Relationship between the sensation seeking scale and a biographical inventory designed to predict risk-taking behavior

One hundred and five students were administered both Zuckerman's Sensation Seeking Scale (SSS) and the Torrance-Ziller biographical inventory (BI) for measuring risk-taking tendencies. Correlations between the BI and selected subscales on the SSS were positive and significant. However, the proportion of explained variance does not suggest that the SSS and the BI are tapping the same dimension.     

Conceptual systems of open university students

The Personal Opinion Scale was applied to 237 Open University and 42 York University students. The distribution of Conceptual Systems was found to be normal in the smaller sample but Open University students comprised fewer System 1 authoritarians and more System 4 problem-solvers than do comparable samples. This may have paedagogic implications. For example it suggests any authoritarianism which may be inherent in a distance-learning approach must be combatted.     

Hemispheric differences are found in the identification,but not the detection,of low versus high spatial frequencies

The processing of sine-wave gratings presented to the left and right visual fields was examined in four experiments. Subjects were required either to detect the presence of a grating (Experiments 1 and 2) or to identify the spatial frequency of a grating (Experiments 3 and 4). Orthogonally to this, the stimuli were presented either at threshold levels of contrast (Experiments 1 and 3) or at suprathreshold levels (Experiments 2 and 4). Visual field and spatial frequency interacted when the task required identification of spatial frequency, but not when it required only stimulus detection. Regardless of contrast level (threshold, suprathreshold), high-frequency gratings were identified more readily in the right visual field (left hemisphere), whereas low-frequency gratings showed no visual field difference (Experiment 3) or were identified more readily in the left visual field (right hemisphere) (Experiment 4). Thus, hemispheric asymmetries in the processing of spatial frequencies depend on the task. These results support Sergent’s (1982) spatial frequency hypothesis, but only when the computational demands of the task exceed those required for the simple detection of the stimuli.     

Postmemory

The American Journal of Psychoanalysis - The urgency of the problem of how to learn from the relatively recent past in order not to repeat its devastating effects, a problem that revolves around...     

Natural evil: The comparative response

International Journal for Philosophy of Religion -