Competition and recency in a hybrid network model of syntactic disambiguation

The competitive attachment model of human parsing is a hybrid connectionist architecture consisting of a distributed feature passing method for establishing syntactic relations within the network, and a numeric competition mechanism for resolving ambiguities, which applies to all syntactic relations. Because the approach employs a uniform mechanism for establishing syntactic relations, and a single competition mechanism for disambiguation, the model can capture general behaviors of the human parser that hold across a range of syntactic constructions. In particular, attachment and binding relations are similarly processed and are therefore subject to the very same influences of disambuguation and processing over time. An important influence on the competitive disambiguation process is distance within the network. Decay of numeric activation, along with distributed feature passing through the network structure, has an unavoidable effect on the outcome of attachment and binding competitions. Inherent properties of the model thus lead to a principled explanation of recency effects in the human parsing of both attachment and filler/gap ambiguities.     

Family management of childhood diabetes

This paper reviews the available literature on family management of childhood diabetes and highlights gaps in the current knowledge base. Four aspects of family management of childhood diabetes are discussed: coping (how the family adjusts to living with a child who has diabetes), compliance (how the family manages the child's diabetes on a daily basis), communication (how the family learns from interactions with the health provider), and context (how the family environment sets the stage for managing diabetes).     

Ending social encouters

Certain classes of verbal behavior—content summary statements (S_c); affective summary statements (S_a); continuity (C), justification (J), and well-wishing (W) statements; and statements of positive affect (P)—were hypothesized to be constituents of interpersonal endings. These statements are shown to increase during the terminal phase of a social encounter as a function of whether the conversation is between friends or strangers and whether it is structured or unstructured. A hypothesis concerning the sequence in which these five classes of statements will occur during the ending of an interaction, namely, [S_c] → [J] → [_Sa^P] → [C] → [W], is tested and confirmed.     

Why researchers don't study women: The responses of 62 researchers

Sixty-two researchers accounting for 64 single-sex studies that appeared in 1970 1971 issues of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology reported why they had limited their studies to a single sex and why they had preferred either males or females for their studies. Also, articles and abstracts were read as a way of checking researchers' reporting practices. The replies were analyzed for thematic content and formed three major types: scientific (56%), practical (28%), and extrascientific (15%). The responses helped to explain why there has been an imbalance in psychology which led to the study of men rather than women instead of the exploration of both sexes. Sggestions are offered to help counteract this trend in future psychological research and reporting.     

Personality and resistance to illness

Personality was found significantly to mitigate the illness-provoking effects of stressful life events. Two groups of executives had comparably high degrees of stress over a 3-year interval, as measured by the Holmes and Rahe Schedule of Recent Life Events. One group (n = 86) suffered high stress without falling ill, while the other (n = 75) reported becoming sick after their encounter with stressful life events. Illness was measured by the Wyler, Masuda, and Holmes Seriousness of Illness Survey. Discriminant function analysis supported the prediction that high stress/low illness executives show, by comparison with high stress/high illness executives, more control, commitment, and interest in change as a challenge.     

Performance of retarded adolescents and nonretarded children on one- and two-bit logical problems

Groups of adolescents of retarded and borderline intelligence, ranging in IQ from 44 to 80 and in mean MA (mental age) from 8 to 12 yr, and groups of nonretarded children ranging in mean MA from 6 to 12 yr, were given logical problem solving tasks. In the nonretarded groups, on a one-bit problem only the kindergarten children (mean MA = 6 yr) failed to perform above chance, and were not tested further. On a two-bit problem, only the first graders (mean MA = 7 yr) failed to perform above chance.Conversely, in the low IQ groups, only the borderline group (mean MA = 12 yr) performed reliably above chance on the one-bit problem, and none performed above chance on the two-bit problem. There is a profound deficiency in low IQ individuals on certain tasks requiring logic and foresight, and MA markedly over-estimates their performance relative to the performance of nonretarded individuals.     

The Relationship of Psychological Resources and Social Support to Job Procurement Self-Efficacy in the Disadvantaged1

This study investigated social-psychological characteristics of disadvantaged persons in employment training. Participants (N=115) furnished information about their psychological resources (internality and learned resourcefulness), social support, and job procurement self-efficacy when they entered employment training programs. Self-efficacy was assessed again approximately 3 weeks after termination from training. It was expected that psychological resources and social support would be associated and that they would predict job procurement self-efficacy at follow-up. Psychological resources and social support were significantly related. Social support, and particularly reassurance of worth, were significant predictors of participants’ efficacy expectations at follow-up. Implications for employment preparation are discussed, and directions for future research are suggested.     

Perceptions of Overprotection in III Adults1

Several studies have suggested that chronically ill adults who receive overprotective care are more depressed and less motivated in rehabilitation therapy. However, for this area of research to proceed, a standard definition and measurement of perceptions of overprotection are needed. In the present study, long and short forms of a scale (the OPSA) to assess perceptions of being overprotected in chronically ill adults were developed. The scale's psychometric properties were tested with a sample of 161 community-dwelling older adults. It was found to have good internal reliability, to correlate highly with an established retrospective measure of overprotection in adults, and to be distinct from ratings of quantity and quality of social support. As expected, overprotection was associated with poorer adjustment: Respondents who felt overprotected were more depressed.     

A latent class approach to fitting the weighted Euclidean model,clascal

A weighted Euclidean distance model for analyzing three-way proximity data is proposed that incorporates a latent class approach. In this latent class weighted Euclidean model, the contribution to the distance function between two stimuli is per dimension weighted identically by all subjects in the same latent class. This model removes the rotational invariance of the classical multidimensional scaling model retaining psychologically meaningful dimensions, and drastically reduces the number of parameters in the traditional INDSCAL model. The probability density function for the data of a subject is posited to be a finite mixture of spherical multivariate normal densities. The maximum likelihood function is optimized by means of an EM algorithm; a modified Fisher scoring method is used to update the parameters in the M-step. A model selection strategy is proposed and illustrated on both real and artificial data.The second author is supported as Bevoegdverklaard Navorser of the Belgian Nationaal Fonds voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek.     

A thurstonian pairwise choice model with univariate and multivariate spline transformations

A probabilistic choice model is developed for paired comparisons data about psychophysical stimuli. The model is based on Thurstone's Law of Comparative Judgment Case V and assumes that each stimulus is measured on a small number of physical variables. The utility of a stimulus is related to its values on the physical variables either by means of an additive univariate spline model or by means of multivariate spline model. In the additive univariate spline model, a separate univariate spline transformation is estimated for each physical dimension and the utility of a stimulus is assumed to be an additive combination of these transformed values. In the multivariate spline model, the utility of a stimulus is assumed to be a general multivariate spline function in the physical variables. The use of B splines for estimating the transformation functions is discussed and it is shown how B splines can be generalized to the multivariate case by using as basis functions tensor products of the univariate basis functions. A maximum likelihood estimation procedure for the Thurstone Case V model with spline transformation is described and applied for illustrative purposes to various artificial and real data sets. Finally, the model is extended using a latent class approach to the case where there are unreplicated paired comparisons data from a relatively large number of subjects drawn from a heterogeneous population. An EM algorithm for estimating the parameters in this extended model is outlined and illustrated on some real data.The first author is supported as Bevoegdverklaard Navorser of the Belgian Nationaal Fonds voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek. The authors are indebted to Ulf Böckenholt and Yoshio Takane for useful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.