Karl Florien Heiser (1904–1991): Obituary.

Memorializes Karl Florien Heiser (1904–1991). Heiser was a former Executive Secretary of the American Psychological Association (APA), founder and president of the Connecticut State Society of Psychologists, and one of the authors of the 1st psychology certification law in the US, for which he received a plaque by the Division of State Psychological Association Affairs of APA. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Judgments of social justice: Compromises between equality and efficiency.

Political economists agree that a trade-off exists between equality and efficiency. Using a hypothetical society paradigm, the mean income (representing efficiency) and income variability (representing equality) of distributions of wealth and the correlation between wealth and effort within a society were manipulated. Ss made all pairwise comparisons of distributions within societies of differing meritocracy. A "maximin" principle best described trade-off resolution strategies when effort and outcome were weakly linked: People maximized the minimum standard of living within a society. A compromise principle best described preferences when income was tightly linked to effort: People rejected distributions in which some citizens fell below the "poverty line" but maximized efficiency above this constraint. Ideological polarization was pronounced under moderate meritocracy; here liberals could focus on the role of chance and conservatives on the role of effort and ability. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Group therapy for adult women survivors of child sexual abuse: Differentiation of completers versus dropouts.

Examined intake profiles of 54 depressed women survivors of child sexual abuse presenting for a specialized group therapy program at a community mental health center. The 32 therapy completers were compared with the 22 dropouts. Both groups possessed extensive and severe childhood and adult abuse histories. Both were extremely socially disadvantaged and clinically impaired as measured on the Millon Clinical Multiaxial Inventory (MCMI). Dropouts were more likely to have been battered as children and to have been sexually abused only within the family. Completers were more likely to have been multiply offended both by intrafamilial and extrafamilial perpetrators. The groups differed in terms of marital status and extent of economic dependence on spouse. Dropouts appeared to be more actively enmeshed in the abuse cycle at the time of therapy. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Stability and change in the complexity of senatorial debate: Testing the cognitive versus rhetorical style hypotheses.

Tested the cognitive vs rhetorical style hypothesis (conservatives have more simplistic rhetorical, not cognitive styles than liberals or moderates) by assessing the integrative complexity of 10 paragraph-sized statements of 81 senators in 5 US Congresses: 3 dominated by liberals and moderates (the 82nd, 94th, and 96th Congresses) and 2 dominated by conservatives (the 83rd and 97th Congresses). Results show that liberals and moderates were more complex than conservatives in the 82nd, 94th, and 96th Congresses but that these differences among ideological groups were much less pronounced in the 83rd and 97th Congresses. The change in pattern was due to sharp declines in the complexity of liberals and, to a lesser extent, moderates in conservative-dominated sessions, not to an increase in the complexity in conservatives. Conservatives displayed more traitlike stability in integrative complexity both within and across Congressional sessions. It is suggested that the integrative complexity of senatorial debate may be a joint product of relatively context-specific styles of political impression management and relatively stable cognitive styles of organizing the political world. (41 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Models of helping and coping.

Draws a distinction between attribution of responsibility for a problem and attribution of responsibility for a solution. Four general helping models are derived. In the "moral" model, actors are held responsible for both problems and solutions and are believed to need only proper motivation. In the compensatory model, people are responsible only for solutions and are believed to need power. Individuals in the medical model are responsible for neither problems nor solutions and are thought to need treatment. In the enlightenment model, actors are responsible for problems but are unable or unwilling to provide solutions; they need discipline. It is maintained that each set of assumptions has characteristic consequences for the competence, status, and well-being of actors and that the wrong choice of model in a situation will undermine effective helping and coping. Competing models of responsibility in education, psychotherapy, law, and welfare are described, and research on attribution of responsibility is recommended as a way of addressing problems of both theoretical and social significance. (128 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Late positive potential to appetitive stimuli and local attentional bias.

Predicated on the idea that positive affects high in approach motivation are crucial in goal-directed behaviors, research has found that these positive affects cause narrowed attention. The present research was designed to investigate a possible neurophysiological underpinning of this effect. Previous research has suggested that the late positive potential (LPP) of the event-related brain potential is increased by emotionally arousing stimuli because of the attention-grabbing nature of such stimuli. Other research has suggested that left prefrontal cortical regions are associated with narrowed attention and approach-motivated affect. Integrating these two lines of evidence, the present research examined LPPs to appetitive versus neutral pictures and assessed the relationship of these LPPs to local versus global attentional bias following the picture primes. Results revealed that appetitive in comparison with neutral pictures evoked larger LPP amplitudes bilaterally over central and parietal regions and asymmetrically over frontal regions. Moreover, these LPP amplitudes to appetitive pictures predicted greater locally biased attention caused by the appetitive pictures. These results provide the first evidence that LPPs are associated with the local attentional bias induced by appetitive motivation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The Carnot Heterogeneous Database Project: Implemented Applications

The Carnot project was an ambitious research project inheterogeneous databases. It integrated a variety of techniques toaddress a wide range of problems in achieving interoperation inheterogeneous environments. Here we describe some of the majorimplemented applications of this project. These applications concern(a) accessing a legacy scientific database, (b) automating a workflowinvolving legacy systems, (c) cleaning data, and (d) retrievingsemantically appropriate information from structured databases inresponse to text queries. These applications support scientificdecision support, business process management, data integrityenhancement, and analytical decision support, respectively. Theydemonstrate Carnot‘s capabilities for (a) heterogeneous queryprocessing, (b) relaxed transaction and workflow management, (c)knowledge discovery, and (d) heterogeneous resource modelintegration.     

Boosting and Microarray Data

We have found one reason why AdaBoost tends not to perform well on gene expression data, and identified simple modifications that improve its ability to find accurate class prediction rules. These modifications appear especially to be needed when there is a strong association between expression profiles and class designations. Cross-validation analysis of six microarray datasets with different characteristics suggests that, suitably modified, boosting provides competitive classification accuracy in general.Sometimes the goal in a microarray analysis is to find a class prediction rule that is not only accurate, but that depends on the level of expression of few genes. Because boosting makes an effort to find genes that are complementary sources of evidence of the correct classification of a tissue sample, it appears especially useful for such gene-efficient class prediction. This appears particularly to be true when there is a strong association between expression profiles and class designations, which is often the case for example when comparing tumor and normal samples.