Hardiness: a review of theory and research.

Although a large body of research on hardiness (a personality construct with dimensions of commitment, control, and challenge) has accumulated, several fundamental issues remain unresolved. Although there are several hardiness scales, the properties of these scales have not been compared. There is debate as to whether hardiness is one or several characteristics. Research studying the pathways through which hardiness exerts its effects has not been comprehensively evaluated. Whereas critics have argued that hardiness does not buffer stress, others have suggested that hardiness buffers for working adults, for males, and in prospective analyses. There is also growing concern that hardiness is related to neuroticism. A review of the literature supports the following conclusions: The Dispositional Resilience Scale (DRS) has several advantages over alternative scales; DRS items form three factors that are consistent with hardiness theory; hardiness dimensions generally show low to moderate intercorrelations; the most common way of categorizing subjects as high or low in hardiness is not consistent with hardiness theory; hardiness does not buffer stress, and it does not buffer stress for working adults, for males, or in prospective analyses; both old and new hardiness scales inadvertently measure neuroticism. Recommendations for future research are provided.     

Joint custody: A blind leap of faith?

This article examines the social, historical, empirical, and legal issues surrounding the concept of joint custody which has now been accepted in over half of the states. Early results in joint custody states suggest that joint custody awards prove satisfactory to parents and children provided that the parents are able to cooperate in childrearing activities and that they live in close geographic proximity. General recommendations and guidelines for joint custody are presented.     

Toward a Process Analysis of Emotions: The Case of Surprise

Based on an earlier model of the processes elicited by surprising events, the present studies provide evidence for one of these processes, the evaluation of the surprising event's relevance for ongoing activities (action-relevance check). The central prediction tested was that, if unexpected events elicit among other processes an action-relevance check, then response delay on a concurrent task will be more pronounced in a condition where this process is more elaborate and hence takes more time. In accord with this prediction, Experiment 1 found that an unexpected appearance change of the imperative stimulus in a choice reaction time (RT) task caused greater response delay than an equivalent appearance change of a distractor stimulus. Experiment 2 replicated this finding and tested several additional predictions that concerned the effects on response delay of a second appearance change of either the imperative or the distractor stimuli. These predictions, which were also mostly confirmed, were derived by combining the logic underlying the first study with the assumption that once made, appraisals of unexpected events are stored as part of the situational schema and are reused when the same or similar events reoccur leading to an abbreviation of appraisal processes. Experiment 3 once more replicated the basic finding of the previous studies and ruled out a possible alternative explanation. It is suggested that the proposed RT method of process verification may be of broader interest as a tool to study appraisal processes in emotion.     

Social reinforcement of operant behavior in rats: a methodological note.

An apparatus was developed to study social reinforcement in the rat. Four Long-Evans female rats were trained to press a lever via shaping, with the reinforcer being access to a castrated male rat. Responding under a fixed-ratio schedule and in extinction was also observed. Social access was found to be an effective reinforcer. When social reinforcement was compared with food reinforcement under similar conditions of deprivation and reinforcer duration, no significant differences were observed.     

Emotional distress in tort law

Although judges and legislators increasingly provide compensation for claims of emotional injury, laws have evolved in an arbitrary and inflexible fashion. A number of judicial barriers to these claims have been developed and applied in ways that unfairly prevent compensation. Likewise, frivolous claims are occasionally granted. Judicial and legislative approaches to this problem should involve enough flexibility to accommodate the facts peculiar to each case. A flexible approach is also responsive to the rapid developments that are occurring in the behavioral and medical sciences which are often consulted in solving disputes involving claims for emotional distress.     

On the spread of semantic excitation

Summary Access to word-representations in memory was studied in two experiments. A lexical decision paradigm was used in both: Ss had to decide whether a string of letters shown to them was a word or a nonword. Decision time was the main dependent variable. Independent variables were context-similarity and context-intensity. The former is defined in terms of the categorical relationship that holds between a set of context-words and a subsequently presented test-word. The latter is defined by the number of highly related context-words, all sampled from a small semantic subcategory, that preceded the test-stimulus. In theory, the presentation of the context-words generates semantic excitation that spreads over memory and activates other memory representations. Differences in mean decision time, as a function of experimental conditions, are attributed to differences in the activation of test-words. Two hypotheses about the course or gradient of excitation-spread in lexical memory were studied. The results indicate that a simple spread-of-excitation hypothesis as proposed by Meyer, Schvaneveldt and Ruddy (1972, 1974) is sufficient to account for the data. For the conditions studied in the experiments, there was no reliable evidence of inhibitory processes that confine spread of excitation to a small region of lexical memory.This paper reports work that was conceived and begun at Stanford University, Calif., USA, where the author spent a year as a postdoctoral fellow. The fellowship was made possible by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, Bad Godesberg, West Germany, Grant Schm 350/1. I thank Prof. Richard G. Atkinson and Dr. Stephan Monsell for discussing aspects of this work with me. I further thank Paul Matthews for introducing me to the art of running computerized experiments.     

Decomposition of multivariate utility functions in non-additive expected utility theory

In expected utility many results have been derived that give necessary and/or sufficient conditions for a multivariate utility function to be decomposable into lower-dimensional functions. In particular, multilinear, multiplicative and additive decompositions have been widely discussed. These utility functions can be more easily assessed in practical situations. In this paper we present a theory of decomposition in the context of nonadditive expected utility such as anticipated utility or Choquet expected utility. We show that many of the results used in conventional expected utility carry over to these more general frameworks. If preferences over lotteries depend only on the marginal probability distributions, then in expected utility the utility function is additively decomposable. We show that in anticipated utility the marginality condition implies not only that the utility function is additively decomposable but also that the distortion function is the identity function. We further demonstrate that a decision maker who is bivariate risk neutral has a utility function that is additively decomposable and a distortion function q for which q(½) = ½.