A quasi-nonmetric method for multidimensional scaling VIA an extended euclidean model

An Extended Two-Way Euclidean Multidimensional Scaling (MDS) model which assumes both common and specific dimensions is described and contrasted with the standard (Two-Way) MDS model. In this Extended Two-Way Euclidean model then stimuli (or other objects) are assumed to be characterized by coordinates onR common dimensions. In addition each stimulus is assumed to have a dimension (or dimensions) specific to it alone. The overall distance between objecti and objectj then is defined as the square root of the ordinary squared Euclidean distance plus terms denoting the specificity of each object. The specificity,s _j , can be thought of as the sum of squares of coordinates on those dimensions specific to objecti, all of which have nonzero coordinatesonly for objecti. (In practice, we may think of there being just one such specific dimension for each object, as this situation is mathematically indistinguishable from the case in which there are more than one.)We further assume that _ij =F(d _ij ) +e _ij where _ij is the proximity value (e.g., similarity or dissimilarity) of objectsi andj,d _ij is the extended Euclidean distance defined above, whilee _ij is an error term assumed i.i.d.N(0, ²).F is assumed either a linear function (in the metric case) or a monotone spline of specified form (in the quasi-nonmetric case). A numerical procedure alternating a modified Newton-Raphson algorithm with an algorithm for fitting an optimal monotone spline (or linear function) is used to secure maximum likelihood estimates of the paramstatistics) can be used to test hypotheses about the number of common dimensions, and/or the existence of specific (in addition toR common) dimensions.This approach is illustrated with applications to both artificial data and real data on judged similarity of nations.     

Understanding environments: The key to improving social processes and program outcomes

The contributions to this Special Issue illustrate research on several important types of environmental units, including psychiatric and substance abuse treatment programs, neighborhood block groups, and entire communities. They also exemplify alternative methodologies, such as assessing environments by relying on participants' appraisals, external observers' ratings, historical archives, and direct observation. I draw on these contributions and some of my own work to discuss four recurrent issues: (a) how to conceptualize environmental domains and dimensions; (b) how to understand environmental dynamics, that is, the interplay of environmental factors both within one setting and across settings; (c) how to comprehend the processes that link environmental factors to outcomes, especially with respect to the power and evanescence of environmental influence; and (d) how to use information about environments to monitor and improve them. Increased knowledge in these four areas is essential to help fulfill a major aim of community psychology: to understand social processes and improve intervention program outcomes.     

What is agentic about the Spatial Agency Bias? How pragmatic relevance contributes to the spatial representations of actions

The mental imagination of (social) actions has been shown to follow a left‐to‐right trajectory, with the thematic agent associated with the left position (Spatial Agency Bias, Suitner & Maass in Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 53, 2016, p. 245–301). For example, individuals asked to choose a picture that visualizes the sentence “Tom kicks George” tend to choose an image where the agent, Tom, is positioned on the left‐hand side rather than on the right‐hand side. However, as an alternative to the thematic role of the agent, such findings may reflect a mental representation following pragmatic relevance. Specifically, a pragmatic perspective holds that word order and syntactic functions are strategic devices to communicate that the element is important for the sentence. Thus, positioning in the described picture‐matching task may actually reflect the agent's pragmatic relevance instead of agency per se. As a test, we vary whether sentences are written in the active versus the passive voice. Results from five studies indicate that the passive voice results in the tendency to place the agent on the right‐hand side rather than on the left‐hand side of a picture. Instead, the acted‐upon person is positioned on the left‐hand side of a picture. A sixth experiment reveals that for the passive voice, the agent is still seen as more agentic than the receiver, but is considered less relevant. The findings are congruent with the proposed pragmatic relevance account. Implications for the Spatial Agency Bias as well as for building mental representations in general are discussed.     

Reasoning with Factors

The paper proposes an analysis and a formalisation of factor-based reasoning. After examining the relevance of factors in legal reasoning, binary and scalable factors (dimensions) are distinguished and the relations between them are discussed. An account of a fortiori reasoning with both types of factors is developed. This article reports ideas which are discussed and developed in Sartor (2005). We refer to the latter work for the theoretical framework in which our analysis of factors is embedded.     

Be aware of the rifle but do not forget the stench: differential effects of fear and disgust on lexical processing and memory

The aim of this study was to investigate the role of discrete emotions in lexical processing and memory, focusing on disgust and fear. We compared neutral words to disgust-related words and fear-related words in three experiments. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants performed a lexical decision task (LDT), and in Experiment 3 an affective categorisation task. These tasks were followed by an unexpected memory task. The results of the LDT experiments showed slower reaction times for both types of negative words with respect to neutral words, plus a higher percentage of errors, this being more consistent for fear-related words (Experiments 1 and 2) than for disgust-related words (Experiment 2). Furthermore, only disgusting words exhibited a higher recall accuracy than neutral words in the memory task. Moreover, the advantage in memory for disgusting words disappeared when participants carried out an affective categorisation task during encoding (Experiment 3), suggesting that the superiority in memory for disgusting words observed in Experiments 1 and 2 could be due to greater elaborative processing. Taken together, these findings point to the relevance of discrete emotions in explaining the effects of the emotional content on lexical processing and memory.     

