Reexamining adaptation and the set point model of happiness: Reactions to changes in marital status.

According to adaptation theory, individuals react to events but quickly adapt back to baseline levels of subjective well-being. To test this idea, the authors used data from a 15-year longitudinal study of over 24,000 individuals to examine the effects of marital transitions on life satisfaction. On average, individuals reacted to events and then adapted back toward baseline levels. However, there were substantial individual differences in this tendency. Individuals who initially reacted strongly were still far from baseline years later, and many people exhibited trajectories that were in the opposite direction to that predicted by adaptation theory. Thus, marital transitions can be associated with long-lasting changes in satisfaction, but these changes can be overlooked when only average trends are examined. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The conflict in Northern Ireland: Causes, consequences, and controls.

The conflict in Northern Ireland is at its most basic a struggle between those who wish to see Northern Ireland remain part of the United Kingdom and those who wish to see the reunification of the island of Ireland. It is underpinned by historical, religious, political, economic, and psychological elements. These elements underlie the violence that has spanned the past 25 years and that has led to death and injury, led to increased community divisions, and impacted on the population's mental health. In an attempt to transform the conflict, various policy initiatives have been pursued, including attempts to reduce inequality and to improve community relations, in particular through educational initiatives. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Psychopathy in instrumental and reactive violent offenders.

Can violent offenders who commit acts of instrumental aggression for goal-oriented purposes such as robbery be distinguished from those who commit acts of reactive (or hostile) aggression in response to provocation? Because violent offenders often have a history of both instrumental and reactive aggression, this study distinguished between offenders with a history of at least 1 instrumental violent offense and offenders with a history of reactive violent offenses. Two studies tested the hypothesis that instrumental offenders would score higher than reactive offenders and nonviolent offenders on R. D. Hare's (1991) Psychopathy Checklist. The first study sample consisted of 106 violent and nonviolent offenders recruited from a medium-security correctional facility. The second study sample consisted of 50 violent offenders referred for pretrial forensic evaluation. In both samples, instrumental offenders could be reliably distinguished from reactive offenders on the basis of violent crime behavior and level of psychopathy. Group differences could not be attributed to participant age, race, length of incarceration, or extent of prior criminal record. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Personal ideology polarity: Its emotional foundation and its manifestation in individual value systems, religiosity, political orientation, and assumptions concerning human nature.

Personal ideology is an individual's philosophy of how life should be lived and of what forces influence human living. In this study S. S. Tomkins's (1963, 1965, 1978, 1987) polarity theory of ideology was used to examine the manifestation of personal ideology in 4 value-laden domains of personality. Tomkins's theoretical postulates concerning the emotional foundation of personal ideology also were tested. Analyses revealed that the 2 defining dimensions of polarity theory—humanism and normativism—are related in the predicted meaningful ways to value systems, assumptions concerning human nature, religiosity, and political orientation. Evidence also was found for Tomkins's contention that specific affect clusters serve as the foundation of personal ideology. Participants who scored high in humanism ideology related autobiographical memories containing the emotion cluster of joy, distress, fear, and shame, whereas the memories of participants with normative ideologies contained relatively more anger. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Epistemic uncertainty and stochastic time reliability correlations

A time reliability correlation is a stochastic model used in quantifying human response to offnormal events in a risk analysis. This article examines this type of model in light of the recent concern with separating models of randomness and uncertainty. It is shown that the separation may only be conceptual or numerical but not mathematical. On the way a direct proof of an old intuition is offered and two errors in previous documentation of TRCs are corrected.     

Strain-induced crystallization kinetics of vinylidene chloride/vinyl chloride (VDC/VC) copolymers

The strain-induced crystallization (SIC) behavior of VDC/VC copolymers has a significant effect on processibility on the blown film process. However, data on SIC of VCD/VC copolymers has been very limited due to the difficulty of measuring the rapid crystallization rates induced by strain; whereas, crystallization under quiescent conditions has been studied extensively. In this work, SIC of VDC/VC copolymers has been calculated from measurements of the adiabatic temperature rise upon stretching of amorphous specimens. The effect of stretching conditions such as strain rate, total strain, and initial temperature and the effect of polymer variables such as copolymer composition, molecular weight, and plasticizer content are determined. It is found that the performance of different VDC/VC copolymers on the film-blowing process correlates much better with measurements of SIC than with quiescent crystallization behavior.     

8088 development system programmed in C

An 8088 development system is described which combines the advantages of a personal computer (IBM PC), with high-level language support in the form of a c compiler, and a rack-based system. A suite of programs has been developed to enable the c compiler output to be converted into a form suitable for execution on the rack-based target as either ROM- or RAM-resident applications.