Anti‐Americanism in Lebanon: an empirical assessment

This paper aims at empirically assessing Lebanese reactions to retaliation attacks against US targets. The author proposes that receptiveness to tenets of religious fundamentalism influences approval of these attacks. In view of the surge of Islamic militancy in recent years, he further proposes that Muslim respondents would be likely to show greater support for the attacks than Christians. The data come from a quota sample, consisting of 607 Christian and Muslim respondents of both genders, conducted in the Greater Beirut area during the months of November and December 2002. The findings support the proposition that proneness to religious fundamentalism is related to approval of the attacks, but they also demonstrate the insignificance of religious fundamentalism in explaining Christian support for retaliation attacks.     

Dutch norm data for 13 semantic categories and 338 exemplars

A data set is described that includes eight variables gathered for 13 common superordinate natural language categories and a representative set of 338 exemplars in Dutch. The category set contains 6 animal categories (reptiles, amphibians, mammals, birds, fish, andinsects), 3 artifact categories (musical instruments, tools, andvehicles), 2 borderline artifact-natural-kind categories (vegetables andfruit), and 2 activity categories (sports andprofessions). In an exemplar and a feature generation task for the category nouns, frequency data were collected. For each of the 13 categories, a representative sample of 5–30 exemplars was selected. For all exemplars, feature generation frequencies, typicality ratings, pairwise similarity ratings, age-of-acquisition ratings, word frequencies, and word associations were gathered. Reliability estimates and some additional measures are presented. The full set of these norms is available in Excel format at the Psychonomic Society Web archive,www.psychonomic. org/archive/.     

Grandparents as family stabilizers during economic hardship in Bulgaria

T he present study of three generations' families living together during a period of marked economic dislocation investigates whether supportive grandparents can ameliorate the negative effects of economic stress on parenting and on teen outcomes. The study focuses on harsh parenting and adolescent depression, which has been shown to be especially responsive to economic stress. Three hypotheses were investigated: (1) in extended families there is a link between economic adversity and adolescent depression that is mediated by harsh parenting; (2) grandparent support diminishes the relationship between economic pressure and harsh parenting; and (3) grandparent support diminishes the relationship between harsh parenting and adolescent depression. Data were collected from a community sample of 62 extended families with an adolescent during a period of marked economic dislocation in Bulgaria. Mothers, fathers, and adolescents completed questionnaires about perceived economic pressure, parents' harsh parenting, and perceived support of grandparents. Adolescents also completed a measure of self‐reported depression. Additional interviews were conducted with every eligible family member about family relations. Results showed that even though there was significant economic stress reported by parents, adolescents reported moderate levels of depression and low levels of harsh parenting by mothers and fathers. Correlation and regression analyses revealed that whenever respondents experienced support by grandparents, it made a difference for family members. More specifically, despite economic stress, mothers who experienced the support of grandparents tended to exercise less harsh parenting practices than mothers who lacked such support. Furthermore, when grandparents were supportive, harsh parenting was not associated with adolescent depression. These findings are discussed in the light of existing studies of families under economic pressure with a special focus on extended family relations and the role of cultural context.     

Welfare and the Achievement of Goals

I defend the view that an individual's welfareis in one respect enhanced by the achievementof her goals, even when her goals are crazy,self-destructive, irrational or immoral. This``Unrestricted View' departs from familiartheories which take welfare to involve only theachievement of rational aims, or of goals whoseobjects are genuinely valuable, or of goalsthat are not grounded in bad reasons. I beginwith a series of examples, intended to showthat some of our intuitive judgments aboutwelfare incorporate distinctions that only theUnrestricted View can support. Then, I show howthe view can be incorporated into a broadertheory of welfare in ways that do not produceimplausible consequences. This in hand, Ifinish by providing a more philosophicalstatement of the Unrestricted View and the casein its favor, and respond to some objections.     

The Newcomb Problem: An Unqualified Resolution

The Newcomb problem is analysed here as a type ofcommon cause problem. Inrelation to such problems, if you take the dominatedoption your expected outcomewill be good and if you take the dominant optionyour expected outcome will be notso good. As is explained, however, these arenot conventional conditional expectedoutcomes but `conditional evidence expectedoutcomes' and while in the deliberationprocess, the evidence on which they are based isonly hypothetical evidence.Conventional conditional expected outcomes aremore sensitive to your currentepistemic state in that they are based purely onactual evidence which is available toyou during the deliberation process. So althoughthey are conditional on a certain actbeing performed, they are not based on evidencethat you would have only if that actis performed. Moreover, for any given epistemicstate during the deliberationprocess, your conventional conditional expectedoutcome for the dominant option willbe better than that for the dominated option. Theprinciple of dominance is thus inperfect harmony with the conventional conditionalexpected outcomes. In relation tothe Newcomb problem then, the evidence unequivocallysupports two-boxing as therational option. Yet what is advanced here isnot simply a two-boxing strategy. Tosee why, two stages to the problem need to berecognised. The first stage is thatwhich occurs before the information used by thepredictor in making his predictionshas been gained. The second stage is after thispoint. Provided that you are still inthe first stage, you have an opportunity toinfluence whether or not the predictorplaces the $1m in the opaque box. To maximisethe probability that it is, you need tocommit yourself to one-boxing.     

Exploring the time prediction process: the effects of task experience and complexity on prediction accuracy

Whilst considerable research shows that people tend to underestimate their task completion times, there is little research concerning factors that mediate the time prediction process. In Experiments 1 to 3 a simple, well‐structured task, the 3‐disk Tower of Hanoi, showed no evidence of underestimation; in fact, participants consistently overestimated the duration of this task. However, predictions were more accurate among participants who acquired some task experience beforehand. Task complexity was also found to be an important factor since the more cognitively complex 4‐ and 5‐disk versions produced less biased predictions. Using a cognitively undemanding disk movement task, we found a general temporal overestimation in Experiment 4, thus suggesting that task duration might be responsible for the general lack of underestimation in the present studies. These results have implications for the planning of tasks in everyday life, and also suggest conditions under which time prediction accuracy can be improved. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.