Mindfulness and Marital Satisfaction

This study investigated the relationships among mindfulness, marital satisfaction, and perceived spousal similarity. All 95 subjects responded to a questionnaire measuring each of these variables, and an additional series of demographic variables. A significant positive relationship was found between mindfulness and marital satisfaction, with no statistically significant relationship found between perceived spousal similarity and marital satisfaction. There was a stronger correlation between mindfulness and marital satisfaction than the correlation between marital satisfaction and any of the other variables, including similarity. These results carry meaningful implications for the role of mindfulness techniques within the context of building and maintaining happy marital relationships and general well-being.     

The longitudinal and concurrent role of neuroticism for partner relationships

Neurotic characteristics of spouses have often been associated with dissatisfaction with the partner relationship. This article addresses the question whether the link between dissatisfaction with the relationship and neuroticism appears during the partner relationship, or whether it is present before the person enters the relationship. Utilizing data from a Swedish longitudinal project, satisfaction with the partner relationship was linked with neuroticism both in adolescence and in adulthood. Adolescent neuroticism was measured at age 15 with the High School Personality Questionnaire (HSPQ), and adult neuroticism was measured at age 37 with the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire (EPQ-I). Results showed that a lower degree of satisfaction in partner relationships in mid-life was linked with higher concurrent neuroticism scores. Opposing most of the previous studies, this association appeared for both men and women. Higher neuroticism in adolescence was, however, not significantly associated with satisfaction in partner relationships in mid-life.     

The influence of hierarchy on probability judgment

Consider the task of predicting which soccer team will win the next World Cup. The bookmakers may judge Brazil to be the team most likely to win, but also judge it most likely that a European rather than a Latin American team will win. This is an example of a non-aligned hierarchy structure: the most probable event at the subordinate level (Brazil wins) appears to be inconsistent with the most probable event at the superordinate level (a European team wins). In this paper we exploit such structures to investigate how people make predictions based on uncertain hierarchical knowledge. We distinguish between aligned and non-aligned environments, and conjecture that people assume alignment. Participants were exposed to a non-aligned training set in which the most probable superordinate category predicted one outcome, whereas the most probable subordinate category predicted a different outcome. In the test phase participants allowed their initial probability judgments about category membership to shift their final ratings of the probability of the outcome, even though all judgments were made on the basis of the same statistical data. In effect people were primed to focus on the most likely path in an inference tree, and neglect alternative paths. These results highlight the importance of the level at which statistical data are represented, and suggest that when faced with hierarchical inference problems people adopt a simplifying heuristic that assumes alignment.     

Remarks on the identifiability of thurstonian paired comparison models under multiple judgment

It is well-known that the representations of the Thurstonian models for difference judgment data are not unique. It has been shown that equivalence classes can be formed to provide a more meaningful partition of the covariance structures of the Thurstonian ranking models. In this paper, we examine the equivalence relations between Thurstonian covariance structure models for paired comparison data obtained under multiple judgment and discuss their implications on the general identification constraints and methods to check for parameter identifiability in restricted models.The author is indebted to Ulf Böckenholt and Albert Maydeu-Olivares for their significant comments and suggestions which led to considerable improvement in this article.     

Happiness, Materialism, and Religious Experience in the US AND SINGAPORE

This study examines relationships between three central human concepts. From national probability samples of adults in the United States and in Singapore, we measured happiness, materialism (operationalized as the three sub-scales of possession-defined success, acquisition centrality, and acquisition as the pursuit of happiness), and religious experience (using three scales measuring intrinsic religiosity, extrinsic religiosity, and religion as quest). It was expected and found that happiness is negatively related to overall materialism in both the US and in Singapore, although happiness" relationship with the three materialism sub-scales was mixed. We observed that adults in Singapore are less happy and more materialistic than those in the US It was expected that happiness would have a positive relationship with intrinsic religiosity and extrinsic religiosity, but a negative relationship with religion as quest. Though our results largely support these hypotheses, they produce some unexpected differences between the two countries and across the three religiosity dimensions. We conclude that happiness is not associated with people's material accumulation but with their perceived inner world. And happy people see their religion not so much as something they do as what they are.     

The early acquisition of verb meaning in German by normally developing and language impaired children

The research reported here focuses on the early acquisition of event structure in German. Based on longitudinal studies from 5 normally developing (ND) and 6 language-impaired (LI) children, a model of "event structural bootstrapping" is presented that spells out how ND children log into the verb lexicon. They project a target-consistent event tree, depicting the head-of-event of transitions. Young LI children, failing to employ this bootstrapping strategy, resort to radically underspecified event representations. The results from a truth-value judgment experiment with 16 ND and 16 LI children showed that ND children perform correctly on transitional verbs, while LI children perform at chance level on the same tasks. These findings are accounted for by the model of event structural bootstrapping to the extent that LI children lack an explicit representation of the head-of-event.     

Measuring Judgments of Professionals: Using Vignettes in a Social Survey About Patient Confusion

The use of a factorial survey to measure the clinical judgments of professionals is described. This design allows the researcher to partial out the effects of variables on clinical decision making while using probability sampling. Methods frequently used to study judgments are reviewed and a study of nurses' judgments about patients' confusional episodes are used to illustrate the application of the factorial survey. Acute confusion in patients is a common clinical problem for nurses working in medical-surgical units in acute care hospitals. Using the factorial survey to study a real-life problem such as confusion demonstrates how this design can be used to test judgments in complex clinical situations, to aid in concept development, and to identify consensus among professionals.     

Conservative Theories of Classical Truth

Some axiomatic theories of truth and related subsystems of second-order arithmetic are surveyed and shown to be conservative over their respective base theory. In particular, it is shown by purely finitistically means that the theory PA ÷ "there is a satisfaction class" and the theory FS of [2] are conservative over PA.     

The Mental Representation of Human Action

Various theories of moral cognition posit that moral intuitions can be understood as the output of a computational process performed over structured mental representations of human action. We propose that action plan diagrams—“act trees”—can be a useful tool for theorists to succinctly and clearly present their hypotheses about the information contained in these representations. We then develop a methodology for using a series of linguistic probes to test the theories embodied in the act trees. In Study 1, we validate the method by testing a specific hypothesis (diagrammed by act trees) about how subjects are representing two classic moral dilemmas and finding that the data support the hypothesis. In Studies 2–4, we explore possible explanations for discrete and surprising findings that our hypothesis did not predict. In Study 5, we apply the method to a less well‐studied case and show how new experiments generated by our method can be used to settle debates about how actions are mentally represented. In Study 6, we argue that our method captures the mental representation of human action better than an alternative approach. A brief conclusion suggests that act trees can be profitably used in various fields interested in complex representations of human action, including law, philosophy, psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, computer science, robotics, and artificial intelligence.