Methods of correcting correlations for indirect restriction of range with non-interval data

A derivation is presented for correcting correlations for indirect restriction of range when correlations between one selection variable and non-interval measures are involved. Following a systematic investigation of special cases, formulas are given for practical application in validation work. Procedures for the case with several selection variables are briefly discussed.This study was initiated when the author was with the Institute of Military Psychology, Sweden.     

Long term marriages in Sweden: And some comparisons with similar couples in the United States

This international, five-country long term marriages study of couples who have been married, or unmarried and cohabiting, for 20 years or longer is designed to study, among other things, marital satisfaction. This first report of the Swedish part of the study reports on a Swedish version of the self-rating Dyadic Adjustment Scale (DAS) used to investigate self-rated marital satisfaction. The couples describe high marital satisfaction and a high sense of coherence (SOC) compared to other groups. Contrary to other studies, no differences were found between men and women regarding SOC. The differences between them, that describe high relative to low marital satisfaction, pertain to matters of recreation, sex, life philosophy, time spent together, and frequency of quarrels. The men reported greater marital satisfaction than the women.     

Disentangling Type A behavior: The roles of ambition,insensitivity, and anxiety

This study identified stable components of Type A behavior as usually defined, and examined their relationships with more traditional psychological constructs. Overall scores on the most popular Type A measure (a version of the Jenkins Activity Survey) were moderately associated with ambition but largely unrelated to measures of adjustment. An item analysis yielded subcomponents of Drivenness and Involvement. Drivenness was unrelated to ambition, but was positively related to anxiety and negatively related to interpersonal perceptiveness. Involvement was positively related to ambition and to interpersonal competence. It is suggested that the Jenkins Activity Survey measures a heterogeneous mixture of constructive commitment and self-defeating responses that clouds its psychological interpretation.     

Belief contraction without recovery

The postulate of recovery is commonly regarded to be the intuitively least compelling of the six basic Gärdenfors postulates for belief contraction. We replace recovery by the seemingly much weaker postulate of core-retainment, which ensures that if x is excluded from K when p is contracted, then x plays some role for the fact that K implies p. Surprisingly enough, core-retainment together with four of the other Gärdenfors postulates implies recovery for logically closed belief sets. Reasonable contraction operators without recovery do not seem to be possible for such sets. Instead, however, they can be obtained for non-closed belief bases. Some results on partial meet contractions on belief bases are given, including an axiomatic characterization and a non-vacuous extension of the AGM closure condition.     

The effect of mirthfulness upon amount of discordant right-left occipital EEG alpha

A total of 68 subjects participated in two experiments that tested the effect of exposure to comedy upon amount of discordant right-left occipital EEG alpha. Data from both showed less discordant alpha in the laughers and more in the nonlaughers at the end of exposure to a filmed comedy, as contrasted by no such group difference before treatment. Experiment 2 clarified that the production of discordant alpha in the right hemisphere was significant to this group difference, that this effect was specific to comedy treatment (nondiscriminative effects of exposure to a neutral film), and that a reversed group difference in amount of discordant right hemisphere alpha occurred after instructed hypoventilation (nondiscriminative effect of hyperventilation; counterbalanced order of all four treatments). The results were discussed in relation to (a) recent findings on right-left hemisphere characteristics of depressed individuals, (b) the significance of motivational states, (c) a link between cerebral blood flow and EEG indicators of activation, (d) ventilatory effects upon cortical activation, (e) personality differences inherent in tolerance for CO₂-blood concentration, and (f) recent findings on corticothalamic connections.     

Against global method safety

The global method safety account of knowledge states that an agent’s true belief that p is safe and qualifies as knowledge if and only if it is formed by method M, such that her beliefs in p and her beliefs in relevantly similar propositions formed by M in all nearby worlds are true. This paper argues that global method safety is too restrictive. First, the agent may not know relevantly similar propositions via M because the belief that p is the only possible outcome of M. Second, there are cases where there is a fine-grained belief that is unsafe and a relevantly similar coarse-grained belief (with looser truth conditions) that is safe and where both beliefs are based on the same method M. Third, the reliability of conditional reasoning, a basic belief-forming method, seems to be sensitive to fine-grained contents, as suggested by the wide variation in success rates for thematic versions of the Wason selection task.