Sex differences in the levels of generality of values/preferences related to work

The current literature on sex differences in values/preferences related to work appears polarized around two apparently contradictory sets of findings and conclusions. One set of studies fails to detect sex differences. The other set of studies indicates that males are more concerned about money, independence, security, and career goals, while females appear more concerned about people and environmental issues at work. Following W. D. Siegfried, I. MacFarlane, D. B. Graham, N. A. Moore, and P. L. Young (Journal of Vocational Behavior, 1981, 18, 30–42) it is suggested that level of analysis may be a crucial factor accounting for much of the prevailing confusion in the literature. This study investigated sex differences in values/preferences related to work at various levels of generality. A sample of 1081 senior high school students was administered the Work Aspect Preference Scale (WAPS). Complete-link cluster analyses were performed for males and females separately. Comparison of the two dendrograms reveals the substantial similarity of the preference patterns of males and females. However, the basic difference in the patterns focused on the Altruism and Physical Activity subscales. Females appeared more likely to associate helping others with personal achievement whereas males tended to see helping people in terms of controlling and organizing them. Females also linked physical activity with helping others and self-development whereas males tended to associate physical activity with extrinsic rewards of work. It is concluded that the use of cluster analysis techniques may provide the best procedure to effect an adequate reconciliation of the conflicting results to be found in the current literature.     

The development of young children's awareness of logical inconsistencies

Research by Markman (1979) suggests that children up to 12 years of age do not spontaneously detect logical inconsistencies. The present study was directed to factors which may limit children's ability to recognize their failures to understand. A task was devised which involved materials that were clearly based on children's experiences, and which involved premises and conclusions which were presented contiguously, rather than being interspersed among other sentences. Ninety-six 5-, 6-, and 7-year-old children were asked to judge the acceptability of eight three-sentence “stories” told by a puppet, and were asked to justify their responses. The stories differed in whether they were consistent or inconsistent, and in whether the principle upon which a story's consistency depended was implicitly or explicitly stated. The results showed developmental differences. By Age 7 years, most children were quite capable of evaluating sentences for their logical consistency. Five-year-olds, however, did not perform as well on the task, especially when the information upon which the logical cohesiveness of the stories rested was implicitly, rather than explicitly, stated. An examination of the justifications provided by these children revealed that they tended to question the empirical validity of individual sentences, rather than integrate the story as a whole and examine its overall logical structure.     

Attentional biases and the right-ear effect in dichotic listening

Most dichotic listening experiments permit subjects to deploy attention in any way they choose. We argue that this adds uncontrolled variance to the observed right-ear advantage. In the first experiment, more robust laterality effects were obtained in an identification task with focused than with divided attention. Such differences were not found in the second experiment, when a detection procedure was used. Virtually all the laterality effect observed in the second study could be attributed to subjects who were biased attenders, in the sense that they exhibited more intrusions from the right ear to the left than vice versa. However, rather than indicating that laterality effects are simply attentional bias, this effect can be attributed to an asymmetry of perceptual discrimination.     

Choosing to believe

This article defends a regulative ethics of voluntary belief. In order to determine the occasion and the scope of such an ethics, the article begins with an examination of the concept of belief in conversation with the view of J. L. Schellenberg. Next, against the dominant position in contemporary epistemology, it argues that some beliefs can be voluntary, in the sense that they are under the immediate control of the believer, and replies to William Alston’s influential objections to doxastic voluntarism. If some beliefs are subject to the immediate control of the believer, then in these cases believers are ethically responsible not only for how they investigate those beliefs, but also for the choice of whether or not to believe them. The article concludes by formulating and defending two types of regulative ethical principles governing voluntary belief.     

Was William James a Patient at McLean Hospital for the Mentally Ill?

Rumors that William James was a patient at McLean Asylum near Boston have persisted for several decades. I focus on the reasons why the question has been so difficult to answer in any definitive way; assess the evidence presented in support of the rumors; note that two different periods in James’s life (late twenties and early sixties) have been judged the most likely; and explore the diagnostic question as well: If he was in fact a patient, for what was he being treated? I also discuss evidence that his younger brother Robertson was a patient at McLean and consider the bearing of this evidence on the question of whether William James was a patient at McLean and on the diagnostic issue.     

