Beliefs about Legality and Benefits for Mental Health.

Research on mental health pays increasing attention to the influence of social institutions on subjective well-being over the life course. Yet little research has considered how belief in the promise of legal institutions may have beneficial effects for well-being. Through structural equation models of longitudinal data, our findings suggest that belief in the neutrality and fairness of legal institutions has salutary effects for mental health net of social and economic status and across individuals from a wide range of ethnic groups.

Recognition ROCs are curvilinear-or are they? On premature arguments against the two-high-threshold model of recognition.

Recent reviews of recognition receiver operating characteristics (ROCs) claim that their curvilinear shape rules out threshold models of recognition. However, the shape of ROCs based on confidence ratings is not diagnostic to refute threshold models, whereas ROCs based on experimental bias manipulations are. Also, fitting predicted frequencies to actual data is a more sensitive method for model comparisons than ROC regressions.