Narcissism and social networking Web sites

The present research examined how narcissism is manifested on a social networking Web site (i.e., Facebook.com). Narcissistic personality self-reports were collected from social networking Web page owners. Then their Web pages were coded for both objective and subjective content features. Finally, strangers viewed the Web pages and rated their impression of the owner on agentic traits, communal traits, and narcissism. Narcissism predicted (a) higher levels of social activity in the online community and (b) more self-promoting content in several aspects of the social networking Web pages. Strangers who viewed the Web pages judged more narcissistic Web page owners to be more narcissistic. Finally, mediational analyses revealed several Web page content features that were influential in raters' narcissistic impressions of the owners, including quantity of social interaction, main photo self-promotion, and main photo attractiveness. Implications of the expression of narcissism in social networking communities are discussed.     

Attention to repeated images on the World-Wide Web: Another look at scanpath theory

The scanpath theory of visual perception was tested using Web pages as visual stimuli.Scanpaths are repetitive sequences of fixations and saccades that occur upon reexposure to a visual stimulus. Since Internet users are exposed to repeated visual displays, the Web provides ideal stimuli to test this theory. Eye movement data were recorded for subjects’repeated viewings of three Web pages over three sessions. Resemblance of eye path sequences was measured with a string-edit method; multidimensional scaling and cluster analysis were used to group sequences. Support was found for the scanpath theory; some clusters included pairs of sequences from the same subject. A repeated measures analysis of variance revealeda statistically significant main effect for stimulus type, with a text-intensive news story page generating more similar sequences than a graphic-intensive advertising page. There was a statistically significant main effect for cross-viewing comparisons, reflecting a linear trend in which eye paths for the same subject became more alike over time.     

Quiz-o-Matic: A free Web-based tool for construction of self-scoring on-line quizzes

Increasingly, educators are using the World-Wide Web (the Web) and related technology to supplement their traditional teaching materials. In this paper, we present a free tool that has been placed on the Web to enable educators to create Web pages that present self-scoring quizzes. Such Web-based practice quizzes provide students with an opportunity for interactive assessment and review of course material. The tool, Quiz-o-Matic, uses active server pages to build the HTML and JavaScript code for each quiz, without requiring the user to edit any code. We present evidence that students judge the self-scoring quizzes to be useful and worthwhile additions to a course.     

The willingness of medical students to use Facebook as a training channel for professional habits: the case of influenza vaccination

The low acceptance of influenza vaccination by both medical students and healthcare workers (HCWs) signals the need for innovative strategies. We administered an anonymous questionnaire to 410 University of Barcelona medical students who were asked about using the Internet to find information on influenza vaccination of HCWs and about their willingness to use technical and informal Facebook pages as an information channel on this topic. Of the 410 participants, 74.1 percent were female and 58.3 percent were in the first preclinical 3-year university cycle. A total of 7.6 percent participants reported using the Internet for queries on influenza vaccination, 89.8 percent reported that they were Facebook users, and 275 (67.1 percent) would accept an invitation from the technical or informal Facebook pages. The technical Web site would be actively followed by 77, or by 30.0 percent of those who would accept the invitation and the informal site by 116 (43.6 percent of those who would accept). The marked willingness to use Facebook to obtain information on the influenza vaccination of HCWs potentially opens a new window in health education: social networks could be used to help create professional habits. Students would be more likely to engage with this type of Facebook page if the contents were informal rather than highly technical.     

Objective age of acquisition norms for a set of 328 words in Spanish

Age of acquisition is one of the most important variables in picture naming. For this reason, a large number of findings concerning age-of-acquisition data have been published in recent years in a number of different languages. In this article, objective age-of-acquisition data in Spanish for 328 pictures were collected from a pool of 760 children, half of whom were boys and the other half girls. A total of 246 pictures were selected from the Snodgrass and Vanderwart (1980) set, and 82 were new pictures. Like the results of other studies, we found that objective age of acquisition correlates less than rated age of acquisition with familiarity and frequency, which indicates that the objective measure is less contaminated by other variables than are rated estimates. A very high correlation was obtained between the norms from this study and those published in English, French, Icelandic, and Italian. These norms will be very useful to Spanish psycholinguists and clinicians. Related materials may be downloaded from the Psychonomic Society Web archive at www.psychonomic.org/archive/.     

Effects of headings and familiarity with a text on strategies for searching a text

College students were videotaped while they searched chapter-length texts for answers to specific questions. The texts either did not contain headings or contained one of three types of headings that varied in the information that they provided about text organization and content. Familiarity with the text was varied by manipulating (1) the number of prior searches of the text and (2) whether or not the text was read before searching. Measures were taken of the time spent examining each page and of the sequence of examination of pages. Cluster analyses of the search measures revealed that familiarity with the text influenced a searcher's strategy for selecting which pages to examine. Once a page was selected for examination, both headings and familiarity influenced how the page was inspected.     

Use of HyperCard to create pages on the World-Wide Web

A variety of commercial and shareware programs are now available to assist in creating HTML pages for a World-Wide Web (WWW) site. However, users with some knowledge of HTML coding and a simple programming language, such as the HyperTalk language in HyperCard, can create custom tools that will simplify the task of creating and maintaining multiple-page WWW sites. This paper presents examples of two such tools and describes the basic steps they use to create HTML documents.     

