Temporal Closeness Promotes Imitation of Meaningful Gestures in Face-to-Face Communication

The present research investigated how temporal distance affects imitation of gestures during a conversation. According to construal level theory, psychological closeness (vs. distance) leads to preference for more pictorial and embodied (vs. symbolic and amodal) forms of communication as well as to greater context sensitivity. We thus hypothesized that people are more sensitive to the contextual meaning of gestures and show more imitation of meaningful (vs. meaningless) gestures when primed with temporal closeness (compared to distance). Participants (N = 91) were assigned to the role of a job interviewer for an internship that would begin in 1 week (vs. in 1 year) and interacted with an ostensible applicant who displayed various meaningful and meaningless gestures. When the internship was to start in 1 week, participants imitated meaningful gestures more often than meaningless gestures. When the internship was to start in 1 year, participants imitated both gesture types equally frequently. This finding indicates that people are more likely to embody verbal statements of an interaction partner when feeling psychologically close to the subject of the conversation.     

The fiscal impact of immigration to welfare states of the Scandinavian type

In this paper, we examine the potential of immigration to strengthen fiscal sustainability, which is under pressure by an ageing population in many European countries. We look at a particularly challenging case, namely that of Denmark, which has extensive tax-financed welfare programmes that provide a high social safety net. The analysis is based on a forecast of the entire Danish economy made using a dynamic computable general equilibrium model with overlapping generations. We present life cycle estimates of the potential fiscal impact of immigration considering the cost of immigration on the margin as well as on average. The main conclusion is that immigrants from Western countries have a positive fiscal impact, while immigrants from non-Western countries have a large negative one, which is also the case when considering only non-refugee immigrants. The negative effect is caused by both a weak labour market performance and early retirement in combination with the universal Danish welfare schemes.     

Stein-like 2SLS estimator

ABSTRACT

Maasoumi (1978 Maasoumi, E. (1978). A modified Stein-like estimator for the reduced form coefficients of simultaneous equations. Econometrica 46:695–703.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) proposed a Stein-like estimator for simultaneous equations and showed that his Stein shrinkage estimator has bounded finite sample risk, unlike the three-stage least square estimator. We revisit his proposal by investigating Stein-like shrinkage in the context of two-stage least square (2SLS) estimation of a structural parameter. Our estimator follows Maasoumi (1978 Maasoumi, E. (1978). A modified Stein-like estimator for the reduced form coefficients of simultaneous equations. Econometrica 46:695–703.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) in taking a weighted average of the 2SLS and ordinary least square estimators, with the weight depending inversely on the Hausman (1978 Hausman, J. A. (1978). Specification tests in econometrics. Econometrica 46:1251–1271.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) statistic for exogeneity. Using a local-to-exogenous asymptotic theory, we derive the asymptotic distribution of the Stein estimator and calculate its asymptotic risk. We find that if the number of endogenous variables exceeds 2, then the shrinkage estimator has strictly smaller risk than the 2SLS estimator, extending the classic result of James and Stein (1961 James W, ., Stein, C. M. (1961). Estimation with quadratic loss. Proceedings of the Fourth Berkeley Symposium on Mathematical Statistics and Probability 1:361–380. [Google Scholar]). In a simple simulation experiment, we show that the shrinkage estimator has substantially reduced finite sample median squared error relative to the standard 2SLS estimator.     

Clinicians Play with Mud,and It's the Best Thing for Us: An Interview With Alistair Campbell

Alistair Campbell is Research Editor for the ANZJFT. He is a Senior Lecturer in Clinical Psychology and Director of the Psychology Clinic at James Cook University in Townsville. He speaks provocatively with Ben Hansen about research and training in family therapy, about accountability to our clients, and about practice.     

Project Employ: engineering hope and breaking down barriers to homelessness

The homeless population in the US has dramatically increased in the past two decades. People who are homeless often lack skills sets such as stress management and social skills, independent living skills, and skills for vocational and leisure engagement. Best practice vocational education and training programs for individuals who are homeless recognize that success in the worker role often hinges on a person's capacity to manage day-to-day living. Life skills and pre-employment training are essential components of vocational programs but no more important than interpersonal skill development including anger management, developing self esteem and motivation, building goal setting capacity, and skills for money management, personal budgeting and self-advocacy. These areas of performance have all been traditionally included in occupational therapy's domain of practice. This article describes Project Employ, a grant funded supportive employment program that has grown out of collaboration between Duquesne University's Department of Occupational Therapy and Bethlehem Haven, an emergency shelter and residential recovery program and primary service provider for homeless people in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The purpose of this article is to describe the history, structure and outcomes of Project Employ.     

Auctions of companies

Auctions of companies are conducted in ways that contradict received auction theory. The major puzzles are: (1) sellers restrict the number of bidders; (2) sellers restrict the number of bidders; (3) bidders are screened by an initial round of non-binding bids; and (4) bidders offer - and sellers sometimes accept - preemptive bids. Puzzles (1), (2), and (4) are explained by assuming that some information concerning the company can, if released, reduce the value of the company. Puzzle (3) is explained as a way for sellers to select the highest-valued bidders; equilibrium is maintained by using the initial bids to set a reserve price for the final bidding round.     

Experiments in modelling recent Danish fertility curves

This paper reports the outcome of an exercise in curve fitting to annual sets of Danish age-specific fertility rates for the years 1962 to 1971 by means of least squares. Functions fitted were a cubic spline, the Hadwiger and Coale-Trussell functions, the gamma and beta densities, two versions of a polynomial, and two of Brass's relational procedures, as well as the Gompertz curve. The spline function fitted all curves far better than any of the others. The Coale-Trussell procedure and gamma density were about equal, followed by the Hadwiger function. All of these functions fit the data well. One of the polynomials fit reasonably well, but the rest of the functions were less accurate.     

Heterogeneity of individuals with a history of child sexual abuse: an examination of children presenting to treatment

The current study examined children and families who presented for treatment through Project SAFE (Sexual Abuse Family Education) following childhood sexual abuse. Pretreatment assessment data were used to develop clusters of participants with significantly differing presentation of symptom outcome following abuse. Four clusters were discovered: (a) a Highly Distressed group, whose members had clinically elevated scores on all self- and parent-report measures; (b) a Problem Behaviors group, whose members had scores within the normal range for self-report measures and elevated scores on all parent-report measures; (c) a Subclinical group, whose participants had scores below the mean and below cutoff scores for all self- and parent-report measures; and (d) a Self-reported Distress group, whose members had elevated scores on self-report measures and scores below clinical cutoffs for all parent-report measures.     

Equivalence Between Out‐of‐Sample Forecast Comparisons and Wald Statistics

We demonstrate the asymptotic equivalence between commonly used test statistics for out‐of‐sample forecasting performance and conventional Wald statistics. This equivalence greatly simplifies the computational burden of calculating recursive out‐of‐sample test statistics and their critical values. For the case with nested models, we show that the limit distribution, which has previously been expressed through stochastic integrals, has a simple representation in terms of χ²‐distributed random variables and we derive its density. We also generalize the limit theory to cover local alternatives and characterize the power properties of the test.