VR Realism Scale—Revalidation of contemporary VR headsets on a Polish sample

This paper presents validation of the VR Simulation Realism Scale on a Polish sample. The scale enables a self-report measurement of perceived realism of a virtual environment in four main aspects of such realism–scene realism, audience behavior realism, audience appearance realism and sound realism. However, since the development of the original scale, the VR technology significantly changed. We aimed to respond to that change and revalidate the original measure in the contemporary setting. For the purpose of scale validation, data was gathered from six studies with 720 participants in total. Five experiments and one online survey were conducted to examine psychometric properties of the scale in accordance with the Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing. Evidence based on internal structure, relations to other variables and test content was obtained. The factorial structure of the original scale was tested and confirmed. The connections between realism and immersion, presence, aesthetics were verified. A suppressed relationship between realism and positive affect was discovered. Moreover, it was confirmed that scale result is dependent on the quality of VR graphics. Results of the analyses provide the evidence that the VR Simulation Realism Scale is a well-established tool that might be used both in science and in VR development. However, further research needs to be done to increase external validity and predictive power of the scale.

Foreign Aid, Development, and US Strategic Interests in the Cold War

Scholars have argued that during the Cold War, the United States gave aid to its allies to reward them for maintaining an anti-Communist foreign policy rather than to promote their economic development. This finding is mostly based on data starting in the 1970s and does not accurately characterize US grand strategy before the 1970s, when the United States used aid to promote development among its allies in order to strengthen them against Communism. Using original data collected from historical editions of USAID's “Greenbook,” this article identifies the amount of unconditional aid in the United States’ foreign-aid programs in the period 1955–1970. This type of aid was designed to be politically attractive rather than to be developmentally effective. This article also develops an original measure of aid recipients’ geopolitical alignment that draws on hand coding of 466 diplomatic documents. Using these data, this article finds that there was more unconditional aid in the United States’ aid programs to neutral and nonaligned countries than in the United States’ aid programs to its allies and security partners—a counterintuitive finding that shows how different the first half of the Cold War was from the second.1

Introducing the Contextual Ambidexterity Scale for Public Organizations (CASPO): Scale development and initial evidence

Contextual ambidexterity describes the organizational capacity of being simultaneously able to adapt and change in the face contextual requirements while keeping alignment and predictability. Contextual ambidexterity has been recognized as an appropriate explanation of organizational performance, and its influence has already permeated accounts of public organizations’ dynamics. We join this line of reasoning by suggesting that some specific characteristics of public organizations call for refinement of the contextual ambidexterity concept, and the correspondent evolution in measuring this organizational ability, thus introducing the Contextual Ambidexterity Scale for Public Organizations (CASPO). We suggest going beyond the original measure of alignment and adaptability created by Gibson and Birkinshaw (2004), to include psychological safety, reflexive spaces, and flexibility as sub-dimensions of adaptability and imprinting, rulefollowing and shared vision as sub-dimensions of alignment. On the basis of a sample of civil servants (n=200), we used exploratory factor analysis to identify a six-dimensional solution covering alignment and adaptability. Using another sample of civil servants (n=200), we used confirmatory factor analysis to test CASPO’s construct validity and regression analysis in testing the criterion validity. The results reveal that CASPO shows appropriate metric qualities and that it surpasses Gibson and Birkinshaw’s (2004) scale in predicting both their measure of generic organizational performance and a measure of performance specific for public organizations. This study contributes to the creation of sound measures of relevant concepts explaining the performance of public organizations.

Moment Estimates of the Cloud of a Planar Measure

With a proper function theoretic definition of the cloud of a positive measure with compact support in the real plane, a computational scheme of transforming the moments of the original measure into the moments of the uniformly distributed mass on the cloud is described. The main limiting operation involves exclusively truncated Christoffel-Darboux kernels, while error bounds depend on the spectral asymptotics of a Hankel kernel belonging to the Hilbert-Schmidt class.

Decision-making in international organizations: institutional design and performance

International organizations (IOs) experience significant variation in their decision-making performance, or the extent to which they produce policy output. While some IOs are efficient decision-making machineries, others are plagued by deadlock. How can such variation be explained? Examining this question, the article makes three central contributions. First, we approach performance by looking at IO decision-making in terms of policy output and introduce an original measure of decision-making performance that captures annual growth rates in IO output. Second, we offer a novel theoretical explanation for decision-making performance. This account highlights the role of institutional design, pointing to how majoritarian decision rules, delegation of authority to supranational institutions, and access for transnational actors (TNAs) interact to affect decision-making. Third, we offer the first comparative assessment of the decision-making performance of IOs. While previous literature addresses single IOs, we explore decision-making across a broad spectrum of 30 IOs from 1980 to 2011. Our analysis indicates that IO decision-making performance varies across and within IOs. We find broad support for our theoretical account, showing the combined effect of institutional design features in shaping decision-making performance. Notably, TNA access has a positive effect on decision-making performance when pooling is greater, and delegation has a positive effect when TNA access is higher. We also find that pooling has an independent, positive effect on decision-making performance. All-in-all, these findings suggest that the institutional design of IOs matters for their decision-making performance, primarily in more complex ways than expected in earlier research.

