Cognitive processes and computerized personality assessment

Several implications of the cognitive viewpoint on personality are tested and the predictive validity of cognitive processing variables is assessed with judgements of parents and friends as a criterion measure. Free recall of items was related to cognitive schemas but reaction time during score recall was not. Ease of faking as well as response latency during faking were not related to cognitive schemas. Intra-individual analysis revealed a consistent non-linear relationship between response latency and item score in all conditions of the experiment. Although some cognitive process variables were correlated with the criterion measures, adding these variables to item scores did not always increase the predictive validity.     

Schedule-induced behavior in hyperactive children

A schedule-induced behavior paradigm was used to investigate the activity patterns of hyperactive children in a standardized situation. In Experiment I, 10 hyperactive and 10 normal control children matched for age, sex, and IQ were observed under conditions of baseline and schedule. Measures of a number of categorized activities were taken on a time-sampling basis. Hyperactive children were more active than controls in baseline and did not respond to the schedule, unlike the controls who became significantly more active in schedule conditions. In Experiment II, 12 hyperactive and 6 normal children were again subjected to the same experimental paradigm, but in two of the four experimental sessions the stimulant drug methylphenidate was administered in an attempt to reduce the amount of baseline activity. Results were substantially similar to those of Experiment I, with hyperactive children more active than controls in baseline and insensitive to the schedule. There was no overall effect of drug administration on the behavior of either group. There were some ratedependent effects of both drug and schedule conditions.     

The relation of nAch to extraversion,emotional instability and level of anxiety in people of different social status and success

Questionnaires of personality (Psychoticism, Extraversion, Neuroticism and Lie scales) and anxiety, together with a questionnaire for measuring need for achievement (nAch), were administered to a Bulgarian population consisting of four groups: gifted and talented high-school students, and eminent industrialists, artists etc. Correlations were observed between nAch but these differed between groups, an explanation required the recognition of the socially recognized success of the individual on his responses. A theoretical explanation of the findings is given in terms of the theories of Leontiev and Ananiev.     

Hierarchy as a Mediator of Fairness: A Contingency Approach to Distributive Justice in Organizations1

Employees of one organization were asked to indicate the fairness of six different ways of allocating a hypothetical lump sum. As expected, the results suggest an overall preference for equity-based allocations. However, the employee's level in the hierarchy was found to mediate perceptions of fairness: upper managers viewed organization-wide equity as being most fair; middle managers saw intra-departmental equity as fairest; and clericals, unable to differentiate between equality and equity, perceived both these principles as being fairest. The results were interpreted in terms of a “contingency” approach to distributive justice which aims at integrating institutional, situational, and individual determinants of fairness.     

KNOWING BEFORE DOING: DISCRIMINATION BY RATS OF A BRIEF INTERRUPTION OF A TONE

Eight rats' lever presses were reinforced after an interruption in a tone, provided the lever had not been pressed before the tone interruption. After a few sessions, long before the animals reliably refrained from lever pressing before the interruption, the latencies of postinterruption presses (time from the termination of the interruption to the moment of the lever press) dissociated into two classes: short ones for to-be-rewarded presses, and long ones for presses in the other trials, which contained no reward because one or more lever presses had occurred before the interruption. Thus discrimination of impending reinforcement in the current trial occurred before there was evidence of sensitivity to reinforcement in the reinforcement-producing aspect of behavior. This finding is related to Shimp's (1981) contention that the temporal properties of recent behavior are reinforceable, if remembered. The present finding shows that learning to discriminate whether one's behavior has met a contingency, and learning to carry out this behavior, need not go together, implying that memory of temporal properties is probably a necessary but not a sufficient condition for learning the latter.     

ON THE SIGN OF SLOPE IN THE LEARNING OF LINEAR FUNCTIONS

Three groups of subjects were presented with pairs of values ( E and S ) of three different linear functions E = a+bS. In a test phase they had to indicate the E -values that corresponded to the S -values. The values were represented as distances marked on straight lines. Two groups, one a control group, had a positive slope, the third group a negative. The squared sum of the S-E differences was kept constant. All groups had roughly the same performance as measured by the squared sum of deviations from empirical and correct E -values. The learning curves indicated, however, that some learning had taken place in the group with the negative slope. It was concluded that a principle rather than a function was learned.     

HOW PROTHETIC IS THE CONTINUUM OF SMELL?: A further comment on the relation between magnitude and category scales

The relation K =αlog( ψ + q / k ) +β between category scale K and magnitude scale ψ found in previous experiments on loudness and softness of white noise was confirmed for smell data, too. The small increase in variability (SDs) of judgments with magnitude for smell as compared with loudness and softness suggests the substitution of the prothetic-metathetic dichotomy with a quantifiable feature, protheticness, with metathetic continua as the limiting case.     

ON THE PROBLEM OF CATEGORY SCALES IN PSYCHOPHYSICS

E isler , H. On the problem of category scales in psychophysics. Scand. J. Psychol ., 1962, 3 , 81–87.—In the first Part of the paper it is shown that, if three assumptions are granted, the category scale must be logarithmically related to the magnitude scale: K =α log φ +β . In the second part of the paper, the relation K =α log ( kφ+ q) +β is derived, starting from the assumptions that the category scale is a pure function of discrimination and that discrimination is appropriately described by the linear generalization of Weber's law for prothetic continua. We can reconcile these two formulas by defining the zero-point of the magnitude scale as the point where variability vanishes.     

SIMILARITY IN THE CONTINUUM OF HEAVINESS WITH SOME METHODOLOGICAL AND THEORETICAL CONSIDERATIONS

An experiment in which the subjects estimated (a) the ratio and (b) the similarity of pairs of stimuli, consisting of weights, is reported. The report reveals that the relation obtained in earlier investigations between estimated similarity and the two subjective magnitudes of the pair, holds good for the continuum of heaviness too. In connection with this the intraindividual standard deviation of ratio estimates and the problem of internal consistency of a ratio matrix are treated. In a speculative discussion the concept of similarity is scrutinized, the similarity function is tentatively extended to multi-dimensional cases and an attempt is made to connect similarity and discrimination learning.