The PC tachistoscope has 32 pages

Page switching is the basis of the PC tachistoscope, and usual accounts of page switching on the PC refer to a maximum of 8 available pages. This article shows how to achieve up to 16 pages in 40-column text mode and up to 32 pages in low-resolution graphics mode using conventional page switching combined with the bit-plane layering technique described by Bokhorst (1995). A high level C program is presented to show how this is done. When 32 pages are in use, the images must be monochrome.     

Dutch norm data for 13 semantic categories and 338 exemplars.

A data set is described that includes eight variables gathered for 13 common superordinate natural language categories and a representative set of 338 exemplars in Dutch. The category set contains 6 animal categories (reptiles, amphibians, mammals, birds, fish, and insects), 3 artifact categories (musical instruments, tools, and vehicles), 2 borderline artifact-natural-kind categories (vegetables and fruit), and 2 activity categories (sports and professions). In an exemplar and a feature generation task for the category nouns, frequency data were collected. For each of the 13 categories, a representative sample of 5-30 exemplars was selected. For all exemplars, feature generation frequencies, typicality ratings, pairwise similarity ratings, age-of-acquisition ratings, word frequencies, and word associations were gathered. Reliability estimates and some additional measures are presented. The full set of these norms is available in Excel format at the Psychonomic Society Web archive, www.psychonomic.org/archive/.     

Measuring study time distributions: Implications for designing computer-based courses

In both traditional lecture-test courses and courses delivered over the World-Wide Web (WWW), both beginning and experienced college students reported studying almost exclusively just before exams. Automatic measures (computer records, WWW page hits, and electronic mail archives) confirmed the self-reported distributions of study times. Weekly deadlines produced weekly volleys of taking on-line quizzes, a pattern that was reflected in self-reports of study times. However, on-line study materials were used primarily for review for regularly scheduled in-class exams. Thus, regardless of course format, students engaged in massed practice and did not experience study aids at appropriate times. Computer technology provides new forms of learning for students, as well as opportunities for instructors to observe patterns of student study time. Management of instructional contingencies will be necessary to bring students into contact with the rich cognitive aids enabled by technology.     

Cognitive technologies for gist processing

Cognitive technologies extend our cognitive abilities, yet they are currently deficient in many respects. According to fuzzy-trace theory, people are gist processors with a fuzzy-processing preference, and information is mentally represented along a fuzzy-to-verbatim continuum. An understanding of gist processing could form the basis of a new generation of more effective cognitive technologies. This suggests, first, the need for new tools to help Web page creators optimize gist representations of text. Such a system could provide feedback about the visitor’s gist and make recommendations about rewriting. It also suggests the need for new tools to help authors create more effective means of presenting quantitative data in visual form. The advocated approach capitalizes on the collective knowledge of communities of practice on the Web. Finally, it suggests the need for new tools for collecting input from users. The facial composite system EvoFIT is cited as an example.     

PsychMate: Providing psychology majors the tools to do real experiments and learn empirical methods

PsychMate is a set of software tools for undergraduate psychology students to run, develop, and analyze computerized experiments. It includes 30 psychological experiments in the areas of perception, cognition, social psychology, human factors, and cognitive neuroscience. Students run experiments themselves and see basic results immediately. The automatic spreadsheet analysis forms allow them to aggregate data and create analyses, presentations, and Web pages with a single click. Students can use the Psychology Experiment Authoring Kit experiment editor to create their own experiments in minutes and run experiments with other students using Web-based experiment-management tools. The Brain-Tutor and BrainViewer applications teach brain anatomy and permit students to analyze fMRI brain imaging data from subjects who have performed the same memory experiments in which they participated. PsychMate has been used in 83 classes in which 1,533 students submitted 5,464 completed experiments with few (less than 1%) requests for help and a very positive rating of the research experience.     

Story stimuli for creating false beliefs about the world

Fiction is not always accurate, and this has consequences for readers. In laboratory studies, the reading of short stories led participants to produce story errors as facts on a later test of general knowledge (Marsh, Meade, & Roediger, 2003). The present article describes these story stimuli in detail, so that interested researchers will be able to use the stimuli and change them as needed for particular research projects. This article provides instructions for using the stories and suggestions for modifying them; it is a manual for one way of creating suggestibility. The full set of stories and reading comprehension questions may be downloaded fromwww.psychonomic.org/archive/.     

Normative data on the familiarity and difficulty of 196 Spanish word fragments.

In this article, normative data on the familiarity and difficulty of 196 single-solution Spanish word fragments are presented. The database includes the following indices: difficulty, familiarity, frequency, number of meanings, number of letters given in the fragment, first and/or last letters given, and ratio of letters to blanks. A factor analysis was performed on difficulty, and two factors were obtained. Frequency, familiarity, and number of meanings loaded highly on the first factor, which we consider to measure lexical processes, whereas number of letters in the fragment, first and/or last letters given, and ratio of letters to blanks loaded highly on the second factor, which we judge to be determined by perceptual information. Regression analyses using factor scores as predictors showed that both factors accounted for a significant part of the completion probability scores. The full set of these norms may be downloaded from the Psychonomic Society Web archive at www.psychonomic.org/archive/.