人格分化的智力假设

人格与智力是个体差异中相互关联的两个重要方面,人格随智力水平的提高而不断分化,智力影响了特定人格维度之间的相关。尽管人格分化的智力假设尚未获得一致性的证据,但它却暗示了智力对人格结构的潜在影响。由于人格测量工具的信度和效度可能因受测者的能力水平而异,因此未来的研究应在使用统一测量工具的基础上,尽量扩大被试的能力范围,采用多重评估或集合评定的方法,使人格测量真正独立于受测者的认知能力。     

Affect as a mediator of attributional egotism

A three-stage model of the relationships among achievement outcomes, outcome-related affect, attribution, and emotion is tested in two studies. It is suggested that success and failure elicit positive and negative affective states due to prior conditioning. These affective states then lead to an attribution process that serves to defend and enhance self-esteem. Next, emotional labels are chosen that are consistent with the affective states and the attributions. Two studies were designed to test the proposed relationships among achievement outcomes, affective states, and attributions. In the first study, subjects received information indicating that they were strongly or mildly aroused as a result of receiving outcome feedback on an achievement task. The results indicated that low arousal reduced egotistical attributions to internal factors. In the second study, subjects either succeeded or failed on an achievement task. Half of the subjects were provided with an opportunity to misattribute the arousal elicited by their outcomes to an irrelevant source. Subjects in the misattribution condition made less egotistical attributions to external factors than subjects who were given no opportunity to misattribute their arousal. The results of both studies suggest that outcome-related affect mediates the relationship between outcomes and attributions in achievement situations.     

Analysis of variances and covariances is misleading as a guide to a common factor model

The “factor” analyses published by Schultz, Kaye, and Hoyer (1980) confused component and factor analysis and led in this case as in many others to unwarranted conclusions. They used component analysis to develop factor models that were subjected to restricted (confirmatory) maximum likelihood analysis, but the final models for which good fits with the observed correlations were obtained were not common factor models. They were, however, discussed as such and conclusions drawn accordingly. When their correlation matrices are analyzed by the principal factors method, two factors are sufficient to account for the intercorrelations. These two factors generally support the a priori expectation of a difference between intelligence tasks and spontaneous flexibility tasks. They are also quite similar in younger and older subjects, when similarity is judged in terms of factor pattern. Factor loadings for the younger subjects, however, are much smaller than expectations based on the respective ranges of talent in the two groups of subjects or on past experience with similar tests in undergraduate student populations.     

Learning from the patient: The East,synchronicity and transference in the history of an unknown case of C.G. Jung

This article presents the history of one until now unknown case of C.G. Jung: Maggy Reichstein. Born in Indonesia in 1894 in a very aristocratic family, she brought her sister to Zurich to be treated by Jung in 1919, and later she herself was in analysis with him. Jung used her case as example in his lecture in 1937 on the realities of practical psychotherapy, relating it to the process of transference and countertransference. Jung deepened his studies in Eastern psychology after a series of dreams she had, which culminated in the Yoga Kundalini Seminars. She was also the case presented in his article of 1951 on the concept of synchronicity. Jung wrote that her case, concerning synchronicity, remained unique in his experience. Jung also published some of her mandalas. He considered her able to understand his ideas in depth. Reichstein was for Jung an important case, which challenged and triggered his interests in different subjects.     

TELEOLOGY PAST AND PRESENT

Abstract. Current teleology in Western biology, philosophy, and theology draws on resources from four main Western philosophers. (1) Plato's Timaeus shows how to interpret the universe as the handiwork of a purposive Creator who subordinates secondary, necessary, causes to primary, intelligent, causes. (2) Aristotle's Physics sets forth purpose as implicit in the nature of things. Purposes of different sorts inhere in different types of being, and everything has a natural function. Living things grow to actualize the potentials of the goal whose principle they bear within themselves. (3) Kant's Critique of Judgment denies that purpose is anything that human beings can know, strictly speaking. Nevertheless, purpose is a concept we must use to make sense of biological systems. (4) Hegel's Philosophy of Nature articulates organic systems as dialectically including and transcending mechanical and chemical systems. Teleological themes persist, in different ways, in contemporary discussions; I consider two lines of criticism of traditional teleology—by Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould—and one line that continues traditional teleology in an updated way—by Holmes Rolston, III.