Accident involvement among Iranian lorry drivers: Direct and indirect effects of background variables and aberrant driving behaviour

Road accident rates among Iranian lorry drivers are considerably high and, according to empirical evidence, aberrant driving behaviours, summed to certain demographic, psycho-social and work-related factors, may explain their accident involvement. Consequently, the main aim of the study was to examine the direct and indirect effects of background variables (i.e. annual mileage, lorry driving experience, demographic and socioeconomic factors) on accident involvement mediated through aberrant driving behaviour among Iranian lorry drivers. A cross-sectional questionnaire survey was conducted in 2012 among 914 lorry drivers in 10 selected provinces in Iran. The 27-item Driver Behaviour Questionnaire (DBQ) was used to measure aberrant driving behaviour. Results from valid observations (n = 785) confirmed a four-factor solution (including ordinary violations, aggressive violations, errors, and lapses) of the DBQ. Errors, ordinary violations and aggressive violations were positively associated with accident involvement. However, lapses were not significantly associated with accident involvement. The results of structural equation modeling (SEM) further showed that, in addition to direct effects of background variables on accident involvement, several variables had indirect effects mediated by three-DBQ factors; ordinary violations, aggressive violations, and errors. Higher age, having more lorry driving experience, having higher educational attainment, and married drivers were indirectly related to less accident involvement. Annual driving mileage and the resting rate of drivers was both directly and indirectly related to accident involvement. Higher income and car ownership were directly related to fewer accidents. Interventions could aim to decrease ordinary violations, aggressive violations and errors among younger, less educated and single lorry drivers. Initiatives targeted to increase the scheduled resting frequency of lorry drivers may also hold promise.     

Reformation Humanism: Reading the Classics in the New Theology

Scholarly discussions on what constitutes Christian humanism in the Renaissance and Reformation periods have typically concentrated on its manifestations before 1536, when Erasmus died. In this period, the old arguments for the reading of the Classics once set out by Basil and Augustine still predominated. Calvin’s teaching on the Fall and the noetic effects of sin, however, provided another basis for the incorporation of pagan thought into Christian learning. Christians who followed Calvin benefited from his precise and comprehensive theological position on the place of worldly knowledge in God’s original creation as a means for justifying their study of the Classics.     

基于结构方程模型的有调节的中介效应分析

有调节的中介模型是中介过程受到调节变量影响的模型。指出了目前有调节的中介效应分析普遍存在的问题：当前有调节的中介效应检验大多使用多元线性回归分析,忽略了测量误差;而基于结构方程模型(SEM)的有调节的中介效应分析需要产生乘积指标,又会面临乘积指标生成和乘积项非正态分布的问题。在简介潜调节结构方程(LMS)方法后,建议使用LMS方法得到偏差校正的bootstrap置信区间来进行基于SEM的有调节的中介效应分析。总结出一个有调节的中介SEM分析流程,并有示例和相应的Mplus程序。文末展望了LMS和有调节的中介模型的发展方向。     

积极刻板印象会产生消极影响?

积极刻板印象是对社会群体的积极特质的描述, 以往刻板印象的相关研究主要聚焦于消极刻板印象, 却忽略了对积极刻板印象尤其是其消极影响的探讨。基于此, 分别从种族、性别和年龄这三个方面详细梳理了积极刻板印象的积极影响和消极影响, 并阐述了其产生的条件, 包括积极刻板印象的微妙激活和明显激活、积极刻板印象的准确表述和极端表述、积极刻板印象阐述者的内外群身份、呈现积极刻板印象的文化背景等。未来研究可从集体主义文化、研究领域和对象, 干预方法和消极刻板印象的积极影响等方面进一步探讨。     

Specific subtype of fluency disorder affecting French speaking children: A phonological analysis

PurposeClinicians working with fluency disorders sometimes see children whose word repetitions are mostly located at the end of words and do not induce physical tension. Prior studies on the topic have proposed several names for these disfluencies including “end word repetitions”, “final sound repetitions” and “atypical disfluency”. The purpose of this study was to use phonological analysis to explore the patterns of this poorly recognized fluency disorder in order to better understand its specific speech characteristics.MethodsWe analyzed a spontaneous language sample of 8 French speaking children. Audio and video recordings allowed us to study general communication issues as well as linguistic and acoustical data.ResultsWe did not detect speech rupture or coarticulation failures between the syllable onset and rhyme. The problem resides primarily on the rhyme production with a voicing interruption in the middle of the syllable nucleus or a repetition of the rhyme (nucleus alone or nucleus and coda), regardless of the position in the word or phrase.ConclusionThe present study provides data suggesting that there exist major differences in syllable production between the disfluencies produced by our 8 children and stuttered disfluencies. Consequently, we believe that this fluency disorder should be recognized as distinct from stuttering.     

