The Effects of Statistical Format and Population Specificity on Adolescent Perceptions of Cell Phone Use While Driving

Research on risk communication has established that people are influenced by numerical values as well as geographical reference points, or populations, in statistical messages. The ratio bias theory predicts that messages featuring higher casualty numbers will be more influential than similar messages featuring smaller values. However, research on the effects of population specificity predicts that risk messages containing specific populations with naturally lower casualty values will be more effective than similar messages containing larger populations and proportionally greater numbers. This study investigated the contradiction between ratio bias and the effects of population specificity. Students in a drivers’ education class (N?=?112) were randomly assigned to read one of four sets of statistical messages about cell phone use while driving that featured either a general (for example, United States) or specific population (for example, Nassau County), and was expressed using one of two statistical formats, frequencies (for example, “9,000 car accidents…”) or probabilities (for example, “25 % of car accidents…”). Participants then rated their intentions to and perceived risk of using cell phones while driving. Participants who viewed messages featuring general populations along with their naturally larger statistics reported lower intentions to use cell phones while driving than those who were exposed to messages with smaller numbers, but more specific populations. Results suggest that emphasizing larger-valued numbers may be a more effective means of risk communication than depicting specific conditions. These findings have implications for the enhancement of driver safety education to discourage the use of cell phones while driving by teenage drivers.     

It is nice to be important,but it is more important to be nice: Country‐of‐origin's perceived warmth in product failures

Although a large body of research has documented country‐of‐origin effects, very few works have inquired systematic differences in the content of national stereotypes that shape attitudes toward foreign products and their manufacturers. Drawing from the stereotype content model, the authors propose that the often ignored warmth dimension of the origin country is as important as (sometimes more important than) the well‐studied competence dimension in certain situations. As shown in two studies, perceived warmth of the origin country predicts purchase intention in normal situations as well as after product failure. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

An Extension of Dominance Analysis to Canonical Correlation Analysis

Dominance analysis (Budescu, 1993 Budescu, D. V. 1993. Dominance analysis: A new approach to the problem of relative importance of predictors in multiple regression.. Psychological Bulletin, 114: 542–551. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) offers a general framework for determination of relative importance of predictors in univariate and multivariate multiple regression models. This approach relies on pairwise comparisons of the contribution of predictors in all relevant subset models. In this article we extend dominance analysis to canonical correlation analysis to explore the relative importance of the variables in both sets. The proposed extension provides (a) a decomposition of the models' fit into components associated with the individual variables; (b) the ability to compare the relative importance of variables from the two sets; (c) the ability to perform multistage analyses, involving all canonical variates; and (d) a bootstrapping inference procedure. The approach is illustrated with an empirical data example involving parenting styles and youth outcomes and its unique features are highlighted and discussed.     

Outcome favorability as a boundary condition to voice effect on people's reactions to public policymaking

Regarding people's reactions to public policymaking, an organizational justice framework has been introduced. Although these studies showed a link between fairness perceptions and attitudes toward public policy and authority, results concerning more behavioral consequences and the moderation of outcome favorability are less clear. The present research explored the voice effect on people's reactions to public policymaking, as well as outcome favorability as a boundary condition to it. Two different settings and use of different designs (a scenario and an experiment) yielded convergent results that people's reactions to public policymaking were more favorable when they had voice than they did not and outcome favorability moderated the voice effect. More precisely, the voice effect was stronger when the outcome was unfavorable than favorable.     

A Comparison of Imputation Strategies for Ordinal Missing Data on Likert Scale Variables

This article compares a variety of imputation strategies for ordinal missing data on Likert scale variables (number of categories = 2, 3, 5, or 7) in recovering reliability coefficients, mean scale scores, and regression coefficients of predicting one scale score from another. The examined strategies include imputing using normal data models with naïve rounding/without rounding, using latent variable models, and using categorical data models such as discriminant analysis and binary logistic regression (for dichotomous data only), multinomial and proportional odds logistic regression (for polytomous data only). The result suggests that both the normal model approach without rounding and the latent variable model approach perform well for either dichotomous or polytomous data regardless of sample size, missing data proportion, and asymmetry of item distributions. The discriminant analysis approach also performs well for dichotomous data. Naïvely rounding normal imputations or using logistic regression models to impute ordinal data are not recommended as they can potentially lead to substantial bias in all or some of the parameters.     

Visual spatial constancy and modularity: Does intention penetrate vision?

Is vision informationally encapsulated from cognition or is it cognitively penetrated? I shall argue that intentions penetrate vision in the experience of visual spatial constancy: the world appears to be spatially stable despite our frequent eye movements. I explicate the nature of this experience and critically examine and extend current neurobiological accounts of spatial constancy, emphasizing the central role of motor signals in computing such constancy. I then provide a stringent condition for failure of informational encapsulation that emphasizes a computational condition for cognitive penetration: cognition must serve as an informational resource for visual computation. This requires proposals regarding semantic information transfer, a crucial issue in any model of informational encapsulation. I then argue that intention provides an informational resource for computation of visual spatial constancy. Hence, intention penetrates vision.     

The representation of category typicality in the frontal cortex and its cross-linguistic variations

When asked to judge the membership of typical (e.g., car) vs. atypical (e.g., train) pictures of a category (e.g., vehicle), native English (N = 18) and native Chinese speakers (N = 18) showed distinctive patterns of brain activity despite showing similar behavioral responses. Moreover, these differences were mainly due to the amount and pervasiveness of category information linguistically embedded in the everyday names of the items in the respective languages, with important differences across languages in how pervasive category labels are embedded in item-level terms. Nonetheless, the left inferior frontal gyrus and the bilateral medial frontal gyrus are the most consistent neural correlates of category typicality that persist across languages and linguistic cues. These data together suggest that both cross- and within-language differences in the explicitness of category information have strong effects on the nature of categorization processes performed by the brain.     

Non-selective lexical access in bilinguals is spontaneous and independent of input monitoring: Evidence from eye tracking

Language non-selective lexical access in bilinguals has been established mainly using tasks requiring explicit language processing. Here, we show that bilinguals activate native language translations even when words presented in their second language are incidentally processed in a nonverbal, visual search task. Chinese–English bilinguals searched for strings of circles or squares presented together with three English words (i.e., distracters) within a 4-item grid. In the experimental trials, all four locations were occupied by English words, including a critical word that phonologically overlapped with the Chinese word for circle or square when translated into Chinese. The eye-tracking results show that, in the experimental trials, bilinguals looked more frequently and longer at critical than control words, a pattern that was absent in English monolingual controls. We conclude that incidental word processing activates lexical representations of both languages of bilinguals, even when the task does not require explicit language processing.     

乐商:一个比智商和情商更能决定命运的因素

乐商(或乐观智力)是指人乐观的能力,它既包括一个人乐观水平的高低,也包括个体从所经历的消极事件中获取积极成分的能力,以及影响或感染他人的能力.“杜乡微笑”是高乐商的一种主要外在表现形式.心理学过去的有关研究证实,高乐商不仅有利于个体的社会性发展、获得稳定的幸福婚姻、提高人的生理健康水平、提高学业成绩和减少坏事情的发生,而且高乐商还有利于促使个体寻求社会支持和社会交往.这些研究结果表明,乐商可能是一个比智商和情商更能决定人未来发展命运的因素.