Clarifying the Linguistic Signature: Measuring Personality From Natural Speech

In this study, we examined the viability of measuring personality using computerized lexical analysis of natural speech. Two well-validated models of personality were measured, one involving trait positive affectivity (PA) and negative affectivity (NA) dimensions and the other involving a separate behavioral inhibition motivational system (BIS) and a behavioral activation motivational system (BAS). Individuals with high levels of trait PA and sensitive BAS expressed high levels of positive emotion in their natural speech, whereas individuals with high levels of trait NA and sensitive BIS tended to express high levels of negative emotion. The personality variables accounted for almost a quarter of the variance in emotional expressivity.     

The reliability of three visual perception tests used to assess adults

Summary.-The reliability of three adult visual perceptual tests was investigated. Participants aged 20 years and older (N = 221; 49 adults with neurological impairment, 172 adults without) completed the Developmental Test of Visual Perception-Adolescent and Adult (DTVP-A), the Motor-Free Visual Perception Test-3 (MVPT-3), and the Test of Visual Perceptual Skills (non-motor) Third Edition (TVPS-3). Participants (n = 46) without neurological impairment completed these tests twice. Cronbach's alpha for the DTVP-A, MVPT-3, and TVPS-3 total scales were .86, .74, and .80 and test-retest correlations .51, .71, and .72, respectively.     

Special Sciences, Conspiracy and the Better Best System Account of Lawhood

An important obstacle to lawhood in the special sciences is the worry that such laws would require metaphysically extravagant conspiracies among fundamental particles. How, short of conspiracy, is this possible? In this paper we’ll review a number of strategies that allow for the projectibility of special science generalizations without positing outlandish conspiracies: non-Humean pluralism, classical MRL theories of laws, and Albert and Loewer’s theory. After arguing that none of the above fully succeed, we consider the conspiracy problem through the lens of our preferred view of laws, an elaboration of the MRL view that we call the Better Best System (BBS) theory. BBS offers a picture on which, although all events supervene on a fundamental level, there is no one unique locus of projectibility; rather there are a large number of loci corresponding to the different areas (ecology, economics, solid-state chemistry, etc.) in which there are simple and strong generalizations to be made. While we expect that some amount of conspiracy-fear-inducing special science projectibility is inevitable given BBS, we’ll argue that this is unobjectionable. It follows from BBS that the laws of any particular special or fundamental science amount to a proper subset of the laws. From this vantage point, the existence of projectible special science generalizations not guaranteed by the fundamental laws is not an occasion for conspiracy fantasies, but a predictable fact of life in a complex world.     

Confidence regions for INDSCAL using the jackknife and bootstrap techniques

Bootstrap and jackknife techniques are used to estimate ellipsoidal confidence regions of group stimulus points derived from INDSCAL. The validity of these estimates is assessed through Monte Carlo analysis. Asymptotic estimates of confidence regions based on a MULTISCALE solution are also evaluated. Our findings suggest that the bootstrap and jackknife techniques may be used to provide statements regarding the accuracy of the relative locations of points in space. Our findings also suggest that MULTISCALE asymptotic estimates of confidence regions based on small samples provide an optimistic view of the actual statistical reliability of the solution. The authors wish to thank Geert DeSoete, Richard A. Harshman, William Heiser, Jon Kettenring, Joseph B. Kruskal, Jacqueline Meulman, James O. Ramsay, John W. Tukey, Paul A. Tukey, and Mike Wish. Sharon L. Weinberg is a consultant at AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, New Jersey 07974.     

Children's comprehension of relative clauses

A review of the literature on children's use of relative clause constructions reveals many contradictory findings. The suggestion is that some studies fail to take into account the two factors of embeddedness (role of complex noun phrase within the sentence) and focus (role of head noun in the relative clause). The experiment reported here attempted to reconcile the disparate findings and extend the range of constructions examined. 114 children between the ages of 3 and 7 served as subjects in a test of comprehension using an act-out procedure of 9 different relative clause sentences that exhaust the possible combination of 3 roles of the complex noun phrase in the sentence and 3 roles that the head noun plays within the relative clause (in each case, subject, driect object, and indirect object). All constructions were understood better with increasing age of the children sex and sentence set were nonsignificant variables. The results reveal a difficulty in ordering of the 9 types of construction that is in keeping with a prediction based on surface structure processing strategies.This research was supported by grant No. BNS73-09150 from the National Science Foundation to Professor Roger Brown.     

Use of the titles Ms., Miss,or Mrs.: Does it make a difference?

In a study of sexism and language 112 persons at a shopping mall were asked to read a paragraph about an achieving woman who was either given the title Miss, Mrs., or Ms., or not given a title. Persons receiving the paragraph with the Ms. title rated the woman as less honest. No effect of the title variation was obtained on a number of other rating dimensions. The results were interpreted as reflecting public acceptance of the use of the Ms. title.     

VELOCITY PERCEPTION — CENTRALLY OR RETINALLY ORGANISED?

C ohen , R. L. Velocity perception—centrally or retinally organised? Scand. J. Psychol ., 1961, 2, 45–48.—5 subjects were asked to estimate ( a ) the relative and (6) the absolute velocities of two spots moving in a simple harmonic motion, 180° out of phase under two experimental conditions: (1) both spots projected on to bothretinas, and (2) one spot projected on to one retina and the second on to the other. Theresults were precisely the same under both conditions. This was taken as indicating that(a) the organisation of velocity perception is central rather than retinal, and ( b ) the effect of interference caused by one spot when trying to estimate the velocity of the other (the signal) is not lessened when the interference is fed into the eye other than the one receiving the signal spot.