Social Issues,Authoritarianism, and Ideological Conceptualization: How Policy Dimensions and Psychological Factors Influence Ideological Labeling

Ideology's crucial theoretical and empirical role in explaining political behavior makes it imperative that scholars understand how individuals conceptualize and apply ideological labels. The existing literature on this topic is quite limited, however, because it relies almost exclusively upon data from the 1970s and 1980s, and it does not examine how psychological factors influence conceptualizations of ideological labels. This article uses data from two original laboratory experiments to test the relative impact of four major policy dimensions on participants' evaluations of candidate ideology and to test authoritarianism's role in shaping ideological conceptualization. These analyses indicate that individuals most often define liberalism and conservatism primarily in terms of social policies closely associated with religious values, each of which invert traditional ideological orientations toward the appropriate size and role of government. The causal mechanism shaping this relationship is authoritarianism, because, I argue, the religious social policy dimension most clearly evokes the deep‐seated value conflicts associated with an authoritarian view of political conflict.     

A model for integrating spiritual education into secular curricula

The purpose of this article is to illustrate how the model proposed initially by De Souza and developed by Buchanan and Hyde for religious education can be applied to secular education. Using the context of an action research project in Mainland China to introduce education in human values to government primary schools, examples are drawn from mathematics topics to show how teachers have been able to integrate cognitive, affective and values messages into their existing subject curricula. Children’s and teachers’ comments suggest that both are aware of the inner transformations that occur over time, and illustrate that it is possible to bring about such transformation in a way that is compatible with the ideology of the system.     

The function of wisdom dimensions in ego‐identity development among Chinese university students

This study investigates the relationship between wisdom and ego‐identity among university students in China. Using Marcia's ego‐identity statuses and Ardelt's wisdom dimensions as the theoretical and conceptual framework, the study investigates 356 university students in China. After exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses, four factors from wisdom and five factors from ego‐identity were retrieved. A structural equation model was then conducted to analyse the relationships. The findings were: (1) among wisdom dimensions, cognitive, and reflective wisdom, especially perspective‐taking best predicted achievement, (2) all three dimensions of wisdom predicted moratorium, but reflective wisdom was the most pronounced predictor, (3) all three dimensions of wisdom predicted diffusion, but resentment items from reflective wisdom were the most pronounced predictors, and (4) gender was a significant predictor of ego‐identity achievement and diffusion. These findings suggest that efforts to build reflective wisdom might contribute to healthier ego‐identity formation.     

The cultural dimension of tightness–looseness: An analysis of situational constraint in Estonia and Greece

The importance of tightness–looseness as a dimension that explains a considerable amount of variance between cultures was demonstrated by Gelfand et al. (2011). Tight nations have many strong norms and a low tolerance of deviant behaviour, whereas loose nations have weak social norms and a high tolerance of deviant behaviour. The main aim of the current studies was to examine situational constraint in Estonia and Greece: that is, how the cultural dimension of tightness–looseness is manifested in everyday situations in those two countries. The findings of a questionnaire study (Study 1) suggested that, in general, there is higher constraint across everyday situations in Greece than in Estonia, but situational constraint in Greece is especially strong in school and organisational settings where people have hierarchically structured roles. The results of an observational study (Study 2) revealed a relatively high agreement between appropriateness of certain behaviours as judged by the respondents in Study 1 and the frequencies of observed behaviours in the two countries. Our findings suggest that the strength of situations may substantially vary both within and across cultures, and that the attitudes of the members about situational strength in their respective cultures are in concordance with observations of situations by neutral observers in how people in general behave in their culture.     

The retrieval of self-defining memories is associated with the activation of specific working selves

This article presents two studies that investigated the impact of the retrieval of self-defining memories on individuals' sense of self. Participants recalled positive and/or negative self-defining memories, rated memory characteristics and completed measures focusing on different self-aspects. Study 1 found that participants reported higher state self-esteem after recalling a positive memory than after recalling a negative one. They also reported lower negative self-consistency and higher state self-concept clarity and positive self-consistency, but this result became non-significant after controlling for state self-esteem. Study 2 found that participants reported higher state self-esteem, a marginally higher proportion of recreation/exploration, goals and a marginally lower proportion of achievement goals after recalling a positive memory than after recalling a negative one. They also reported a higher proportion of self-cognitions referring to emotional states after recalling memories from which they had not abstracted meaning than after recalling memories from which they had done this. These findings suggest that the retrieval of vivid, emotional and highly self-relevant memories may be accompanied by the activation of specific self-representations or working selves. They also suggest that the experience of memory-related intrusive images may temporarily influence individuals' sense of self. The implications of these findings for clinical practice are discussed.