The purpose of this study was to explore the links between general and personal mortality salience and nationalistic bias. After watching either a mortality salience or a control videotape, participants read a scenario about a car accident in which the driver was suing either an American or a Japanese auto manufacturer. Results showed that mortality salience produced nationalistic bias in assignments of blame to the company and to the driver; such nationalistic bias did not occur in the control condition. This creation of intergroup bias when mortality was made salient is consistent with the predictions of terror management theory. This study makes an important theoretical contribution by providing evidence that the observed effects are driven by thoughts of personal mortality; the bias in favor of American auto companies occurred only among participants who reported thinking about their own deaths.

The validityand reliability of the Test of Playfulness is examined.Abstract Since play wears many faces, occupational therapists (OTs) are concerned with the ways it may be expressed. Because adaptability is an important by-product of approaching activity in a playful manner, playfulness is a valuable outcome of occupational therapy. The Test of Playfulness (ToP) is an observational assessment requiring no special equipment. It represents a conceptualization of playfulness drawn from the literature. The purpose of this paper was to trace the development of the ToP and examine its preliminary construct and concurrent validity and inter-rater reliability. Validity and reliability were examined using the many-faceted Rasch analysis. Concurrent validity was examined by comparing children's ToP scores with their scores on the Children's Playfulness Scale. Results suggested that the ToP is both valid and reliable whenapplied to children, with or without disabilities, between 15 months and 10 years.

Three studies tested the hypothesis that people assume that the identities of other people are tied more closely to their distinctive than to their nondistinctive traits In Studies 1 and 3, subjects predicted the preferences of a target person who was a member of both a statistically distinctive and a statistically nondistinctive category (e g, sky diver and tennis player) In Study 2, subjects judged the degree of interpersonal similarity between pairs of people sharing distinctive as opposed to nondistinctive category memberships Consistent with the hypothesis, subjects linked targets with their more distinctive traits and assumed targets would be more similar to people who shared their distinctive traits than to people who shared their nondistinctive traits The implications of this distinctiveness effect for an understanding of stereotyping are explored

CI correlates significantly better with RVEDVI than PAOP at all levels of PEEP up to 50 cm H2O. RVEDVI is a more reliable predictor of volume depletion and preload recruitable increases in CI, especially in patients receiving higher levels of PEEP where PAOP is difficult to interpret.