A Comment on ‘Rank Disagreement: A Comparison of Multi-Criteria Methodologies’

In a recent paper in this journal, Buede and Maxwell found reasonable agreement between MAVT and conventional AHP most preferred alternatives in a large-scale simulation. We show that MAVT would have had total agreement on preferred alternatives with two modified forms of AHP, referenced AHP and linking pin AHP, under simulation. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Developmental patterns in the infants and young children of mentally ill mothers

The development of children (ages 2 to 49 months) of mentally ill mothers was compared with that of children of matched “well” mothers. The children of mentally ill mothers scored lower on measures of intelligence and had a less adaptive coping style in the testing situation. The children of “well” mothers were more socially competent; that is, they sought the attention of adults more often, responded more to social initiatives, displayed more positive affect, and sent clearer signals. Clinical data on the children of mentally ill mothers complemented the research data, indicating that these children displayed problems in the areas of interpersonal relationships, verbal-conceptual functioning, attentional skills, and mood and affect.     

Context-dependent repetition effects on recognition memory

One widely acknowledged way to improve our memory performance is to repeatedly study the to be learned material. One aspect that has received little attention in past research regards the context sensitivity of this repetition effect, that is whether the item is repeated within the same or within different contexts. The predictions of a neuro-computational model (O’Reilly & Norman, 2002) were tested in an experiment requiring participants to study visual objects either once or three times. Crucially, for half of the repeated objects the study context (encoding task, background color and screen position) remained the same (within context repetition) while for the other half the contextual features changed across repetitions (across context repetition). In addition to behavioral measures, event-related potentials (ERP) were recorded that provide complementary information on the underlying neural mechanisms during recognition. Consistent with dual-process models behavioral estimates (remember/know-procedure) demonstrate differential effects of context on memory performance, namely that recognition judgements were more dependent on familiarity when repetition occurs across contexts. In accordance with these behavioral results ERPs showed a larger early frontal old/new effect for across context repetitions as compared to within context repetitions and single presentations, i.e. an increase in familiarity following repetition across study contexts. In contrast, the late parietal old/new effect, indexing recollection did not differ between both repetition conditions. These results suggest that repetition differentially affects familiarity depending on whether it occurs within the same context or across different contexts.     

Generalization versus contextualization in automatic evaluation

Research has shown that automatic evaluations can be highly robust and difficult to change, highly malleable and easy to change, and highly context dependent. We tested a representational account of these disparate findings, which specifies the conditions under which automatic evaluations reflect (a) initially acquired information, (b) subsequently acquired, counterattitudinal information, or (c) a mixture of both. The account postulates that attention to contextual cues during the encoding of evaluative information determines whether this information is stored in a context-free representation or a contextualized representation. To the extent that attention to context cues is low during the encoding of initial information but is enhanced by exposure to expectancy-violating counterattitudinal information, initial experiences are stored in context-free representations, whereas counterattitudinal experiences are stored in contextualized representations. Hence, automatic evaluations tend to reflect the valence of counterattitudinal information only in the context in which this information was learned (occasion setting) and the valence of initial experiences in any other context (renewal effect). Four experiments confirmed these predictions, additionally showing that (a) the impact of initial experiences was reduced for automatic evaluations in novel contexts when context salience during the encoding of initial information was enhanced, (b) context effects were eliminated altogether when context salience during the encoding of counterattitudinal information was reduced, and (c) enhanced context salience during the encoding of counterattitudinal information produced context-dependent automatic evaluations even when there was no contingency between valence and contextual cues. Implications for automatic evaluation, learning theory, and interventions in applied settings are discussed.     

Validating the semantic misattribution procedure as an implicit measure of gender stereotyping

The current research tested the validity of the semantic misattribution procedure (SMP)—a variant of the affect misattribution procedure—as an implicit measure of gender stereotyping. In three studies (N = 604), prime words of gender‐stereotypical occupations (e.g., nurse, doctor) influenced participants' guesses of whether unknown Chinese ideographs referred to male or female names in a stereotype‐congruent manner. Priming scores of gender stereotyping showed high internal consistency and construct‐valid correlations with explicit measures of sexism. Discriminant validity of gender stereotyping scores was tested by investigating relations with priming effects involving grammatical gender (e.g., mother, father). Evidence for discriminant validity was obtained when (1) trials from the two priming measures were presented in a blocked rather than interspersed manner and (2) the measure of stereotypical gender priming preceded the measure of grammatical gender priming. Overall, the SMP showed good psychometric properties and construct validity for the assessment of gender stereotyping.     

The role of derivational morphology in vocabulary acquisition: get by with a little help from my morpheme friends

This study explores the role of morphology in vocabulary knowledge of 3rd and 6th grade Finnish elementary school children. In a word definition task, children from both grades performed overall better on derived words than on monomorphemic words. However, the results were modified by the factors Frequency and Productivity. Most strikingly, performance on monomorphemic words was disproportionately weaker than on derived words at the low frequency range. At the high-frequency range, derived words with low-productive suffixes yielded poorest performance. We partly make an appeal to the lexical-statistical properties of the Finnish language to explain the interaction of Frequency and Word Structure. At any rate, the results suggest that Finnish elementary school children benefit significantly from utilizing morphology in determining word meanings.     

Electrical stimulation of human hair follicles via microelectrodes

Trains of electrical pulses were applied to hair follicles on the forearm by microelectrodes with tip diameters less than 5 μ. Clear, painless, vibratory sensations could be evoked by stimulating the middle of a follicle. Exponents of the individual power functions relating vibratory magnitude and electric current ranged from 3.1 to 7.4. Absolute thresholds varied little with pulse frequency but did vary from S to S and from one electrode placement to another. Pitch discrimination was very poor; Ss could not distinguish 40 from 80 pps. Pain was often present, but the manner of its appearance suggested an anatomical segregation between vibratory and pain receptors.     

Culture,ethnicity, and mental health

Conclusion This is the important point, I think, both in the research field and in the research-policy-administrative-political field that might be characterized by the collective interests of people in these fields. Our discussions do not suggest unalterable directions for our efforts, and whatever answers we may come up with do not suggest final conclusions. If we are able to trust one another and our institutions-and I feel that trust is one of the key issues in any discussion about mental-health topics—then we have to admit that perhaps we are all correct. And our progress in the area of ethnicity, culture, and mental health will be promoted by our continued co-operation.the National Institute of Mental Health, Department of Health, Education, and Welfare.This paper is the substance of an address given at the Conference on Culture and Ethnicity-Mental Health Services for a Pluralistic Society held under the sponsorship of the Institute on Pluralism and Group Identity, American Jewish Committee of New York, and the Maurice Falk Medical Fund of Pittsburgh, at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, Department of Psychiatry, on October 13, 1976.     

The Interplay of Word Formation Type, Affixal Homonymy, and Productivity in Lexical Processing: Evidence from a Morphologically Rich Language

This study addresses the role of three factors in morphological processing of visually presented words in Finnish: word formation type (inflection versus derivation), productivity, and affixal homonymy. Three visual lexical decision experiments show that complex words can be processed slower, equally fast, or even faster than comparable monomorphemic word forms. We will argue that this diverse pattern of results reflects the ways different complex words are stored and processed. Moreover, it indicates that the balance of storage and computation crucially depends on the interplay of the three above-mentioned factors. Surprisingly, our results converge in a manner consistent with data obtained from a typologically very different language, namely Dutch.