Information Medicine: An Application of the New Paradigm in Medicine

Information medicine is a new application and development of an age-old method of healing. It re-creates and re-discovers a method that has proved its merits for thousands of years through a synthesis with new developments in new-paradigm physics and biology. The basic premise of information medicine is the use of information to correct faulty or blocked information-flows in the organism. As the latest discoveries, among others by Dr. Biava, show, even cancerous cells can be reprogrammed through the introduction of substances that provide the correct information. Also, electromagnetic information can produce corrective re-programming, introducing an era of soft, information-based healing not as a substitute for, but as a complement to, the current biochemical substance and physical intervention-based methods. The information-based method I have developed is the one created by the Austrian scientist Erich Koerbler, called New Homeopathy. It harmonizes the electromagnetic field in the body through the use of specific geometrical forms. This article outlines the basic elements of this application of the new paradigm in medicine, with more detailed information provided in the references.     

Breaking Down the Bilingual Cost in Speech Production

Bilinguals have been shown to perform worse than monolinguals in a variety of verbal tasks. This study investigated this bilingual verbal cost in a large‐scale picture‐naming study conducted in Spanish. We explored how individual characteristics of the participants and the linguistic properties of the words being spoken influence this performance cost. In particular, we focused on the contributions of lexical frequency and phonological similarity across translations. The naming performance of Spanish‐Catalan bilinguals speaking in their dominant and non‐dominant language was compared to that of Spanish monolinguals. Single trial naming latencies were analyzed by means of linear mixed models accounting for individual effects at the participant and item level. While decreasing lexical frequency was shown to increase naming latencies in all groups, this variable by itself did not account for the bilingual cost. In turn, our results showed that the bilingual cost disappeared when naming words with high phonological similarity across translations. In short, our results show that frequency of use can play a role in the emergence of the bilingual cost, but that phonological similarity across translations should be regarded as one of the most important variables that determine the bilingual cost in speech production. Low phonological similarity across translations yields worse performance in bilinguals and promotes the bilingual cost in naming performance. The implications of our results for the effect of phonological similarity across translations within the bilingual speech production system are discussed.     

“Blind” interviewing: Is ignorance bliss?

Current investigative interviewing guidelines [e.g., Technical Working Group: Eyewitness evidence. (1999). Eyewitness evidence: A guide for law enforcement. U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, National Institute of Justice. Retrieved from https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/178240.pdf] suggest that interviewers review available case information prior to conducting a witness interview. The present study investigated the effect of interviewers’ pre-interview awareness of crime details on eyewitnesses’ memory and interviewer behaviour shortly after a mock crime or a week later. Results indicate that blind interviewers with no knowledge about the crime elicited more correct information than those who were correctly informed about the crime. Differences in interviewer behaviour emerged only in the very first question of the interview: Blind interviewers were more likely to begin the interview with a non-suggestive question than the informed interviewers. Blind interviewers also recalled more details than the informed interviewers when asked to generate a report after the witness interview documenting the witness’ account.     

A role of goals for social inhibition of return?

The social inhibition of return (sIOR) effect refers to the finding that response initiation times are longer if a movement is executed to a location where another person has responded to just before. Previous studies have examined the influence of the goal of the action on sIOR. In these studies, however, the movement endpoint and to-be-attained goal (e.g., touching/pressing a response key) were at the same spatial location. In the present two experiments, we disentangled movement endpoint and goal's identity and locations by means of introducing action effects that followed directly from a movement. Similar methods were previously shown powerful enough to clearly show the importance of action goals for other phenomena—a finding consistent with effect-based theories of action control, such as the ideomotor theory. The results of the present study revealed that sIOR was shaped by the movement endpoint location, not the goal's identity or location. That is, in both experiments, an sIOR effect was observed, but the magnitude of the sIOR effect was not modulated by repetitions/switches of goals or their locations. Thus, results indicate that goals play a negligible role in the emergence of the sIOR and, consequently, highlight the importance of action observation for the emergence of the sIOR effect.     

Not lost in translation: writing auditorily presented words at study increases correct recognition “at no cost”

Previous studies have reported a translation effect in memory, whereby encoding tasks that involve translating between processing domains produce a memory advantage relative to tasks that involve a single domain. We investigated the effects of translation on true and false memories using the Deese/Roediger-McDermott (DRM) procedure [Deese, J. (1959). On the prediction of occurrence of particular verbal intrusions in immediate recall. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 58, 17–22; Roediger, H. L., III, & McDermott, K. B. (1995). Creating false memories: Remembering words not presented in lists. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition, 21, 803–814]. Translation between modalities enhanced correct recognition but had no effect on false recognition. Results are consistent with previous research showing that correct memory can be enhanced “at no cost” in terms of accuracy. Findings are discussed in terms of understanding the relationship between true and false memories produced by the DRM procedure.