What do you learn about someone over time? The relationship between length of acquaintance and consensus and self-other agreement in judgments of personality.

Theory and research examining length of acquaintance and consensus among personality judgments have predominantly examined each dimension of personality separately. In L. J. Cronbach's (1955) terminology, this trait-centered approach combines consensus on elevation, differential elevation, and differential accuracy in personality judgments. The current article extends D. A. Kenny's (1991, 1994) weighted average model (WAM)--a theoretical model of the factors that influence agreement among personality judgments--to separate out two of Cronbach's components of consensus: stereotype accuracy and differential accuracy. Consistent with the predictions based on the WAM, as length of acquaintance increased, self-other agreement and consensus differential accuracy increased, stereotype accuracy decreased, and trait-level or raw profile correlations generally remained unchanged. Discussion focuses on the conditions under which a relationship between length of acquaintance and consensus and self-other agreement among personality evaluations emerges and how impressions change over time. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

外包在中国

目前，中国正逐渐成为西方寻找外包开发游戏公司的一片新热土，Pearl Research认为中国市场上存在的大量劳动力，相对较低的劳务成本，大批的游戏玩家以及完善的设施都是形成这种态势的重要原因。通过向中国开发公司外包，仅就游戏美工一项，往往就可以帮助西方公司节约20%以上的开发成本，在次时代游戏开发成本超越400万美元的今天，开发成本的减少将直接提升公司的毛利率，并对游戏产品的获利与否产生直接影响。     

Characteristics of college cyberbullies

Cyberbullying is a newer variation of bullying that utilizes technology to harass. This study investigated the psychological symptomology, suicidal behaviors, aggressive tendencies, and illegal behaviors of college cyberbullies. Sixty cyberbullies and 19 cyberbully/victims (participants who cyberbullied and were victims of cyberbullying) scored higher in psychological symptoms of depression, hostility, interpersonal sensitivity, paranoia, phobic anxiety, and psychoticism than participants who were uninvolved with cyberbullying. The cyberbullies also endorsed more suicidal behaviors and scored higher in aggression. The cyberbully/victims engaged in more violent and drug crimes than cyberbullies and controls. These findings indicate perpetrators of cyberbullying have more psychological distress, aggressive tendencies, and engage in more illegal behaviors than those who do not cyberbully. This is the first study to show the distress cyberbullies are experiencing.     

Comparing true and false confessions among persons with serious mental illness.

Over the past decade, knowledge on false confessions has grown tremendously. However, a similar knowledge base on true confessions has not. In the present study, independent, self-reported true and false confession experiences of persons with serious mental illness were compared. In addition to examining the crimes and police questioning that led to the true or false confession, we investigated the reasons behind the confessions and the eventual case outcomes. We found that, in comparison to true confessors (n = 30), false confessors (n = 35) were questioned more times, took longer to confess, perceived the evidence against them to be weaker, and reported significantly more external pressure and less internal pressure. Moreover, of those participants who were convicted, false confessors were four times more likely to receive a prison sentence than true confessors. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Defining Media Enjoyment as the Satisfaction of Intrinsic Needs

This article presents a model of enjoyment rooted in self‐determination theory ( Deci & Ryan, 1985 ) that includes the satisfaction of three needs related to psychological well‐being: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. In an experiment designed to validate this conceptualization of enjoyment, we manipulate video game characteristics related to the satisfaction of these needs and examine their relative effects on enjoyment. The validated model explains 51% of the variance in enjoyment, even without including needs usually studied in relation to enjoyment such as pleasure seeking. Results indicate the utility of defining enjoyment as need satisfaction. These results are discussed in terms of a broader conceptualization of enjoyment represented as the satisfaction of a comprehensive set of functional needs.     

A psychophysical study to determine acceptable limits for repetitive hand impact severity during automotive trim installation

The purpose of the current study was to use a psychophysical methodology to establish acceptable impact severity levels for this automotive trim installation. Two studies were conducted. In the first study, 17 male and 12 female subjects (6 assembly line workers and 23 students) performed 5 hand impacts/min on a device that simulated the process of seating push pins during door trim panel installation. In both studies, subjects were asked to impact the simulation device as hard as they found acceptable without causing injury, numbness or pain. Subjects were trained for 11 h. Force and hand acceleration time-histories were recorded from the simulation device and a hand-mounted accelerometer, respectively. The magnitude of each impact was quantified with eight dependent measures: peak, time-to-peak, load rate and impulse, from both the force and acceleration transducers. Statistics were used to determine the effects of gender, skill level and impact location on acceptable impact severity. In the second study, 8 male and 8 female subjects performed repeated hand impacts on a wall-mounted force plate at three different frequencies (2, 5 and 8 impacts/min) over three separate sessions. Force measures and statistics were the same as in Study 1. In the first study, impact location did not appear to have a consistent effect on the acceptable impact severities and there was no significant differences observed between male and female values. For both force and acceleration, impulse was the most reliable variable followed by the peak. In the second study an increase in impact frequency was observed to result in a significant decrease in the acceptable levels of peak force and force impulse. This effect was largest when going from 2 to 5 impacts/min and was less pronounced when going from 5 to 8 impacts/min (especially for force impulse). Male subjects demonstrated significantly higher acceptable impulse levels. Based on the combined results from both studies, acceptable limits were recommended for peak force and impulse that would be acceptable to 75% of the population for a range of frequencies. These limits were observed to range from 181 (8/min) to 259 N (2/min) for peak force and 2.53 (8/min) to 3.52 N s (2/min) for force impulse. It was concluded that force impulse and peak force were the variables most likely being controlled by the subjects.

Relevance to industry

Automotive assembly includes a number of tasks that involve hand impacts within the manufacturing process. One such task is the door trim panel installation process where the base of the hand is used to impact the door trim panel and drive fastening push pins through holes in the metal door frames. The current study provides tolerance limits so that industrial tasks involving hand impacts can be evaluated for their injury risk.     

Stress-strain response of a cast 319-T6 aluminum under thermomechanical loading

The stress-strain behavior of cast 319-T6 aluminum-copper alloys with three different secondary dendrite arm spacings (SDASs) was studied at high temperatures and under thermomechanical deformation, exposing marked cyclic softening. A two state-variable unified inelastic constitutive model proposed earlier was modified to describe the stress-strain responses of these alloys by considering the variation of hardening and recovery functions of back-stress and drag stress. The SDAS was incorporated in the model as a length-scale parameter, and the material constants were determined systematically from experiments on a cast 319-T6 aluminum with small and large SDASs. The capabilities of the constitutive model were checked by the comparisons of simulations to experiments in the small-strain regime (<0.005). The results show that the model provides successful simulations for material response after thermal exposure at high temperature and cyclic transient stress-strain behavior. The causes of mechanical behaviors at the macro scale are discussed based on microstructural changes during thermal exposure.     

How to reverse-engineer quality rankings

A good or bad product quality rating can make or break an organization. However, the notion of ??quality?? is often defined by an independent rating company that does not make the formula for determining the rank of a product publicly available. In order to invest wisely in product development, organizations are starting to use intelligent approaches for determining how funding for product development should be allocated. A critical step in this process is to ??reverse-engineer?? a rating company??s proprietary model as closely as possible. In this work, we provide a machine learning approach for this task, which optimizes a certain rank statistic that encodes preference information specific to quality rating data. We present experiments on data from a major quality rating company, and provide new methods for evaluating the solution. In addition, we provide an approach to use the reverse-engineered model to achieve a top ranked product in a cost-effective way.