A cross-cultural examination of the relation of marital communication behavior to marital satisfaction.

Numerous studies have examined the communication behaviors of Western, primarily North American, couples and have demonstrated a robust and reliable association between marital satisfaction and couple communication. However, there has been relatively less attention given to the generalizability of these findings to non-Western couples. To address this issue, the authors conducted an observational study of marital communication among couples from 3 different cultural groups: 50 White American couples, 52 Pakistani couples in Pakistan, and 48 immigrant Pakistani couples in America. The results show that positive and negative communication behaviors were associated with marital satisfaction within each of the 3 cultural groups. However, the American group's marital satisfaction was more strongly related to marital communication behaviors than was that of the Pakistani group and, to a lesser extent, the immigrant group. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Calibration of Soil Constitutive Models with Spatially Varying Parameters

Soil constitutive models are frequently calibrated from laboratory tests that utilize global boundary measurements, which necessarily relegate soil response to that of a homogenized equivalent medium. This paper demonstrates the applicability of advanced experimental technologies to enhance the state of model-based predictions in soil mechanics by taking into account the possibility of material heterogeneity during model calibration. By utilizing the full-field displacement measurement technique of three-dimensional digital image correlation, displacements of the surfaces of deforming triaxial sand specimens are measured throughout deformation. These displacements are assimilated into finite-element (FE) models of the test specimen through solution of an inverse problem. During optimization, in which the difference between measured and predicted displacements across the specimen surface form the basis for the objective function, model parameters are allowed to vary spatially throughout the specimen volume. FE models allowing three different levels of spatial variability are tested. Results indicate that accommodating consideration of material heterogeneity during calibration leads to more accurate predictions of global stress-strain behavior that are more faithful to observed full-field response.     

Family socialization of emotional expression and nonverbal communication styles and skills.

Describes the development of the Family Expressiveness Questionnaire, which measures family styles of emotional expression and discusses its use in a study assessing the effects of family socialization of emotional expression on the Ss' own expression, nonverbal behavior, and skill. Questionnaire development indicated accuracy in tapping emotional expression levels in the home. In the study, 64 college students and confederates filled out several questionnaires, were videotaped while discussing topics of emotional significance and while encoding scenes of affective content, and participated in a nonverbal judging task. The socialization hypothesis, that family expressiveness has a differential effect on individuals' nonverbal behavior and skill, was supported and refined. It is concluded that style of expression and skill in communication are influenced by the emotional expressiveness of the family environment. (34 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A study of guidelines for the conduct and analysis of simultaneous clinical replications.

Examined the development, implementation, and evaluation of guidelines for the simultaneous application of clinical replications. The 15 authors served as Ss. Success of the guidelines was evaluated by their ability to yield (1) information concerning the probability of the treatment's success, and (2) hypotheses concerning uncontrolled variables that may limit generalization of the treatment. Results support the validity of the guidelines in accomplishing these purposes. The use of such guidelines may serve as a vehicle for the integration of the roles of researcher and practitioner. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

An interface for mutual disambiguation of recognition errors in a multimodal navigational assistant

Users often have tasks that can be accomplished with the aid of multiple media – for example with text, sound and pictures. For example, communicating an urban navigation route can be expressed with pictures and text. Today’s mobile devices have multimedia capabilities; cell phones have cameras, displays, sound output, and (soon) speech recognition. Potentially, these multimedia capabilities can be used for multimedia-intensive tasks, but two things stand in the way. First, recognition of visual input and speech recognition still remain unreliable. Second, the mechanics of integrating multiple media and recognition systems remains daunting for users. We address both these issues in a system, MARCO, multimodal agent for route construction. MARCO collects route information by taking pictures of landmarks, accompanied by verbal directions. We combine results from off-the-shelf speech recognition and optical character recognition to achieve better recognition of route landmarks than either recognition system alone. MARCO automatically produces an illustrated, step-by-step guide to the route.     

