Based on a large scale investigation of workers and staff members inlarge and medium state owned enterprises in Shandong province,this research examined the reliability and validity of a satisfaction questionnaire,and drew some important conclusions in using this questionnaire.The results showed:1)The satisfaction questionnaire had good reliability and validity;2)The scores that the examinees gained on the overall and five specific satisfaction questions were unbalanced;3)The satisfaction of workers and staff members in large and medium state owned enterprises were influnced by the individual's gender,age,education,marriage,position,way of employment,and the location of the enterprise,size of the enterprise,the enterprise's benefit,the reform of the enterprise's property right.
Horn points out that the civil-trial verdict in the O.J. Simpson case was announced 16 months after the criminal-trial verdict. We tested memory for the circumstances surrounding the announcement of the criminal-trial verdict at 15 months or 32 months after the event, and we compared the recollections we obtained to what the same individu-als had told us 3 days after the verdict (Schmolck, Buffalo, & Squire, 2000). We found memory to be less accurate and more prone to distor-tion after 32 months than after 15 months. Horn suggests that the an-nouncement of the civil-trial verdict, which intervened between our two tests, may have interfered with memory for the criminal-trial ver-dict and thereby may have impaired memory accuracy. Horn’s comment is a reminder of the difficulties inherent in carry-ing out research in natural settings outside the laboratory. Although we cannot rule out conclusively the possibility that interference was an important factor in the recollections we recorded, we believe it quite
In a recent article, Schmolck, Buffalo, and Squire (2000) investigated memory distortions in college students’ recollections of how they heard the verdict in the O.J. Simpson murder trial. Students were questioned either 15 months or 32 months after the verdict was rendered. Their responses were compared with their own reports 3 days after the verdict. Responses 15 months after the verdict were more likely than those given after 32 months to be in concordance with participants’ initial reports. Whereas only 11% of 15-month reports contained major distortions, 42.9% of 32-month responses were in error. In addition, Schmolck et al. reported that 77.8% of the major distortions involved incorrectly reporting the source of the news (e.g., television or radio), and that these participants, “described an entirely different situation than the one they had described earlier” (p. 43). Despite their apparently poor memories, 61% of the participants whose responses were characterized as “grossly inaccurate” (p. 43) were highly confident of their accuracy. The breakdown of confidence ratings for these inaccurate participants by delay condition was not reported. The authors concluded that the discrepancy between the 15- and 32-month conditions was due to the difference in the time that had elapsed after the verdict. In drawing this conclusion, they failed to consider a possible confound. Specifically, 16 months after the murder-trial verdict, the month after the 15-month data were collected, the verdict of Simpson’s civil trial was announced. This event, although perhaps not as surprising or emotionally charged as the first verdict, was certainly a memorable event in its own right. Therefore, participants in the 32-month condition were confronted not only with a longer delay, but also with the possibility of interference from their memories of the second verdict. Previous studies that compared immediate and delayed memories of consequential public events included memories of the Challenger Space Shuttle disaster (Bohannon & Symons, 1992; McCloskey, Wible, & Cohen, 1988; Neisser & Harsch, 1992), the resignation of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (Conway et al., 1994), and the Loma Prieta earthquake (Neisser et al., 1996). One distinction that has emerged from these studies is that memories approximately 1 year after the event tend to be accurate, whereas those reported after a 3-year delay are more likely to be distorted. However, as these studies differed in various ways, it is still an open question as to whether memory distortion is a function of delay. One of the goals of Schmolck et al. was to determine the effect of delay duration on memories of a single event. However, one cannot be certain that the 32-month participants in this study, unlike participants in earlier studies, were attempting to recall the target event and not the more recent similar event. The remarkably high proportion of errors that involved the report of an “entirely different” (p. 43) event may be a result of the interference of memories of the civil-trial verdict. This confound makes it difficult to tease apart the effects of time and interference. Moreover, the fact that participants in the 15-month condition were more likely to respond “don’t remember” than were those in the 32-month condition (21.4% and 