colombian municipalities, which allowed us to conduct multilevel analyses to identify municipality‐ and school‐level variables predicting school bullying. Most variance was found at the school level. Higher levels of school bullying were related to more males in the schools, lower levels of empathy, more authoritarian and violent families, higher levels of community violence, better socio‐economic conditions, hostile attributional biases and more beliefs supporting aggression. These results might reflect student, classroom and school contributions because student‐level variables were aggregated at the school level. Although in small portions, violence from the decades‐old‐armed conflict among guerrillas, paramilitaries and governmental forces predicted school bullying at the municipal level for 5th graders. For 9th graders, inequality in land ownership predicted school bullying. Neither poverty, nor population density or homicide rates contributed to explaining bullying. These results may help us advance toward understanding how the larger context relates to school bullying, and what socio‐emotional competencies may help us prevent the negative effects of a violent and unequal environment. Aggr. Behav. 35:520–529, 2009. © 2009 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.     

A corpus-based analysis of verb continuation frequencies for syntactic processing

In the experimental study of how much verb guidance occurs in parsing syntactic ambiguity, the preference of an ambiguously subcategorized verb for its continuations is a relevant factor in the choice of the stimuli and in the interpretation of the results. Many methods have been used to measure this bias, ranging from experimenter's intuitions to sentence completion studies. In this paper, I assume that an acceptable definition of frequency is the count of the occurrences in a corpus, and I provide some cooccurrence counts calculated on a set of verbs and their syntactic siblings in a subset of the Penn Treebank (Marcus, Santorini, & Marcinkiewicz, 1993). Second, I perform some correlations with sentence completion and sentence production studies, which show that the two data collection methods are not strongly correlated with the corpus counts. Finally, I analyze the stimuli of some experiments which have shown evidence both in favor of the garden path theory of sentence processing and the lexical guidance theory. I argue that all the stimuli were balanced, and that a minimal attachment effect is not a consequence of the overall NP-bias of the stimuli. Moreover, evidence from the relation between processing times and verb completions with declarative and interrogative complementizers is used to argue that the parser is sensitive to the lexical content of the complementizers.     

Husserl's Theory of Language as Calculus Ratiocinator

This paper defends an interpretation of Husserl's theory of language, specifically as it appears in the Logical Investigations, as an example of a larger body of theories dubbed 'language as calculus'. Although this particular interpretation has been previously defended by other authors, such as Hintikka and Kusch, this paper proposes to contribute to the discussion by arguing that what makes this interpretation plausible are Husserl's distinction between the notions of meaning-intention and meaning-fulfillment, his view that meaning is instantiated through meaning-intending acts of transcendental consciousness, and his view that the content of meaning-intending acts is ideal meaning simpliciter. As well, the paper argues that the phenomenological method of reduction itself presupposes the notion that reality as such can be reached by subtracting the influence of the language of the natural attitude and its ontological commitments and it, thus, presupposes the conception of language as a reinterpretable calculus.     

Transfer of conditioned inhibition across different aversive reinforcers in the rat

Three experiments using a conditioned suppression procedure in rats assessed transfer of conditioned inhibition across different aversive reinforcers. Experiment 1, using shock and car horn blast as reinforcers, showed that a noise negatively correlated with 0.7-mA shock between sessions attenuated suppression of lever pressing elicited by the signals for 0.7-mA shock and 110-db horn blast. Similarly, when the noise signaled the omission of horn blast, it attenuated suppression elicited by the signals for horn blast and shock. Experiment 2, using the same procedure, replicated transfer of conditioned inhibition from shock to horn found in Experiment 1, and indicated that such effects should be attributed to associative factors. Experiment 3, using the conditioned inhibition paradigm and different chambers during training and testing, replicated transfer from horn to shock and indicated that transfer cannot be attributed to multiple-background-reinforcer associations established during inhibitory training. The results of these experiments have implications for theories of conditioned inhibition.     

Understanding indirect requests for information in high-functioning autism

Cognitive Processing - Few works have addressed the processing of indirect requests in High-Functioning Autism (HFA), and results are conflicting. Some studies report HFA individuals’...     

Inhomogeneous surrounds, conflicting frameworks, and the double-anchoring theory of lightness

The empirical question of whether or not the lightness of a region is accounted for purely by the average luminance of its surround has a complex answer that depends on whether such a region is an increment, a decrement, or intermediate relative to the luminances of the contiguous surfaces. It is shown here that a new model of lightness, based on anchoring principles, predicts and clarifies such intricacies. In this model, the luminance of the target region determines its lightness in two ways: indirectly, by causing it to group with parts of its surround and thus defining the nested frameworks to which it belongs; and directly, by anchoring it to the highest luminance and to the average surround luminance in each of these frameworks. Inter- and intraindividual differences in lightness assessment are shown to emerge under grouping conditions that create unstable, conflicting frameworks.