Our Personal and Professional Lives: Learning Positive Connotation and Circular Questioning

The work of the Center for the Study of the Family in Milan has had wide influence. We describe its influence on us--the positive connotation of many car journeys, our self-training, and changes in how we view, and function in, our personal and professional lives.     

Correspondence analysis used complementary to loglinear analysis

Loglinear analysis and correspondence analysis provide us with two different methods for the decomposition of contingency tables. In this paper we will show that there are cases in which these two techniques can be used complementary to each other. More specifically, we will show that often correspondence analysis can be viewed as providing a decomposition of the difference between two matrices, each following a specific loglinear model. Therefore, in these cases the correspondence analysis solution can be interpreted in terms of the difference between these loglinear models. A generalization of correspondence analysis, recently proposed by Escofier, will also be discussed. With this decomposition, which includes classical correspondence analysis as a special case, it is possible to use correspondence analysis complementary to loglinear analysis in more instances than those described for classical correspondence analysis. In this context correspondence analysis is used for the decomposition of the residuals of specific restricted loglinear models.     

The control of social desirability in personality inventories: A study using the principal-factor deletion technique

The present study sought to investigate Paulhus' (1981) principal-factor deletion technique (PFDT), a factor analytic method for controlling for socially desirable responding. Adult subjects (N = 330) responded to both forms of the Eysenck Personality Inventory and a 32-item lie scale. Peer ratings of extraversion and neuroticism served as criterion measures. The factor deleted by PFDT more closely reflected neuroticism than impression management. Factors resulting from PFDT were considerably less valid and less content saturated than those emerging from an ordinary factor solution. The implications of these results are discussed from the perspectives of predictive and construct validity.     

Fusing Apples and Oranges: A Rejoinder to Carver & Scheier and to Fenigstein

ABSTRACT A simple parable is introduced that serves as an analogy to the private/public self-focus distinction The analogy elucidates that the reliability of the effects observed by the private/public research direction is not the focus of the Wicklund and Gollwitzer critique Rather, the critique questions the validity of the explanations offered More importantly, the analogy implies the conclusion that construing social dependency as an issue of self-focus does injustice to both the social dependency and self-focus concepts     

Teacher ratings of children's problem and competence behaviors: Normative and parametric characteristics

Teacher-rated adjustment differences among young elementary school children from (a) a recent sample and a 1974 cohort, and (b) urban/suburban, male/female, and grade-level subgroups were examined. A problem behavior checklist (Classroom Adjustment Rating Scale) and a school competence measure (Health Resources Inventory) for 974 children from 5 urban and 5 suburban schools were completed by 101 first- to fourth-grade teachers. Children from the more current cohort were rated as significantly more maladjusted than those from the earlier sample on 8 of 10 adjustment variables. In the recent sample, girls and suburban children evidenced a greater number of school competencies and fewer problem behaviors than boys and urban children, respectively. The implications of these findings for the future use of the teacher rating scales are discussed.     

Variations on the Ramsey test: More triviality results

The purpose of this note is to formulate some weaker versions of the so called Ramsey test that do not entail the following unacceptable consequenceIf A and C are already accepted in K, then if A, then C is also accepted in K. and to show that these versions still lead to the same triviality result when combined with a preservation criterion.     

Conceptual pragmatism

The paper puts forward the thesis of conceptual pragmatism: that there are pragmatic choices to be made between distinct but similar concepts within various contexts. It is argued that this thesis should be acceptable to all who believe in concepts, whether the believers are platonists, realists or anti-realists. It is argued that the truth of the thesis may help to resolve many long-standing debates, and that in any case it will lead to an extension of philosophical method. The paper then briefly considers the concepts of belief and desire as a case-study, and argues for the recognition of the practical reasoner's stance (to stand alongside Dennett's intentional stance), relative to which we should select concepts of belief and desire which are broadly cartesian.I am grateful to the following for their help (varying from detailed comments and criticisms on earlier drafts, to general advice and encouragement): David Archard, Simon Blackburn, Jack Copeland, Dan Dennett, Susan Levi, Christopher McKnight, Derek Parfit, Michael Slote, Tim Williamson, and Crispin Wright.     

Completion norms for 40 three-letter word stems

This is a report of the completion responses for 40 three-letter word stems (e.g., ABO) produced by 100 undergraduate students at the University of California at San Diego. The report includes a list of the different words that were written as stem completions, their frequency of occurrence as completions, and their frequency of occurrence in English according to published norms. This list of materials is useful for the construction of completion tests for future investigations of direct priming phenomena, and it may provide an important covariate in the analysis of performance on completion tests. Preliminary analyses of the results reveal three primary factors that determine overall performance on a stem-completion test: word frequency, word length, and meanings per word. Analyses of the completions produced for each individual word stem, however, reveal that usually only one of these factors makes a significant contribution to performance.