Volume 45, Issue 1 (2003): What's Inside

This issue opens with Dieter Rasch on a question that trips up more empirical work than people admit: how large should a study actually be? His paper walks through determining the optimal size of experiments and surveys, the sort of planning decision that shapes everything downstream.

Wido La Heij, Karin W. Heikoop, Simone Akerboom and Ineke Bloem take on picture naming when a picture sits inside a surrounding context. The puzzle they chase is whether that context slows naming down (semantic interference) or speeds it up (semantic facilitation). The answer, it turns out, is not as settled as the labels suggest.

Bernhard Hommel reports on spatial asymmetries in the flanker-congruency effect. His finding is that attentional scanning does not treat left and right evenly; it gets pulled around by the orientation of the flankers themselves.

Then comes a sharper, more argumentative piece. Alexander von Eye, Friedrich Lösel and Roni Mayzer revisit Sachs and his astrology monograph, re-analyzing the crime statistics he used. Their commentary is methodological, and the title says it plainly enough: is it all written in the stars? Their reworking of his data suggests the answer is no.

Karl Schweizer and Peter Döbrich turn to teachers, looking at self-reported health alongside appraisal, coping and stress. It is the kind of study that connects how people read their own circumstances with how their bodies hold up under them.

Klaus D. Kubinger closes the issue with a caution rather than a result. When factor analysis gets applied to dichotomous variables, he argues, you can end up with artificial findings: structure that looks real but is a byproduct of the method, not the data.