What I Like About You: Legislator Personality and Legislator Approval

Political Behavior - Recent work in the study of legislative politics has uncovered associations between the Big Five personality traits and myriad phenomena in the United States Congress. This...     

The Dynamics of Intra-jurisdictional Relations in the Inuit Regions of the Canadian Arctic: An Institutionalist Perspective

One of the most exciting developments in Canadian federalism has been the emergence of Aboriginal self-governing regions. This paper constructs a theoretical framework for exploring the evolution of intra-jurisdictional relations in the self-governing Inuit regions of the Canadian Arctic. Intra-jurisdictional relations in these regions are characterized by a unique set of relationships between elected governments and organizations that represent the beneficiaries of land-claims agreements. Using the literature on historical institutionalism, we argue that the nature of Inuit intra-jurisdictional relations following the establishment of self-government can be explained by the institutional choices made prior to the signing of land-claims agreements and/or self-government agreements. To illustrate the potential of our framework for analysing Inuit intra-jurisdictional relations, we briefly examine the experiences of Nunavut, an Inuit-dominated region and the newest territory in the Canadian federation.     

Computer‐Assisted Keyword and Document Set Discovery from Unstructured Text

The (unheralded) first step in many applications of automated text analysis involves selecting keywords to choose documents from a large text corpus for further study. Although all substantive results depend on this choice, researchers usually pick keywords in ad hoc ways that are far from optimal and usually biased. Most seem to think that keyword selection is easy, since they do Google searches every day, but we demonstrate that humans perform exceedingly poorly at this basic task. We offer a better approach, one that also can help with following conversations where participants rapidly innovate language to evade authorities, seek political advantage, or express creativity; generic web searching; eDiscovery; look‐alike modeling; industry and intelligence analysis; and sentiment and topic analysis. We develop a computer‐assisted (as opposed to fully automated or human‐only) statistical approach that suggests keywords from available text without needing structured data as inputs. This framing poses the statistical problem in a new way, which leads to a widely applicable algorithm. Our specific approach is based on training classifiers, extracting information from (rather than correcting) their mistakes, and summarizing results with easy‐to‐understand Boolean search strings. We illustrate how the technique works with analyses of English texts about the Boston Marathon bombings, Chinese social media posts designed to evade censorship, and others.     

Clinical presentation of malingerers diagnosed by experienced forensic psychologists

Little is known about the incidence of malingering or the diagnostic criteria for malingering employed by forensic clinical psychologists conducting pretrial evaluations for the criminal justice system. The clinical presentations of 39 criminal defendants diagnosed as malingering psychotic symptoms were contrasted with 25 defendants diagnosed as genuinely psychotic. The incidence of diagnosed malingering was 8% in a series of 314 consecutive evaluations. Malingerers differed from psychotics on 14 of 24 clinical presentation variables, including measures of general presentation, affect, hallucinations, delusions, and formal thought disorder. Results indicate consistent clinical features associated with the diagnosis of malingered psychosis.A summary of this study was presented at the 1988 Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association in Atlanta, Georgia. We very much appreciate the contribution made by the six forensic clinical psychologists at the Michigan Center for Forensic Psychiatry who volunteered to participate in this study.     

Finding and using technology-specific expertise

Successful technology transfer depends on the skills and knowledge of those who must implement new or rapidly advancing technologies. Often, new systems and technologies are delivered without proper preparation of the intended users. Thorough documentation is only part of the solution-during development, many important and technology-specific lessons are learned. These include problem diagnosis, troubleshooting techniques, and strategies for optimum utilization. Many such skills develop in response to incidents that occur during testing and evaluation and are rarely incorporated into formal documentation or instructional materials. Yet they can make the difference between skilled satisfied users and frustrated non-users. Gary A. Klein, who received his Ph.D. in experimental psychology at the University of Pittsburgh in 1969, is chairman and chief scientist of Klein Associates Inc. (Fairborn, OH) an R&D company he founded in 1978 to do work in applied cognitive psychology. His principal research area is methods of knowledge elicitation that reflect the perceptual-cognitive aspects of expertise. He previously worked at the US Air Force Human Resources Laboratory. Beth Crandall holds a dual appointment as research associate and director of operations at Klein Associates Inc., which she joined in 1986. Her research interests include expert knowledge and decisionmaking skills, and methods for eliciting this information. She received her BS in psychology from Wright State University in 1978.