5.7%, respectively) is consistent with the 32-month participants having two memories of verdicts and the 15-month participants having only one. One possible strategy for assessing the relative contributions of memories of the civil-trial verdict to the reports of the 32-month participants would be to classify the responses based on distinctions between the two verdicts. Whereas the criminal-trial verdict was delivered in the morning, when participants would likely be at school, the civil verdict was reported in the evening (interestingly, during President Clinton’s State of the Union Address), when participants would be more likely to be away from school. The fact that the two verdicts were at odds with one another (the criminal verdict was in Simpson’s favor, the civil verdict was not), and that public opinion was split along racial lines (Newport & Saad, 1997), may also allow for the classification of recollections. If the “major distortions” at 32 months are found to have details that are consistent with the events surrounding the civil-trial verdict (e.g., a participant said that the verdict was reported in the evening, or that a mostly Caucasian group of observers cheered), it is likely that the participants were victims of interference. Although Schmolck et al. presented compelling data, care should be taken in interpreting their results. The effects of the confounding factor of a second, similar event on participants in the 32-month condition must be considered. The question of whether flashbulb memories decay over time is still open.
Perspective is usually considered a monocular pictorial cue, distinct from other cues such as occlusion and stereopsis. We cut across these distinctions by asking whether purely binocular (cyclopean) contours, created by stereoscopically shifting a region of homogeneous texture nearer or further than its surround, can act as a linear-perspective cue and whether the contours' ability to do this is influenced by their surface belongingness. We found that the left/right orientation of cyclopean trapezoids nearer than a surround strongly influenced perceived slant, showing that perspective constraints are applied to stereoscopically derived contours. Further regions, however; appeared as surfaces seen through a trapezoidal aperture. Because the aperture "owned" the trapezoidal contours, their orientation had little effect on perceived slant. We conclude that the application of perspective constraints depends critically on how contours are classified by stereo-specified occlusion relationships among surfaces and that perspective, stereopsis, and occlusion are not distinct processing systems.
Identification of visually presented objects and words is facilitated by implicit memory for past visual experiences with those items. Several behavioral and neuroimaging studies suggest that this form of memory is dependent on perceptual processes localized in the right occipital lobe. We tested this claim by examining implicit memory in patients with extensive right occipital lobe lesions, using lexical-decision mirror-reading, picture-fragment, and word-fragment-completion tests, and found that these patients exhibited normal levels of priming. We also examined implicit memory in patients with complete callosotomies, using standard and divided-visual-field word-fragment-completion procedures, and found that the isolated left hemisphere exhibited normal priming effects. The results indicate that the right occipital lobe does not play a necessary role in visual implicit memory, and that the isolated left hemisphere can support normal levels of visual priming in a variety of tasks.
Despite our intuition that representative expert judgments are highly nonlinear, previous studies have shown only little, if any, nonlinearity in such judgments. The current study presents a method for assessing nonlinearity in judgment that is based on estimating communal nonlinearity--the systematic nonlinearity shared by the community of judges. The article also examines the predictive accuracy of communal nonlinearity, and compares it with the corresponding linear accuracy.
It is well known that people can perfectly identify only a handful of distinct unidimensional stimuli, such as line lengths, but can identify thousands of complex stimuli, such as letters and words. This result is consistent with capacity limits in identifying unidimensional stimuli but not complex stimuli. The experiments reported here tested this theoretical dissociation using Luce's (1963) Similarity Choice Model to measure the psychological distance between stimuli in line-length-identification and letter-identification tasks. The psychological distance between line-length stimuli decreased with the number of to-be-identified stimuli; this result is concordant with capacity limits in unidimensional absolute identification. Surprisingly, the opposite result held in letter identification. Psychological distance between letters increased with an increased number of to-be-identified stimuli. This result indicates an opposite type of processing deficit: People process letters more efficiently with more choices.