he golden section is 8 proportion the aesthetic properties of which have been extolled since antiquity. The data from five experiments in which subjects made dichotomous judgements of acquaintances on bipolar dimensions (e.g. p h a n t -2 m p l ) were reported. These data indicated that the mean proportion of positive adjectives used in making interpersonal judgements is an excellent approximation of the golden aection. An explanation of this finding was offered in terms of Berlyne's 'strikingneaa hypothesis'. It waa suggested that Boucher & Osgood's 'Pollyt~na hypothesis' should be extended to include the possibility that, by tending to organize his judgements i n the golden section ratio, the person is able to pay specid attention to negative events.* Data supporting the golden section hypothesis may also be found in the Osgood & Riohacda experiment itself. "hey gave subjects 200 sentences of the form X is (adjective) -(adjective), such aa X ia dangerow,empty. The subject's task wm to decide whether and or but should be used to 6ll the blank.From the viewpoint of the golden seotion hypothesis, the subject is being asked to divide the sentences into two classes: those which take and, and those which take but. Since and is positive and but negative (Osgood & Riohards, 1973, p. 397), subjects should use and 02 per cent of the time, and but 38 per cent of the time. Osgood and Richards (1973, pp. 401,409) report that and is used, on the average, 82.6 per cent of the time and but 37.6 per cent of the timeimpressively close to the golden section ratio.

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Knowledge acquisition is a constructive modeling process, not simply a matter of "expertise transfer." Consistent with this perspective, we advocate knowledge acquisition practices and tools that facilitate active collaboration between expert and knowledge engineer, that exploit a serviceable theory in their application, and that support knowledge-based system development from a life-cycle perspective. A constructivist theory of knowledge is offered as a plausible theoretical foundation for knowledge acquisition and as an effective practical approach to the dynamics of modeling. In this view, human experts construct knowledge from their own personal experiences while interacting with their social constituencies (e.g., supervisors, colleagues, clients, patients) in their niche of expertise. Knowledge acquisition is presented as a cooperative enterprise in which the knowledge engineer and expert collaborate in constructing an explicit model of problem solving in a specific domain. From this perspective, the agenda for the knowledge acquisition research community includes developing tools and methods to aid experts in their efforts to express, elaborate, and improve their models of the domain. This functional view of expertise helps account for several problems that typically arise in practical knowledge acquisition projects, many of which stem directly from the inadequacies of representations used at various stages of system development.To counter these problems, we emphasize the use of mediating representations as a means of communication between expert and knowledge engineer, and intermediate representations to help bridge the gap between the mediating representations themselves, as well as between the mediating representations and a particular implementation formalism.

This research examines further the hypothesis that subjects tend to allot figures to the negative poles of constructs approximately 38 per cent of the time (Benjafield & Adams‐Webber, 1976). Sixty Canadian undergraduates (30 women and 30 men) judged 20 nonsense words (e.g. JOHZAN) as if these were the names of people on 20 bipolar constructs. Ten of these constructs contained positive poles which were E+ and negative poles which were E‐ (e.g. kind‐not kind) and the other ten constructs had positive poles which were E‐ and negative poles which were E+ (e.g. sad‐not sad). These procedures were developed by Eiser & Mower White (1973). The results of this experiment, and a reanalysis of those of Eiser & Mower White, clearly supported the hypothesis.

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