The Conceptual Complexity of Presidents Carter and Clinton: An Automated Content Analysis of Temporal Stability and Source Bias

Previous work on the measurement of leaders' foreign policy orientations by Margaret G. Hermann argues that spontaneous utterances should provide more useful indications of stable personality characteristics than prepared statements. This paper reconsiders this question for Presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton through an automated coding system. A large number of spontaneous utterances and prepared statements by these presidents were compared in an effort to determine the stability of their conceptual complexity across source types and over time. The findings support the ability of Hermann's conceptual complexity measurement to capture robust differences between individuals; however, scores derived from spontaneous comments varied significantly from those derived from prepared remarks. In addition, the trait appears to be stable for some subjects (Carter) but not for others (Clinton).     

Leadership Image-Building: After Clinton and Watergate

Leadership images are built collectively by leaders and their relevantconstituencies—elected officials, the news media, and the public. The process of buildingleadership image rests on prior expectations about the leader, policy outputs, the course ofevents, and the disposition of political resources. In building images of leadership, each of thethree constituencies puts more weight on some aspects of image-building than on others: Thepublic sees the president primarily in terms of his previous behavior, the media view thepresident through the lens of immediate events, and other elected officials focus on politicalresources. One of the president's most important resources is his public image. It can helphim to maintain the loyalty of other officials, which in turn contributes to balanced newscoverage, even in times of crisis. President Clinton was able to preserve his public image throughthe impeachment debacle in large part because of low public expectations about his personalmoral behavior and satisfaction with his economic leadership. Conversely, President Nixon wasforced to resign because of high public expectations about his personal probity anddisappointment with his management of the economy.     

Media presentation of the mental health bill and representations of mental health problems

This paper discusses the findings of a study that examined the way in which the Mental Health Bill of June 2002 was presented in the British national and local media over a 3‐year period. A Lexis Nexis search yielded 256 articles, which were then analysed qualitatively and quantitatively. Overall, and perhaps contrary to what might have been expected given previous studies' conclusions regarding the media's negative portrayal of mental ill health, most articles tended to present a negative view of the Bill as unnecessarily repressive, and consequently were more sympathetic towards mental heath service clients, although this was not the case for tabloid articles. However, this paper then considers the more implicit representations found within the articles. It focuses particularly on the continued linking of mental ill health and violence, and also on the way in which the mental health service user might be portrayed as passive and rather pitiful as an alternative to violent and dangerous. It is suggested that the continued use of such images may stem from the fact that mental health problems have long been constructed as ‘Other’, and are therefore deeply engrained in our society. The implications of this for anti‐stigma campaigns are briefly discussed. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Sexism Versus Partisanship: A New Look at the Question of Whether America is Ready for a Woman President

We question the validity of traditional polling about the likelihood of respondents to vote for a woman president and argue that the use of such polls may overestimate sexism and underestimate the role that party identification and individual characteristics play in deciding about whether to vote for a woman president. Our analysis of data collected in May–June 2004 show that many people who say they will not vote for a woman for president would do so if given realistic, specific, political scenarios via head-to-head match-ups with potential candidates. Although survey respondents preferred George W. Bush to Hillary Clinton, the margin between these candidates was close especially considering that Bush had been actively campaigning for months, whereas Clinton had not.     

Learning impairment following insoluble problems: Learned helplessness or altered hypothesis pool?

According to the learned helplessness hypothesis, the learning impairment typically displayed by subjects previously given insoluble problems results from the veridical learning of response-outcome independence. This learning is represented as a belief in helplessness which interferes with the subsequent acquisition of adaptive responses. However, this interpretation is suspect since subjects in a psychology experiment tend not to learn that random relationships are random. Instead, an alternative interpretation of these findings attributes the learning impairment following insoluble problems to a hypothesis pool alteration in the direction of (inappropriately) complex hypotheses. This alternative interpretation tended to be supported ported in Experiment 1, which varied the difficulty of the test task and found the impairment (relative to a no-treatment control) following insolubility to be inversely proportional to the test difficulty. In contrast, Experiment 2 employed a procedure which facilitated the attribution of response-outcome independence and found the impairment following insolubility to be directly proportional to the test difficulty. It was concluded that the results of Experiment 2 represented learned helplessness.     

Word-by-word analysis of observer agreement utilizing audio and audiovisual techniques

The purpose of this study was to compare audio and audiovisual techniques of analyzing stuttering behavior using a recently developed index of agreement (Young, 1975). Twenty speech pathologists identified moments of stuttering for ten adult stutterers using both audio and audiovisual methods. Although no statistically significant differences existed between the two conditions, the listeners had more difficulty identifying moments of stuttering during the audio condition when mild stutterers were used.     

Multiple component agraphia in a patient with atypical cerebral dominance: an error analysis

A 52-year-old man with atypical cerebral dominance (left-handed for writing but mixed handedness for other tasks) suffered an extensive right hemisphere stroke, resulting in a combination of deficits that has not been previously reported. There were profound visual constructive and visual perceptual disturbances and a spatial agraphia, which were consistent with a nondominant hemisphere lesion. There was also a severe apraxic agraphia, which is typically associated with a dominant hemisphere lesion, but no other signs of dominant hemisphere dysfunction such as linguistic disturbance or limb-motor apraxia were present. This case serves to highlight the functional and anatomical relationship between handwriting and other forms of praxis; the various sources of error in letter formation; the need to be specific in labeling and describing agraphias ; and the role of a detailed analysis of writing errors in delineating the neuropsychological processes involved in handwriting.     

Children's comprehension of presupposed information: Logical and pragmatic inferences to speaker belief

This study explored the ability of young children (5 and 8 years old) to make presuppositional inferences to a speaker's belief in uttering a sentence. Presuppositional information is the information a speaker believes to be common between himself and the hearer. The information is cued by a speaker either logically, by the use of specific lexical items, or pragmatically, by the use of an utterance in violation of conventional rules of conversation. Comprehension of the information may require a reading of the context of utterance. Kindergarten and thirdgrade children and adults were read paragraphs containing both logical and pragmatic presuppositional information, as well as a sentence that could be treated in a logical or a pragmatic manner depending on the context of utterance. The results showed that both groups of children and the adults could make presuppositional inferences to a speaker's belief, and that the responses of the children and adults were context sensitive.