The world turns at 33 and 45: Defining simple cutoff scores for the Negative Acts Questionnaire–Revised in a representative sample

Workplace bullying is a serious hazard in every day working life that needs to be assessed carefully. In order to achieve such a goal, both victims of severe bullying as well as targets of less intensive bullying need to be identified, the latter in order to prevent further escalation into severe bullying. Previous research has mainly offered simple and crude measures of who is and who is not a victim of bullying. In this article we show how cutoff scores for the scale Negative Acts Questionnaire–Revised (NAQ-R) can be calculated. Based on a representative sample of the Norwegian workforce, we formulated 2 cutoff points or thresholds for the NAQ-R with a Receiver Operation Characteristic curve. Employees with a score lower than 33 are not bullied, employees with a score between 33 and 45 may be considered as being bullied occasionally, and employees who score above 45 can be considered to be victims of workplace bullying. As the NAQ-R is used in more than 300 research projects worldwide, we hope to inspire other scholars to define similar cutoff points. In addition, we hope that clear cutoff scores may be of assistance to practitioners for designing interventions regarding workplace bullying in line with the identified problems.     

Hispanic use of juramentos and Roman Catholic Priests as auxiliaries to abstaining from alcohol use/misuse

This self-administered mail survey study conducted along the US–Mexico border replicates and expands on research conducted in Florida regarding the prevalence of juramento use as an intervention technique for alcohol misuse. Juramentos are pledges to abstain from alcohol use for a time determined by the user. The pledge is usually to the Virgin of Guadalupe and is often done in the presence of a Roman Catholic Priest. As in Florida, the majority of Priests along the border reported they were familiar with the practice of juramentos and had already witnessed at least one. The majority of Priests who had done juramentos viewed them as effective. Since the vast majority of Priests indicated that they would begin or continue witnessing juramentos, this makes juramentos and Roman Catholic Priests a viable culturally sensitive aide for treatment among Hispanics, in particular those of Mexican descent.     

The Portuguese version of Addenbrooke’s Cognitive Examination–Revised (ACE-R) in the diagnosis of subcortical vascular dementia and Alzheimer’s disease

The aim of this study was to investigate the accuracy of the Portuguese version of Addenbrooke’s Cognitive Examination–Revised (ACE-R) in detecting and differentiating early stage subcortical vascular dementia (SVD) from early stage Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Ninety-two subjects (18 SVD patients, 36 AD patients, and 38 healthy controls) were assessed using the ACE-R. Between-group’s differences were evaluated using the Quade’s rank analysis of covariance. The diagnostic accuracy and discriminatory ability of the ACE-R were examined via receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis. The ACE-R was able to successfully discriminate between patients and healthy subjects. The mean ACE-R total scores differed between SVD and AD patients; there were also significant differences in attention and orientation and in memory measures between the groups. An optimal cut-off of 72/73 was found for the detection of AD (sensitivity: 97%; specificity: 92%) and SVD (sensitivity: 100%; specificity: 92%).     

Crying games in the theory of child development

Mathematical tools, such as static and dynamic optimization theory and game theory, are used to axiomatize developmental theory and to model the interaction between parents, their infant children and siblings. Parents allocate their time between parenting and other activities. They respond to their children's demand for attention. Children signal attention seeking by “crying”. Jealous siblings vie for their parents' attention. Parents, children and siblings are assumed to pursue their goals efficiently. The model solves for the equilibrium amount of crying by siblings, the allocation of parents' time between themselves and their children, and the sub-allocation of attention between rival siblings. Parents have an enlightened self-interest in promoting their children's independence, which they do by setting limits. In this they tread a fine line between spoiling and depriving their child. The model is dynamized to solve the optimal development policy of parents and to formalize the separation process of children from parents.     

Building a composite factorial score for the assessment of quality of parent–child relationships in adolescence

The quality of parent–child relationships has important implications for adolescent development and well-being. However, whereas numerous measures of specific dimensions contributing to quality of parent–child relationships are available, scales that provide a global assessment of this content are scarce. Consequently, the assessment of quality of parent–child relationships poses a challenge to the researcher, especially when the need exists to consider its main aspects but long instruments can not be used due to diverse circumstances. This paper presents a composite factorial score on quality of parent–child relationships developed from four short measures of affection, communication, parental knowledge and family satisfaction that can contribute to solving some of those difficulties. This composite score can be a useful tool to assess quality of parent–child relationships, especially for studies devoted to the study of the relationships between experiences within the family and the adolescent's well-being.     

Response–effect compatibility of finger–numeral configurations in arithmetical context

Research in experimental economics suggests that decision making in strategic interactions is often guided by a concern for fairness. However, experimental economics studies routinely place participants of equal social status and no prior social history in anonymous interactions, a context that would tend to foster the adoption of an egalitarian fairness norm. Extensive research in anthropology (Fiske, 1991) and psychology (Bugental, 2000) suggests that social norms, including fairness norms, are relationship-specific, raising doubts about whether the concern for egalitarian fairness observed in the experimental economics literature would generalize to a wider range of social relations. In this paper we focus on an alternative social norm characteristic of hierarchical relationships: noblesse oblige—the obligation of high-ranking individuals to act honorably and beneficently towards subordinates. In a series of five experiments, we show that the norm of noblesse oblige predicts tolerance of free riding better than individual self-interest does.     

Information structure expectations in sentence comprehension

In English, new information typically appears late in the sentence, as does primary accent. Because of this tendency, perceivers might expect the final constituent or constituents of a sentence to contain informational focus. This expectation should in turn affect how they comprehend focus-sensitive constructions such as ellipsis sentences. Results from four experiments on sluicing sentences (e.g., The mobster implicated the thug, but we can't find out who else) suggest that perceivers do prefer to place focus late in the sentence, though that preference can be mitigated by prosodic information (pitch accents, Experiment 2) or syntactic information (clefted sentences, Experiment 3) indicating that focus is located elsewhere. Furthermore, it is not necessarily the direct object, but the informationally focused constituent that is the preferred antecedent (Experiment 4). Expectations regarding the information structure of a sentence, which are only partly cancellable by means of overt focus markers, may explain persistent biases in ellipsis resolution.     

Generality of the summation effect in human causal learning

Considerable research has examined the contrasting predictions of the elemental and configural association theories proposed by Rescorla and Wagner (1972) and Pearce (1987), respectively. One simple method to distinguish between these approaches is the summation test, in which the associative strength attributed to a novel compound of two separately trained cues is examined. Under common assumptions, the configural view predicts that the strength of the compound will approximate to the average strength of its components, whereas the elemental approach predicts that the strength of the compound will be greater than the strength of either component. Different studies have produced mixed outcomes. In studies of human causal learning, Collins and Shanks (2006) suggested that the observation of summation is encouraged by training, in which different stimuli are associated with different submaximal outcomes, and by testing, in which the alternative outcomes can be scaled. The reported experiments further pursued this reasoning. In Experiment 1, summation was more substantial when the participants were trained with outcomes identified as submaximal than when trained with simple categorical (presence/absence) outcomes. Experiments 2 and 3 demonstrated that summation can also be obtained with categorical outcomes during training, if the participants are encouraged by instruction or the character of training to rate the separately trained components with submaximal ratings. The results are interpreted in terms of apparent performance constraints in evaluations of the contrasting theoretical predictions concerning summation.