Life satisfaction across adulthood: different determinants at different ages?

It is likely that with aging and changing life circumstances, individuals’ values shift in systematic ways, and that these shifts may be accompanied by shifts in the determinants of their subjective judgments of well being. To examine this possibility, the relations among the Satisfaction With Life Scale (SWLS) and a number of personality, affect, demographic, and cognitive variables were examined in a sample of 818 participants between the ages of 18 and 94. The results indicated that although many variables had significant zero-order correlations with the SWLS, only a few variables had unique utility in predicting life satisfaction. Invariance analyses indicated that while the qualitative nature of life satisfaction remains constant across adult age, the influence of fluid intelligence on judgments of life satisfaction declines with age. In contrast, negative affect is negatively associated with life satisfaction consistently across the adult age span.     

A simplicity principle in unsupervised human categorization

We address the problem of predicting how people will spontaneously divide into groups a set of novel items. This is a process akin to perceptual organization. We therefore employ the simplicity principle from perceptual organization to propose a simplicity model of unconstrained spontaneous grouping. The simplicity model predicts that people would prefer the categories for a set of novel items that provide the simplest encoding of these items. Classification predictions are derived from the model without information either about the number of categories sought or information about the distributional properties of the objects to be classified. These features of the simplicity model distinguish it from other models in unsupervised categorization (where, for example, the number of categories sought is determined via a free parameter), and we discuss how these computational differences are related to differences in modeling objectives. The predictions of the simplicity model are validated in four experiments. We also discuss the significance of simplicity in cognitive modeling more generally.     

International Human Rights and National Discretion

This paper argues that the EuropeanCourt of Human Rights couldserve as a model for an international court ofhuman rights to be builtupon the United Nations Committee on HumanRights. It argues that theconcerns states might have over the surrenderof a significant portion oftheir national sovereignity might be lessenedif such an internationalcourt were to incorporate the margin ofappreciation doctrine employed bythe European Court of Human Rights. Thisdoctrine is intended to respectthe customs and traditions of sovereign statesin dealing with humanrights issues, while maintaining that somerights such as the right not tobe tortured will be considered as basic andwill stand independently ofthe customs and traditions of sovereignstates.     

Who's controlling whom? Infant contributions to maternal play behavior

Because the way mothers play with their children may have significant impacts on children's social, cognitive, and linguistic development, researchers have become interested in potential predictors of maternal play. In the present study, 40 mother–infant dyads were followed from child age 5–20 months. Five‐month habituation rate and 13 and 20 month temperamental difficulty were found to be predictive of maternal play quality at 20 months. The most parsimonious theoretical model was one in which habituation was mediated by temperamental difficulty in predicting mother play. Consistent with prior speculation in the literature, these data support the possibility that mothers adjust some aspects of their play behaviors to fit their children's cognitive and temperamental capabilities. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

潜变量交互效应分析方法

简要回顾了分析显变量交互效应的常用方法。详细讨论了目前分析潜变量交互效应的主要方法,包括用潜变量的因子得分做回归分析、分组线性结构方程模型分析、加入乘积项的结构方程模型分析和两步最小二乘回归分析,并比较和评价了这些方法的优缺点。最后归纳了潜变量交互效应分析方法的研究趋势,并介绍了新近进展(包括LMS方法和GAPI方法)。     

Logic Games are Complete for Game Logics

Game logics describe general games through powers of players for forcing outcomes. In particular, they encode an algebra of sequential game operations such as choice, dual and composition. Logic games are special games for specific purposes such as proof or semantical evaluation for first-order or modal languages. We show that the general algebra of game operations coincides with that over just logical evaluation games, whence the latter are quite general after all. The main tool in proving this is a representation of arbitrary games as modal or first-order evaluation games. We probe how far our analysis extends to product operations on games. We also discuss some more general consequences of this new perspective for standard logic.     

Learning Disabilities, Gender, Sources of Efficacy, Self-Efficacy Beliefs, and Academic Achievement in High School Students

This study examined the impact of gender, learning disability (LD) status, and sources of efficacy on self-efficacy beliefs and academic achievement in the concept of Bandura's self-efficacy theory. Two hundred and seventy-eight high school students participated in the study. Structural equation modeling was used. The results revealed that LD status had indirect influence on self-efficacy via the source variable; gender did not have direct or indirect influences on self-efficacy; sources of efficacy had direct impact on self-efficacy, which in turn affected academic performance. The structural model fit the data well and explained 55% of the variance in academic achievement.     

Prosocial behavior in families: Moderators of resource sharing

Archival studies of within-family prosocial behavior (Judge & Hrdy, 1992; Smith, Kish, & Crawford, 1987) have shown that inheritance patterns support Hamilton’s (1964) theory of inclusive fitness, such that people will more of their estates to relatives of closer genetic relatedness. In a survey-based simulation of these studies, students allocated one of three lotteries to their blood relatives. As expected, participants allocated greater proportions of their lotteries to relatives of greater genetic relatedness. This effect became stronger with decreasing lottery amounts. Relatives of certain relatedness were favored over relatives of uncertain relatedness (via paternal uncertainty), and this effect was stronger among those with less money to allocate. Male participants tended to favor their young female relatives over their young male relatives when given the smallest lottery, but this sex preference reversed when male participants were given the largest lottery. In general, scarcer resources led to more evolutionarily conservative investment strategies.