Latinas with Arthritis: Effects of Illness, Role Identity, and Competence on Psychological Well-Being

Tested a theoretical model on the effects of social role identity, illness intrusion, and competence on psychological well-being among 109 low-income Latinas with arthritis. All six roles studied were rated as highly important identities. Sex-role nontraditionalism was associated with less importance of the homemaker, mother, and grandmother roles. Negative affect increased as a function of intrusions into valued identities. Having important role identities contributed to feelings of competence (i.e., self-esteem and self-efficacy), which in turn, contributed to psychological well-being. Competence also mediated the effects of pain, identity, and illness intrusions on psychological well-being. Results suggest competence processes play an important role in well-being.     

An alternative assessment of children's comprehension of relative clauses

Methodological difficulties are identified in the assessment of children's comprehension of relative clauses (RCs) by means of the standard acting-out procedure. An alternative experimental task is proposed which attempts to minimize these difficulties while exploring the advantages of the acting-out technique. An experiment is reported in which Portuguese-speaking 3- to 6-year olds were tested by means of this alternative task. The results show children being affected by both the position and the focus of the RC in the same way adults have been reported to be and an error analysis suggests that most of children's difficulties can be ascribed to memory overload while RCs are processed as noun modifier sentences. These results contradict the view that there are developmental differences with regard to the way sentences with RCs are parsed and that processing load induces errors particularly manifested in right-branching subject focus sentences. Developmental changes taking place between the ages of 3 and 6 are considered and questions are raised concerning development from the age of 5.The research reported here was carried out while the author read for the PhD degree at the University of London. The writing up of this paper was financially supported by a postdoctoral grant from the Brazilian Research Council (CNPq: 302103-86.4).     

Probabilistic inferences,discrimination, and stimulus interference in comparative judgement

Comparative judgements of successive stimuli involve constant errors. Here, two theories of these errors are considered. For the wave theory of discrimination, constant errors directly originate from discrimination operations. For the inferential theory, the same errors are due to probabilistic inferences drawn after discrimination. Previous studies suggest that the second of two successively compared stimuli has more influence on the comparative response. The results of the present experiment, in which successive lines as comparison stimuli were used, confirm this suggestion. The wave theory does not explain these results, while the inferential theory explains them in terms of probabilistic inferences. Analysis of response frequencies and response times indicates that there was a response bias in favour of the longer response. Interfering lines appearing before the first comparison line significantly affected response frequency, response time, and discriminability, whereas interpolated lines significantly affected only response frequency and response time. The inferential theory does not explain these effects on response time, while the wave theory explains them as due to modifications of response bias. These results suggest the possibility that the two theories describe independent sources of constant errors.     

A note on the ω-incompleteness formalization

The paper studies two formal schemes related to -completeness.LetS be a suitable formal theory containing primitive recursive arithmetic and letT be a formal extension ofS. Denoted by (a), (b) and (c), respectively, are the following three propositions (where (x) is a formula with the only free variable x): (a) (for anyn) ( _T (n)), (b) _{T x} Pr _T (^–(x)^–) and (c) _T x(x) (the notational conventions are those of Smoryski [3]). The aim of this paper is to examine the meaning of the schemes which result from the formalizations, over the base theoryS, of the implications (b) (c) and (a) (b), where ranges over all formulae. The analysis yields two results overS : 1. the schema corresponding to (b) (c) is equivalent to ¬Cons _T and 2. the schema corresponding to (a) (b) is not consistent with 1-CON _T. The former result follows from a simple adaptation of the -incompleteness proof; the second is new and is based on a particular application of the diagonalization lemma.Presented byMelvin Fitting     

Beyond belief bias: Reasoning from conceptual structures by mental models manipulation

Mental models constitute an alternative to the rule-based systems in the explanation of human reasoning (Johnson-Laird, 1983). In this paper, we claim that the concept of believability generally used to categorize content and context effects is of little use within a semantic theory. Thus, we propose the use of categories that are directly extracted from subjective relations among concepts within the reasoning problem. We demonstrate that manipulations based on this kind of categorization produce predictable patterns of responses in reasoning problems. We present two experiments to test our predictions, using conditional and syllogistic reasoning problems, and in both cases, we demonstrate the influence of conceptual knowledge not only in natural contexts, but also in experimentally created artificial contexts.     

Group aggregates and individual reliability: The case of verbal short-term memory

Two experiments examined the generalizability of the effects of word length and phonological similarity with visual and auditory presentation in immediate verbal serial ordered recall. In Experiment 1, data were collected from 251 adult volunteers drawn from a broad cross-section of the normal population. Word length and phonological similarity in both presentation modes significantly influenced the group means. However, 43% of the subjects failed to show at least one of the effects, and the likelihood that effects appeared was highly correlated with verbal memory span. In Experiment 2, 40 subjects of the original sample were retested, 20 of whom had failed to show one or more effects in Experiment 1. Whether or not an effect had appeared for individual subjects on the first test session was a poor predictor of whether the effect would appear on retest. Finally, an analysis of subject reports demonstrated that the patterns of experimental data could be accounted for in part by the strategies that subjects reported using, and the effect of strategy was independent of the effect of span. The implications of these findings for theories of verbal short-term memory are discussed.     

Attentional scanning and space errors

Using the method of paired comparisons, pairs of simultaneous horizontal or vertical lines, with one line above and one below or one on the left and one on the right of a fixation point, respectively, were presented tachistoscopically for length comparison. Space errors were found to have a pattern similar to that of time errors. The tendency to guess the comparative response from the absolute magnitude of stimuli is proposed as a basis for time and space errors. Manipulation of attentional scanning, which implies a more frequent usage of this guessing strategy for one of the two lines in a pair, was shown to affect space errors.