Episodic Autobiographical Memory Impairment and Differences in Pronoun Use: Study of Self-Awareness in Functional Amnesia and Transient Global Amnesia

The subjective experience associated to memory processing is the core of the definition of episodic autobiographical memory (EAM). However, while it is widely known that amnesia affects the content of memories, few studies focused on the consequences of an impairment of EAM on the subjective self, also called the I-self. In the present study, we explored the I-self in two puzzling disorders that affect EAM: functional amnesia, which has an impact on autobiographical memory, and transient global amnesia (TGA), which only affects episodic memory. I-self was assessed through an original measure of self-integration in autobiographical narratives, namely the use of general or personal pronouns. Results showed that patients with functional amnesia tended to use general pronouns, whereas patients with TGA preferentially used the first person. The link between I-self and depersonalization-derealisation tendencies was also explored, showing dissociative tendencies in patients with functional amnesia but not in patients with TGA. We discuss these results from a combined neuropsychological and psychopathological perspective, with a view to proposing an explanatory model of the links between self-awareness and the episodic component of autobiographical memory.

Semantic diversity is best measured with unscaled vectors: Reply to Cevoli, Watkins and Rastle (2020)

Semantic diversity refers to the degree of semantic variability in the contexts in which a particular word is used. We have previously proposed a method for measuring semantic diversity based on latent semantic analysis (LSA). In a recent paper, Cevoli et al. (2020) attempted to replicate our method and obtained different semantic diversity values. They suggested that this discrepancy occurred because they scaled their LSA vectors by their singular values, while we did not. Using their new results, they argued that semantic diversity is not related to ambiguity in word meaning, as we originally proposed. In this reply, we demonstrate that the use of unscaled vectors provides better fits to human semantic judgements than scaled ones. Thus we argue that our original semantic diversity measure should be preferred over the Cevoli et al. version. We replicate Cevoli et al.’s analysis using the original semantic diversity measure and find (a) our original measure is a better predictor of word recognition latencies than the Cevoli et al. equivalent and (b) that, unlike Cevoli et al.’s measure, our semantic diversity is reliably associated with a measure of polysemy based on dictionary definitions. We conclude that the Hoffman et al. semantic diversity measure is better-suited to capturing the contextual variability among words and that words appearing in a more diverse set of contexts have more variable semantic representations. However, we found that homonyms did not have higher semantic diversity values than non-homonyms, suggesting that the measure does not capture this special case of ambiguity.

Translation and Validation of a Persian Version of the Mindfulness in Parenting Questionnaire: P-MIPQ

Background and Objective: parenting is an important issue in the growth process of children that affects their health. A new approach in parenting styles is mindful parenting. mindfulness in parenting means taking care of the children with no judgmental approach and having an open welcoming attitude toward children’s actions in the very moment parents and offspring(s) are living in. This study aimed to localize the MIPQ questionnaire into Persian language through translation and validation in order to create a useful valid measure for assessing mindfulness in parenting in Iran. Methods and materials: the MIPQ- original version- was translated through forward-backward translation into Persian, and then was pilot-tested on mothers of children aged 7-12 after confirming the validity of the measure using CVR-CVI method. Confirmatory factor analysis was used to ensure the item-development validity of the measure. To evaluate the factor structure of data, AMOSE (version 24) software was used. In order to assess the reliability of translated version 15 mothers included in the first phase of the study. They filled out the MIPQ questionnaire, and also they filled out simultaneously “parenting scale” by Arnold and O’leary -1993 and MMAS by Brown and Ryan-2003. After having the measure confirmed regarding validity and reliability, it was distributed among 400 mothers of which 306 returned the questionnaire fully administered. Results: Confirmatory factor analysis assessed and it indicated that the two-factor model in the original measure was of a good fit. The total score of the questionnaire and the scores of the two domains (‘Mindfulness’ and ‘Being in the moment with the child’) were correlated significantly positive with the total score of the MAAS and PS. The CVR-CVI of the questionnaire was also confirmed. Conclusion: regarding psychometrics of the measure, according results of our study, it seems that the questionnaire benefits from a highly standard structure and content as well. As one could notice, this study is the second effort for translation and validation of MIPQ which in both the measure could meet the criteria’s requirements. Therefore, it seems that the measure could be a useful standard questionnaire for evaluating mindfulness in parenting. More research is needed to evaluate the effectiveness of the measure (P-MIPQ) in different kind of people.

Convergence and Psychometric Properties of Character Strengths Measures: The VIA-IS and the VIA-IS-R.

This study compares the original measure to assess character strengths (VIA-IS) with its latest revision (VIA-IS-R) regarding reliability and convergent, discriminant, and criterion validity. A sample of 499 German-speaking adults (79.4% women, mean age: 33.3 years) provided self-reports of character strengths (VIA-IS, VIA-IS-R) and several criteria: Core virtues, thriving, and moral behaviors. Results suggested that both measures showed satisfactory internal consistency and converged well in a multitrait-multimethod analysis. Further, both measures were comparable regarding their relationships with the criteria. Overall, the results of the current study suggest that both questionnaires are reliable and valid instruments and findings based on these instruments can be considered highly comparable.

Crystal market: a way to study knowledge-based dynamic capabilities

PurposeIn this work, the authors address a gap in the literature on the contribution of dynamic capabilities and internal contingencies to performance in a highly competitive environment.Design/methodology/approachThe authors use data from the Premier Football (soccer) League in Portugal over ten years. This league works as a laboratorial setting and enables the authors to identify the influences of the variables in the study.FindingsThe authors find evidence that human capital is decisive to a team's performance. This study’s findings question the role of the alignment between the different levels of the organization: strategic, tactical and operational.Research limitations/implicationsWith this work, the authors stress the importance (1) of using alternative scenarios in management research and (2) of the way that human and social capitals and managerial cognition and internal contingencies influence the development of knowledge-based dynamic capabilities, especially in highly regulated industries such has sports clubs.Practical implicationsThis work provides evidence on the importance of strategic coherence at different structural levels of the organization. Furthermore, it highlights the need to secure the right resources at the right time.Originality/valueThe authors propose a setting to run the study: a crystal market and an original measure of performance that reflect the relative achievement of market potential.