The remaining few: Christian Zionists making sense of a changed ecclesiastic landscape

Using a hermeneutical method, this study seeks to understand Christian Zionism as a meaningful practice in late modern Sweden. We visited four Christian Zionist conferences where we observed, analysed the sermons, and conducted interviews. The conferences are almost entirely attended by elderly people and the style is characterized by an old-time revivalist nostalgia. Results show that Israel is seen as a key to understanding a general conflict that the informants experience in late modern Swedish society and in relation to the majority church. Supporting Israel is intertwined with support for conservative values and theology and Israel becomes a nodal point that puts the greater conflict in a new perspective: identifying with Old Testament prophecies and God’s dealings with Israel gives hope and a sense of continuity to a revivalist movement that has become out of date. In Israel, Christian Zionists connect with both the past and the future, personally and as a movement.     

The question of the training analysis system. Notes from the debate in Oslo

The Norwegian discussion of the training analyst system and the pro et contra arguments are shortly presented. When this note is written, the Board is contemplating to propose a revision of the by-laws, making it somewhat easier to fulfil the criteria for being approved as training analyst.     

Asymptotic efficiency of the pseudo‐maximum likelihood estimator in multi‐group factor models with pooled data

A multi‐group factor model is suitable for data originating from different strata. However, it often requires a relatively large sample size to avoid numerical issues such as non‐convergence and non‐positive definite covariance matrices. An alternative is to pool data from different groups in which a single‐group factor model is fitted to the pooled data using maximum likelihood. In this paper, properties of pseudo‐maximum likelihood (PML) estimators for pooled data are studied. The pooled data are assumed to be normally distributed from a single group. The resulting asymptotic efficiency of the PML estimators of factor loadings is compared with that of the multi‐group maximum likelihood estimators. The effect of pooling is investigated through a two‐group factor model. The variances of factor loadings for the pooled data are underestimated under the normal theory when error variances in the smaller group are larger. Underestimation is due to dependence between the pooled factors and pooled error terms. Small‐sample properties of the PML estimators are also investigated using a Monte Carlo study.     

Vowel bias in Danish word‐learning: processing biases are language‐specific

The present study explored whether the phonological bias favoring consonants found in French‐learning infants and children when learning new words (Havy & Nazzi, 2009; Nazzi, 2005) is language‐general, as proposed by Nespor, Peña and Mehler (2003), or varies across languages, perhaps as a function of the phonological or lexical properties of the language in acquisition. To do so, we used the interactive word‐learning task set up by Havy and Nazzi (2009), teaching Danish‐learning 20‐month‐olds pairs of phonetically similar words that contrasted either on one of their consonants or one of their vowels, by either one or two phonological features. Danish was chosen because it has more vowels than consonants, and is characterized by extensive consonant lenition. Both phenomena could disfavor a consonant bias. Evidence of word‐learning was found only for vocalic information, irrespective of whether one or two phonological features were changed. The implication of these findings is that the phonological biases found in early lexical processing are not language‐general but develop during language acquisition, depending on the phonological or lexical properties of the native language.     

The Happiness of Giving: Evidence from the German Socioeconomic Panel That Happier People Are More Generous

This study explores the causal direction between happiness and charitable giving. Through the application of Cohen’s path analysis, the main purpose of the study is to find evidence which of the possible causal directions—the one from giving to happiness or from happiness to giving—is the more dominant one. To that aim the authors use data from the German Socio-Economic Panel 2009/10. In a sample of 6906 donors, the relationships between monetary giving and life satisfaction were assed. Furthermore, we controlled for different variables such as age, gender, and marital status. Contradictory to the hypotheses development, the results of the Cohen’s path analysis indicate that the causal direction from happiness to charitable giving is the more dominant one. Through the study and our initial results we contribute to theory by highlighting the ambiguous causal relationship between the focal constructs and provide a statistical method to investigate such unclear causal relationships. We discuss how happiness, particularly the affective aspect, can be utilized by nonprofit managers to raise fundraising effectiveness and suggest areas for further research.     

Do you get what you pay for? Sales incentives and implications for motivation and changes in turnover intention and work effort

This study investigated relations between pay-for-performance incentives designed to vary in instrumentality (annual pay-for-performance, quarterly pay-for-performance, and base pay level) and employee outcomes (self-reported work effort and turnover intention) in a longitudinal study spanning more than 2 years. After controlling for perceived instrumentality, merit pay increase, and the initial values of the dependent variables, the amount of base pay was positively related to work effort and negatively related to turnover intention, where both relationships were mediated by autonomous motivation. The amounts of quarterly and annual pay-for-performance were both positively related to controlled motivation, but were differently related to the dependent variables due to different relations with autonomous motivation.     

Implementation intention and planning interventions in Health Psychology: Recommendations from the Synergy Expert Group for research and practice

The current article details a position statement and recommendations for future research and practice on planning and implementation intentions in health contexts endorsed by the Synergy Expert Group. The group comprised world-leading researchers in health and social psychology and behavioural medicine who convened to discuss priority issues in planning interventions in health contexts and develop a set of recommendations for future research and practice. The expert group adopted a nominal groups approach and voting system to elicit and structure priority issues in planning interventions and implementation intentions research. Forty-two priority issues identified in initial discussions were further condensed to 18 key issues, including definitions of planning and implementation intentions and 17 priority research areas. Each issue was subjected to voting for consensus among group members and formed the basis of the position statement and recommendations. Specifically, the expert group endorsed statements and recommendations in the following areas: generic definition of planning and specific definition of implementation intentions, recommendations for better testing of mechanisms, guidance on testing the effects of moderators of planning interventions, recommendations on the social aspects of planning interventions, identification of the preconditions that moderate effectiveness of planning interventions and recommendations for research on how people use plans.     

Why does the phonological similarity effect reverse with nonwords?

The detrimental phonological similarity effect (PSE), a robust finding in serial recall of words, sometimes reverses with nonwords. The current study tested the hypothesis that nonwords benefit from phonological similarity because they are harder to retrieve. In two experiments serial recall and serial reconstruction of visually presented words and nonwords were compared. Phonological similarity is known to have a positive effect on item memory and a negative effect on position accuracy in serial recall, and the demands on item retrieval were greatly reduced in the latter task. PSE occurred for words in both tasks and was reversed for nonwords in serial recall, but not in serial reconstruction—a new finding in the literature. The following conclusions can be made: (1) the detrimental PSE on order retrieval occurs irrespective of lexicality, in accordance with prominent short-term memory models; and (2), the positive PSE on item retrieval is crucially affected by lexicality, a finding less well explained by the existing models.     

IMPS 2008 PLANNED SESSIONS

Announcement

IMPS 2008 PLANNED SESSIONS