El Salvador, Guatemala is a, study in black and white. On the left is a collection of extreme Marxist-Leninist groups led by what one diplomat calls “a pretty faceless bunch of people.’ ’ On the right is an entrenched elite that has dominated Central America’s most populous country since a CIA-backed coup deposed the reformist government of Col. Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán in 1954. Moderates of the political center. embattled but alive in E1 Salvador, have virtually disappeared in Guatemala-joining more than 30.000 victims of terror over the last tifteen vears. “The situation in Guatemala is much more serious than in EI Salvador, ” declares one Latin American diplomat. “The oligarchy is that much more reactionary. and the choices are far fewer. “ ‘Zero’: The Guatemalan oligarchs hated Jimmy Carter for cutting off U.S. military aid in 1977 to protest human-rights abuses-and the right-wingers hired marimba bands and set off firecrackers on the night Ronald Reagan was elected. They considered Reagan an ideological kinsman and believed they had a special

We developed a multidimensional coping inventory to assess the different ways in which people respond to stress. Five scales (of four items each) measure conceptually distinct aspects of problem-focused coping (active coping, planning, suppression of competing activities, restraint coping, seek-ing of instrumental social support); five scales measure aspects of what might be viewed as emotion-focused coping (seeking of emotional social support, positive reinterpretation, acceptance, denial, turning to religion); and three scales measure coping responses that arguably are less useful (focus on and venting of emotions, behavioral disengagement, mental disengagement). Study 1 reports the development of scale items. Study 2 reports correlations between the various coping scales and sev-eral theoretically relevant personality measures in an effort to provide preliminary information about the inventory's convergent and discriminant validity. Study 3 uses the inventory to assess coping responses among a group of undergraduates who were attempting to cope with a specific stressful episode. This study also allowed an initial examination of associations between dispositional and situational coping tendencies. Interest in the processes by which people cope with stress has grown dramatically over the past decade (cf. Moos, 1986). The

How do people know as much as they do with as little information as they get? The problem takes many forms; learning vocabulary from text is an especially dramatic and convenient case for research. A new general theory of acquired similarity and knowledge representation, latent semantic analysis

In almost all computer applications, users must enter correct words for the desired objects or actions. For success without extensive training, or in first-tries for new targets, the system must recognize terms that will be chosen spontaneously. We studied spontaneous word choice for objects

A general theory of domain identification is used to describe achievement barriers still faced by women in advanced quantitative areas and by African Americans in school. The theory assumes that sustained school success requires identification with school and its subdomains; that societal pressures

to be independent. We introduce a novel search strategy that combines Hill-climbing with systematic search, and we show how other powerful heuristic information can be extracted and used to prune the search space. FF was the most successful automatic planner at the recent AIPS-2000 planning competition. We review

search strategies, each of which is a query expansion for a given domain. For this task, we compare the performance of RankBoost to the individual search strategies. The second experiment is a collaborative-filtering task for making movie recommendations. Here, we present results comparing Rank

Valid predictions for the direction of nonresponse bias were obtained from subjective estimates and extrapolations in an analysis of mail survey data from published studies. For estimates of the magnitude of bias, the use of extrapolations led to substantial improvements over a strategy

The literature on interference in the Stroop Color-Word Task, covering over 50 years and some 400 studies, is organized and reviewed. In so doing, a set ofl 8 reliable empirical findings is isolated that must be captured by any successful theory of the Stroop effect. Existing theoretical positions

“Somebody says, ‘You know, you people always say that space is continuous. How do you know when you get to a small enough dimension that there really are enough points in between, that it isn’t just a lot of dots separated by little distances? ’ Or they say, ‘You know those quantum mechanical