How subjective grouping of options influences choice and allocation: diversification bias and the phenomenon of partition dependence

The authors argue that people's tendency to diversify their allocations of money and consumption choices over alternatives gives rise to decisions that vary systematically with the subjective grouping of available options. These subjective groupings are influenced by subtle variations in the presentation of options or elicitation of preferences. Studies 1-4 demonstrate such "partition dependence" in allocations of money to beneficiaries, consumption experiences to future time periods, and choices to a menu of consumption options. Study 5 documents weaker partition dependence among individuals with greater relevant experience discriminating among options, and Study 6 shows that the effect is attenuated among participants with stronger or more accessible intrinsic preferences.     

Ecologically relevant stimuli and color memory

Ecologically relevant stimuli were developed as an alternative to Munsell color chips. Colored pictures of familiar objects were used to study color memory. We investigated the typicality of color to particular objects. Contextually typical colors were remembered more accurately than atypical colors were. Moreover, this variable had a stronger effect on memory than focality did. We concluded that memory for ecologically relevant material is more impressed by a color's relation to experience than by its intrinsic properties.     

Measuring lexical diversity in children who stutter: application of vocd

There is growing but equivocal evidence that the language abilities of young children who stutter (CWS) may be depressed when compared to those of their fluent peers. In particular, the lexical skills of CWS have variously been reported to be weaker or stronger than comparison children in a number of recent studies. One source for such disagreement may be the measures used to compute lexical characteristics of these children's spoken conversations. In this study, we examined the concurrent validity of two measures of lexical diversity in spontaneous language samples, Type-Token Ratio (TTR) and the newly developed utility vocd (Malvern & Richards, 1997), using a standard test of expressive vocabulary as the comparison measure. Findings indicated that vocd values ("D") correlated well with standardized measures of expressive vocabulary, while TTR values did not. In addition, both the standardized measure and vocd revealed significantly poorer expressive lexical skills of CWS, whereas TTR analyses did not evidence this difference. Results are discussed in relation to the relative strength of vocd over TTR as a method for describing lexical characteristics of the spontaneous language samples of this population. EDUCATIONAL OBJECTIVES: The reader will learn about and be able to (1) identify several common measures of conversational vocabulary and the strengths and weaknesses of each, and (2) compare the performance of the young CWS in this study to their normally fluent peers in terms of vocabulary performance on both formal and conversational measures of vocabulary.     

A Better Tomorrow: Toward a Stronger Science of Youth Purpose

Having a sense of purpose in life has been discussed as a psychological asset for promoting positive youth development. Yet confidence in the benefits of purpose has accumulated faster than rigorous confirmation of their existence among youth, using instruments and methods calibrated to the developmental stage of those under study. Here, the authors illuminate four problems this asymmetry creates for drawing inferences from extant research on youth purpose, namely its reliance on (1) unclear scientific criteria for distinguishing “youth” and measures that include developmentally presumptuous items, (2) single-informant and self-report methods, (3) misapplication of cross-sectional designs to test prospective or causal theories, and (4) analytic techniques insensitive to purpose content. In delineating these problems, the authors consider the extent to which the three empirical contributions included in this issue are responsive to each and may provide templates to guide future studies of youth purpose.