The implementation of neural network for semiconductor PECVD process

In semiconductor manufacturing, the monitoring system has been developed very excellently and can be used for comprehensively collecting the historical data of process information and quality characteristics of equipment. However, due to the high turnover rate of personnel and the great variance in manufacturing process, the previous control technique by using intuition and experience of engineers for manufacturing process parameter settings to achieve good product quality is no longer appropriate. Therefore, this research establishes a quality predictor for analyzing the relationship between manufacturing process parameter setting and final product quality in the plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition (PECVD) of semiconductor manufacturing by applying the back-propagation neural network (BPNN) algorithm and Taguchi method. The experimental data are categorized into 500 pieces of training data and 150 pieces of verifying data. The proposed analysis method for using in the PECVD process of semiconductor manufacturing is verified by comparing the predicted film thickness of SiO₂ and the predicted refractive index of silicon dioxide films with the measured data. According to the comparison result, the proposed model has an excellent prediction capability of final product quality and can be applied in process control for related manufacturing fields.     

Precipitants of partner aggression.

Self-reported precipitants of psychological and physical partner aggression were examined in a community sample of 453 cohabiting couples with 3- to 7-year-old children. Partners precipitated most partner aggression. Men, but not maritally discordant men, were more likely than women to cite physical partner aggression as the precipitant of their own aggression. Women, including maritally discordant women, were more likely to endorse partner verbal than partner physical aggression as a precipitant for their own mild physical aggression, which is consistent with women's aggression escalation. Nonaggressive partner precipitants were common and deserve future research attention. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Implicit policies about relations between personality traits and behavioral effectiveness in situational judgment items.

This paper develops the concept of implicit trait policy (ITP), which is a variant of the accentuation effect described by Tajfel (1957). ITPs are implicit beliefs about causal relations between personality traits and behavioral effectiveness. Studies reported here tested the hypotheses (a) that personality traits affect ITPs so that agreeable people, for instance, believe the relation between agreeableness and effectiveness is more strongly positive than disagreeable people do and (b) that ITPs can predict behavior that expresses associated personality traits. Two studies with undergraduate research participants supported the first hypothesis for traits of agreeableness and extraversion (the average correlation between traits and associated ITPs was .31 for agreeableness and .37 for extraversion) but not for conscientiousness. A 3rd study with student participants found that individual differences in ITPs for agreeableness predicted agreeable behavior (the average correlation was .33) in simulated work settings. These results suggest that ITPs may be useful for predicting work behavior that expresses personality traits even though ITPs may not be strongly correlated with the personality traits themselves. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Gene expression profiling for understanding chemical causation of biological effects for complex mixtures: a case study on estrogens

Gene expression profiling offers considerable potential for identifying chemical causation of effects induced in exposures to complex mixtures, and for understanding the mechanistic basis for their phenotypic effects. We characterized gene expression responses in livers and gonads of fathead minnow (Pimephales promelas) exposed (for 14-21 days) to estrogenic wastewater treatment works final effluents with varying potencies and assessed the extent to which these expression profiles mapped with those induced by individual steroid estrogens present in the effluents (17beta-estradiol and 17alpha-ethinylestradiol) and, thus, were diagnostic of estrogen exposure. For these studies, we adopted a targeted approach (via real-time PCR) with a suite of 12 genes in liver and 21 genes in gonad known to play key roles in reproduction, growth and development (processes controlled by estrogens) and responses were compared with effects on phenotypic end points indicative of feminization. Gene responses to effluent were induced predominantly in a linear (monotonic) concentration-dependent manner but were complex with many genes responding differently between tissue types and sexes. The gene expression profiles for the estrogenic effluents and the individual steroid estrogens had many common features. There were marked differences in the profiles between the two effluents, however, that were not explained by differences in their estrogenic potencies, suggesting that these may have arisen as a consequence of differences in the contents of other chemicals, which may act directly or indirectly with the estrogen-response pathway to alter estrogen-induced gene expression. These data demonstrate that the patterns of gene expression induced by estrogenic effluents, although complex, can be diagnostic for some of the estrogens they contain and provide insights into the mechanistic basis for the phenotypic effects seen.