The Balance-Scale Dilemma: Either the Subject or the Experimenter Muddles Through

We examined two critiques of rule-assessment methodology: (a) the method does not take into consideration other rules that subjects use to solve problems, and (b) its multiple-choice format misrepresents subjects' cognitive level. In Study 1, high school students completed a paper-and-pencil, multiple-choice balance scale questionnaire. Their performance was assessed with Siegler's original rules and a revised set of rules that included an addition and a qualitative proportionality rule. Results showed that Siegler's Rule 3 was not homogeneous and that distinguishing specific patterns of answers among Rule 3 subjects increased the diagnostic value of the rule-assessment methodology. In Study 2, we compared rule-assessment methodology to the Piagetian clinical model. High school students solved balance-scale problems within each method. Results indicated an overall match between Piagetian levels and Siegler's rules, with the exception of Rule 3, suggesting again the pertinence of specifying alternative rules.     

The effect of noun phrase type on working memory saturation during sentence comprehension

Double centre-embedded structures such as “the rat the cat the boy chased ate was brown” seem ungrammatical to many human subjects. Using an offline complexity judgement task, Gibson and Thomas (1999) demonstrated that people found such sentences no more difficult to understand when the second verb phrase (VP) was omitted, relative to a condition where all the required VPs were present. According to the Syntactic Prediction Locality Theory (SPLT; Gibson, 1998), this syntactic illusion is determined by the high working memory cost associated with the integration of the second VP. This cost could be reduced by replacing the third noun phrase (the boy) by a pronoun, making the reader more sensitive to the omission of the second VP. This hypothesis was tested in two experiments using French sentences. Both experiments confirmed the syntactic illusion when the second VP was not a pronoun. The second experiment measured the reading times of the VPs and showed that the pronoun induced a longer reading time of the final VP when the second VP was omitted. The overall results indicate a condition under which human subjects could process the most complex part of a sentence with more than one embedded relative clause. The overall results are consistent with most of the hypotheses derived from the SPLT although offline complexity judgements could not be the most sensitive measure to test some of these hypotheses.     

Illness perceptions and self-care behaviours in the first years of living with type 2 diabetes; does the presence of complications matter?

Objective: To assess illness perceptions, self-care behaviours and their relationship in recently diagnosed type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) patients with and without diabetes-related complications.

Design: Cross-sectional survey among 192 recently diagnosed T2DM patients of whom 23% reported the presence of diabetes-related complications. Illness perceptions and self-care were assessed by the Revised Illness Perception Questionnaire (IPQ-R) and the revised Summary of Diabetes Self-Care Activities (SDSCA) measure.

Results: Generally, participating patients perceived T2DM as a chronic, but relatively controllable condition with minor consequences. In the presence of complications, however, T2DM was perceived as more unpredictable with more (serious) consequences and less controllable by self-care or medical treatment. Furthermore, engagement in exercise and foot care was reported more often by patients with complications. Self-care was related to certain illness perception dimensions, and interactions between perceptions and complications were found.

Conclusion: T2DM patients in the first years of their illness are often recommended to make lifestyle changes in the absence of noticeable diabetes-related symptoms or complaints. As many T2DM patients do not seem to perceive their condition to be serious and postpone lifestyle changes until diabetes-related complications appear, a major challenge for professionals is to convince asymptomatic patients of the importance of self-care.     

Psychological Contracts and Their Implications for Job Outcomes: A Social Exchange View

This article explores the relationship between on the 1 hand psychological contract fulfilment and affective commitment and on the other hand, normative commitment and job satisfaction. We hypothesized that the perceived supervisor support (PSS) and the perceived organizational support (POS) mediate the relationship between the fulfilment of the psychological contract, commitment and job satisfaction. The sample consists in 337 soldiers in training. In order to test our model, we used 3 measures of psychological contract fulfilment (economic, socioemotional and developmental), PSS and POS measures as well as attitudes. Results show that the developmental psychological contract is related to affective and normative organizational commitment and job satisfaction whereas socioemotional fulfilment is unrelated to affective commitment. Psychological contract fulfilment has a greater impact on normative commitment than affective commitment. Results show also that only PSS plays a mediating role in psychological contract processes. Several implications emerge from this study. First, in a military context, it is important to strengthen the developmental psychological contract. Second, it is essential for organizations to place greater emphasis on encouraging supervisors to establish healthy working relationships with newcomers.     

Response to Comment: Starting to Solve the Method Puzzle in Salesperson Self-Report Evaluations

This response addresses the comments of Sharma, Rich, and Levy (2004) about the generalizability of the performance effect. The comments are addressed by bringing additional theoretical and empirical support with a new study that replicates and extends the results of our 2003 paper. Results confirm our 2003 findings that bottom performers overestimate and that top performers underestimate their job performance. Further, results confirm our 2003 findings that bottom performers are significantly more inaccurate than top salespeople in their performance estimation. Finally, this study extends previous research by providing evidence that the inaccuracy in self-evaluations is reduced when factualbased questions are used.     

A Meta-Analytic Comparison of Managerial Ratings and Self-Evaluations

The purpose of this study was to examine the equivalence of self-reports and managerial ratings of salesperson job performance. A meta-analysis showed that the two measures exhibited low convergent validity (mean corrected correlation = 0.19), which indicated that they are not interchangeable. The predictive validity of self-reports and managerial ratings was compared. Managerial ratings had a corrected mean correlation of 0.44 with objective performance, whereas the corrected mean correlation between self-reports and objective measures was 0.34. Further meta-analytic investigations showed that the divergence between self-reports and managerial ratings was attributable to the performance effect. A discussion of the findings and avenues for further research are also provided.     

Religious Coping and Psychological and Behavioral Adjustment After Hurricane Katrina

Positive and negative religious coping are related to positive and negative psychological adjustment, respectively. The current study examined the relation between religious coping and PTSD, major depression, quality of life, and substance use among residents residing in Mississippi at the time of Hurricane Katrina. Results indicated that negative religious coping was positively associated with major depression and poorer quality of life and positive religious coping was negatively associated with PTSD, depression, poorer quality of life, and increased alcohol use. These results suggest that mental health providers should be mindful of the role of religious coping after traumatic events such as natural disasters.     

Jazz Redux: a reply to Möller

This paper is a response to Niklas Möller’s (Philosophical Studies, 2013) recent criticism of our relational (Jazz) model of meaning of thin evaluative terms. Möller’s criticism rests on a confusion about the role of coordinating intentions in Jazz. This paper clarifies what’s distinctive and controversial about the Jazz proposal and explains why Jazz, unlike traditional accounts of meaning, is not committed to analycities.