A solution for case iii of the law of comparative judgment

A solution for Case III of the Law of Comparative Judgment, modeled after Thurstone's solution for Case IV but eliminating the restrictive assumption of relatively equal discriminal dispersions, is developed.     

Unique needs: Salvation Army officers in retirement and end-of-life care

ABSTRACT

Retirement is a major life transition. On this point there is general agreement. But what about retirement for clergy and those who serve in the church? Perhaps a few see ministry as a job; then the change would be much like a worker ceasing paid employment. However, does being ordained, having a respected leadership role in the church, and serving God bring some unique dynamics to this transition? In this article we try to identify such factors using a large sample of Australian Salvation Army officers.     

Examining the Cross-National Measurement Invariance of the Extended Satisfaction with Life Scale in the United States and Hungary

The measurement invariance properties of four domains from the Extended Satisfaction with Life Scale (ESWLS) were examined in samples of young adults from the United States and Hungary. The four domains (scales) were general life satisfaction, social life satisfaction, family life satisfaction, and satisfaction with one’s self. For both countries, confirmatory factor analyses supported a correlated four-factor model, with each ESWLS domain constituting a single independent factor. Multigroup invariance testing provided support for both configural invariance and metric invariance, suggesting that across the U.S. and Hungarian samples the four ESWLS scales evidenced the same pattern of factor loadings as well as largely equivalent regression weights. These results suggest that respondents in both countries attributed the same meaning to the ESWLS constructs and that associations between the four ESWLS scales and other variables can be meaningfully compared across the two nations. Latent factor analyses indicated that with the exception of the correlation between general- and self-satisfaction, which was higher for the U.S., the magnitudes of the correlations between ESWLS domains were similar for the U.S. and Hungary. Possible explanations for the lack of measurement invariance across all of the nested models (i.e., item intercepts through residuals) are discussed.     

On the symmetric treatment of an asymmetric approach to factor analysis

On the assumption that a partitioning can be found such that three mutually exclusive test vector configurations span the same factor space, a procedure is derived whereby symmetric parts of the correlation matrix are estimated from functions of asymmetric parts treated symmetrically. This yields an explicit matrix formula for communality estimation which generalizes earlier work by Albert. Conventional factoring methods, with all their computational and fitting advantages, can be applied once the symmetric portions of the correlation matrix have been estimated. Extension to four subgroups of test vectors allows for a matrix generalization of the old tetrad difference criterion to the multiple-factor case.     

Inhibition of return and attentional control settings

In the present study, we used a spatial cuing paradigm in conjunction with a choice identification task to investigate whether exogenous attentional orienting and inhibition of return are affected by attentional control settings. As in previous studies (e.g., Folk, Remington, & Johnston, 1992), onset- and color-defined targets were crossed with uninformative onset- and color-defined cues. As expected, when the cue-target stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) was short (i.e., 100 msec), the results showed that exogenous attentional orienting was contingent on attentional set; attentional capture occurred in response to a particular cue only when the feature that defined the cue also defined the target (Folk et al., 1992). More importantly, when the cue-target SOA was long (i.e., 1,000 msec), the results showed that the occurrence of inhibition of return was also contingent on attentional set, at least partially so; inhibition of return occurred in response to onset cues only when they preceded onset targets. In contrast, inhibition of return never occurred in response to color cues (at a variety of long SOAs). The associations and dissociations that were observed between exogenous attentional orienting and inhibition of return are discussed in terms of posterior and anterior attention networks in the brain (Posner & Petersen, 1990).     

Distinguishing Serial and Parallel Parsing

This paper discusses ways of determining whether the human parser is serial maintaining at most, one structural interpretation at each parse state, or whether it is parallel, maintaining more than one structural interpretation in at least some circumstances. We make four points. The first two counterclaims made by Lewis (2000): (1) that the availability of alternative structures should not vary as a function of the disambiguating material in some ranked parallel models; and (2) that parallel models predict a slow down during the ambiguous region for more syntactically ambiguous structures. Our other points concern potential methods for seeking experimental evidence relevant to the serial/parallel question. We discuss effects of the plausibility of a secondary structure in the ambiguous region (Pearlmutter & Mendelsohn, 1999) and suggest examining the distribution of reaction times in the disambiguating region.