Risk Perception and Affect

ABSTRACT— Humans perceive and act on risk in two fundamental ways. Risk as feelings refers to individuals' instinctive and intuitive reactions to danger. Risk as analysis brings logic, reason, and scientific deliberation to bear on risk management. Reliance on risk as feelings is described as "the affect heuristic." This article traces the development of this heuristic and discusses some of the important ways that it impacts how people perceive and evaluate risk.     

Autism as impairment in the formation and use of meaning: an attempt to integrate a functional and a neurological model

Neurological approaches and functional approaches to impairments in autism provide different perspectives on the disorder. This study attempted an integration of the two approaches, based specifically on the role of the mesolimbic/neostriatal system in imparting adaptive meaning to percepts and problems that autistic persons have in making adaptive use of meaning.     

Word associations in old age: evidence for consistency in semantic encoding during adulthood

Word associations of 80 young and 80 older adults were compared for 113 stimulus words. The proportion of paradigmatic responses varied with the grammatical class of the stimulus word and with the vocabulary level of the subject, but not with age. The same proportion of young and older adults gave the most common responses. Although older adults had a greater number of unique responses, this seems to reflect age differences in vocabulary level, as vocabulary but not age was a good predictor. Within-subject variability was also comparable across age, as on a retest young and older adults gave the same proportion of responses that were identical to those on the original test. Both age groups were more likely to repeat common than uncommon responses on the retest. This, together with analyses of response latency, suggests equivalent use of strategic processes across age. The results indicate that semantic structure and semantic encoding in adults are related to verbal ability, but not to age.     

Editorial

Science and religion share the conviction that the world is intelligible, susceptible to being logically understood, but they delineate this under different paradigms. In the cleanest cases we can say that science operates with the presumption that there are causes to things, religion with the presumption that there are meanings to things.
—Holmes Rolston III     

Youth, family and employment

Some of the functions and dysfunctions of youth employment in contemporary society are discussed. The focus then shifts to a third variable: family dynamics. The research indicates that youth unemployment prolongs residence with parents. The younger the youth, the more tolerant are the parents of the unemployment. It was also found that a daughter's lack of employment in the summer months is more acceptable than a son's; that debts are part of the lifestyle of youth after age 18; that males incur more debts than do females; and that parents are the major source of financial loans.     

A. V. Lunačarskij und L. D. Trockij. Eine kulturtheoretische Kontroverse und ihre Folgen

Ohne ZusammenfassungPresented at the III World Congress for Soviet and East European Studies, Washington, DC, November 1985.     

Dichotic listening performance and writing posture in right- and left-handers

Right-handers and left-handers with the inverted (IN) and noninverted (NI) writing posture were tested on a dichotic consonant-vowel listening task and on two motor tasks (hand strength and speed of tapping). The results failed to show the differences between IN and NI right-handers reported by S. M. Tapley and M. P. Bryden (1983, Neuropsychologia, 21, 129-138) and there were no significant handedness x writing posture x ear interactions. A significant interaction between dichotic listening performance and writing posture was found; NI right-handers and IN left-handers had more correct responses and fewer intrusions than IN right-handers and NI left-handers. Left-handers and right-handers were found to have a right ear advantage (REA) in the dichotic listening task but left-handers had relatively smaller left/right differences in all of the performance measures. Sample characteristics suggest that there are more IN male right-handers than IN female right-handers.