One answer to the demand for accountability: Selection utility as an investment decision

An examination of selection utility models demonstrates that they bear a considerable resemblance to capital budgeting models well established in the finance literature. Five applications of capital budgeting to selection utility are suggested and discussed. Capital budgeting concepts are recommended as a rich source of further practical and theoretical development of selection Utility models.     

Nonimmediate language style and inconsistency between private and expressed evaluations

It was hypothesized that certain language style variations would reflect apprehension about affirming the validity of communication content. Wiener and Mehrabian (Language within language: Immediacy, a channel in verbal communication. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts,1968) have identified a cluster of such variations called verbal nonimmediacy, which they describe as indicators of psychological distance between the communicator and his/her communication. Four experiments are reported. Experiments 1 and 2 showed that communication about positive manifestations of disliked traits and negative manifestations of liked traits was more nonimmediate than when positive manifestations of liked traits or negative manifestations of disliked traits were described. This was true both when one's own or another's personality traits were described. In Experiment 3, nonimmediacy was found to increase when communications involved clear fabrications about either one's liked or disliked traits. Experiment 4 showed that when self-regard was experimentally manipulated, low self-regard subjects showed more opinion conformity and nonimmediacy in their disclosures to a confederate than did high self-regard subjects.     

Effect of mutual acquaintance on the construction of conversation

In a previous investigation, we demonstrated the role of questions as an instructional resource in the social construction of conversation by depriving conversationalists of their use. The resulting conversational structure, measured in terms of the ability of third parties to reconstruct the dialogues after they had been randomized, was impaired. The importance of culturally shared knowledge for the reconstruction (and by implication the construction) task was apparent in the superiority of British over Canadian subjects in reconstructing unconstrained British dialogues. The present study was concerned with the effects of privately shared knowledge on the construction of conversation. Conversational structure and the frequency of questions were greater in strangers' than in mutual acquaintances' unconstrained dialogues. Strangers' dialogues, but not those of mutual acquaintances, were disrupted under a ban on questions. The results were taken to indicate that strangers need to provide one another with continual instruction in how to proceed, whereas mutual acquaintances, in virtue of their privately shared social knowledge, can construct orderly dialogue with less moment-to-moment guidance.     

Relative status and interpersonal presumptuousness

Previous research has shown that, in status-discrepant dyads, the higher-status member's verbal behavior tends to be more presumptuous, that is, to have a higher proportion of utterances that imply a presumption of knowledge of the other, including Advisements, Interpretations, Confirmations, and Reflections as defined by a taxonomy of verbal response modes (VRMs). However, members of these dyads have differed in absolute status in an external social hierarchy as well as in relative status within the dyad. The present study was designed to distinguish relative status from absolute status. Eighteen senior psychology majors each participated in two similar conversations—one with a freshman and one with a professor. Conversations were coded using the VRM system. In freshman-senior dyads, seniors were more presumptuous and in senior-professor dyads, professors were more presumptuous, replicating previous findings. Seniors' presumptuousness was greater toward freshmen than toward professors, supporting the hypothesis that presumptuousness varies with relative status. Absolute status was not highly predictive of presumptuousness; there were no significant differences between seniors with freshmen and professors with seniors or between freshmen with seniors and seniors with professors.     

Mystical Experience: Unveiling the Veiled

Mystical experience is not unusual. Nearly half of all Americans report having had one or more mystical experiences. The author looks at how these experiences are moments of knowing—Do they unveil what is hidden?—and at how pastoral theologians and clinicians may help others come to understand their experience. Some thoughts on what this area of study may contribute to pastoral theology and pastoral counseling are also provided.     

APOLOGIA PRO SCRIPTURA SUA, OR MAYBE WE GOT IT RIGHT AFTER ALL

Abstract. A summary of the progress of biogenetic structuralism as an approach to the social and behavioral sciences is presented, from the publication of Biogenetic Structuralism in 1974 to the present. The difficulty that many scholars have found integrating neuroan-thropology and comparative ethology into an understanding of cultural, and particularly of religious, phenomena over the past almost two decades is considered. More specifically, the articles of James Ashbrook and Mary Lynn Dell published in the same June 1993 issue of Zygon as this article are analyzed and responded to. These authors critique Eugene d'Aquili's work of integrating neuropsychology and religious experience primarily by analyzing Brain, Symbol & Experience , which d'Aquili co-authored with Charles Laughlin, Jr., and John McManus, H. Rodney Holmes's article in the same issue of Zygon analyzes the whole corpus of d'Aquili's religion and science work as it appeared over the years in the pages of Zygon and in other articles and books as well as in Brain, Symbol & Experience. This critique is likewise carefully considered and responded to. Finally a proposed trajectory of d'Aquili's (and Andrew Newberg's) future work in their ongoing project integrating neuropsychology and religious experience is elaborated. This involves, not only expansion of their general theoretical approach, but also empirical testing of hypotheses relating brain function to religious experience using PET scanning and some newer MRI visualization techniques.     

Capacity and strategy for syntactic comprehension after left or right hemidecortication

The left and right hemispheres perform different encoding and decoding operations on a syntactically complex sentence in order to identify its meaning. Hemispheric asymmetry for syntax involves not only variations in capacity, but also differences in the strategy used to effect similar language performance.     

A category theory approach to cognitive development

The category theory concept of a commutative diagram is used to construct a model of the way in which symbolic processes are applied to problem solving. The model provides for a relationship between symbolic processes and the problem which depends on structural isomorphism and consistency, but is independent of similarity between symbol elements and problem elements. It is then shown that several different levels of thought can be distinguished within the basic model. More information is needed to assign symbolic processes to a problem in a consistent way with higher-level thought processes than with lower-level processes. These information-processing requirements permit the approximate age of mastery of each level to be predicted, thereby offering an alternate theory of cognitive developmental stages. Two experiments designed to test the theory are reported.     

A developmental study of the role of word order in comprehending Hebrew

Monolingual Hebrew-speaking subjects, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 11 years old, as well as adults, were asked to interpret utterances consisting of two nouns and a verb. Some utterances included only word order cues while others included direct object marker and subject-verb gender agreement cues. Even though Hebrew word order is relatively free, when subjects used word order as an interpretive cue they generally assigned sentence relations according to the dominant SVO order of modern Hebrew. This trend was less strong for the interpretations of NNV utterances than of NVN and VNN utterances. There was no evidence of a developmental sequence for word order strategies. In addition, there was no evidence that word order, for any age group, was necessarily a dominant cue for assigning sentence relations when other linguistic information was available.     

Learned helplessness as a schedule-shift effect

The essentials of learned helplessness theory are described and supporting evidence surveyed. It is shown that two main empirical phenomena are associated with learned helplessness: a low rate of responding in laboratory animals following numerous discrete trials with continuous free relief and in human subjects following continuous nonrelief/reward or traditional extinction. The explanation Seligman and Maier give for these findings is critically analyzed and found to be unsupported at several critical points. The “patchwork” nature of the theory and observations is considered and it is contended that what is new in learned helplessness research is a schedule-shift effect like that observed when extinction follows partial reinforcement. A schedule-shift discrimination theory of “learned helplessness” effects is offered which is closely parallel to a widely accepted explanation of other schedule-shift effects, notably the partial reinforcement extinction effect. Although the behavioral effects of some schedule shifts resemble clinical depression, the latter is a more complex behavioral phenomena than the former which in turn has broader relevance to human behavior than just depression.