Commentary: Are Three Waves of Data Sufficient for Assessing Mediation?

Maxwell, Cole, and Mitchell (2011) demonstrated that simple structural equation models, when used with cross-sectional data, generally produce biased estimates of meditated effects. I extend those results by showing how simple structural equation models can produce biased estimates of meditated effects when used even with longitudinal data. Even with longitudinal data, simple autoregressive structural equation models can imply the existence of indirect effects when only direct effects exist and the existence of direct effects when only indirect effects exist.     

Internationalizing 360-Degree Feedback: Are Subordinate Ratings Comparable?

ABSTRACT: This study addressed whether 360-degree feedback ratings made by subordinates are equivalent across national cultures (Great Britain, Hong Kong, Japan, U.S.). Employees ratings of their leaders were collected via a companys existing 360-degree feedback survey. A two-factor baseline model was developed using exploratory factor analysis and tested across cultures utilizing confirmatory factor analysis techniques. Results revealed differences in factor form, suggesting that the constructs underlying the survey and their relationship to the survey items differed across cultures. These results emphasize the need for multinational companies to use caution when transporting human resources practices, such as 360-degree feedback, to international locations.The author would like to express appreciation to Alice Stuhlmacher for her valuable comments on earlier versions of this article. This research was conducted as part of the authors doctoral dissertation. Portions of this article were presented at the 17th Annual Conference of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, April 2002.     

Are Large Physiological Reactions to Acute Psychological Stress Always Bad for Health?

How we react physiologically to stress has long been considered to have implications for our health. There is now persuasive evidence that individuals who show large cardiovascular reactions to stress are at increased risk of developing cardiovascular disease, particularly hypertension. By implication, low reactivity is protective or benign. However, there is recent evidence that low reactivity may predict elevated risk for a range of adverse health outcomes, such as depression, obesity, poor self-reported health and compromised immunity. In addition, low cortisol and cardiovascular reactivity may be a characteristic of individuals with addictions to tobacco and alcohol, as well as those at risk of addiction and those who relapse from abstinence. Our ideas about reactivity may have to be revised in the light of such findings.     

What Are Gay Men for?

Abstract

The question asked in the title is one that Mark Vernon takes from Michael Vasey's own writings on sexuality. Vernon notes that Vasey presents a clearly constructavist account of sexuality in which the nature and meaning of homosexuality will change with historical and social circumstances. This raises the question of what gay men might be for in contemporary society. In order to explore this question Vernon looks at the literature on friendship, drawing on the work of Aristotle and others. He aims to show that the kind of friendship experienced by and shown to others through gay men, is of a particular, perhaps disturbing, kind. It is from this position that Vernon answers Vasey's question by suggesting that gay men may be able to offer a prophetic message to contemporary society about the nature of friendship beyond, and within, the family structures of society.     

Are Pre-Assembly Shared Work Experiences Useful for Temporary-Team Assembly Decisions? A Study of Olympic Ice Hockey Team Composition

The purpose of this study was to investigate if pre-assembly shared work experiences among temporary team members facilitate individual and team performance. Archival data from the 2014 Men’s Olympic Ice Hockey Tournament (12 teams, 25 players each) was used in the study. Measures of social network centrality were computed based on the pre-assembly shared work experiences among national team members derived from professional and amateur affiliations. These measures were used to predict objective individual and team performance criteria. Players’ closeness centrality scores, from pre-assembly shared work experience networks, positively predicted their goals, assists, and being involved in more positive than negative plays. Teams with less centralized pre-assembly shared work experience network structures tended to perform better than teams with more centralized pre-assembly shared work experience network structures. Temporary teams are commonly used by organizations to perform tasks that are specific, important, and of short duration. Because temporary teams have little time to develop the shared properties required for effective team functioning, assembly decisions are of paramount importance. The results from this study suggest that centrality measures derived from pre-assembly shared work experiences are useful to consider when assembling temporary teams. Few studies have investigated the impact of pre-assembly shared work experiences on individual and team performance. Using objective data, this study provides evidence that pre-assembly shared work experiences relate to individual and team performance in temporary teams, supporting the need for expanded research in this area.     

Self-Report Measures of Intelligence: Are They Useful as Proxy IQ Tests?

Correlations between single-item self-reports of intelligence and IQ scores are rather low (.20–.25) in college samples. The literature suggested that self-reports could be improved by three strategies: (1) aggregation, (2)item weighting, and (3) use of indirect, rather than direct, questions. To evaluate these strategies, we compared the validity of aggregated and unaggregated versions of direct measures with four indirect measures (Gough's Intellectual efficiency scale, Hogan's Intellect composite scale, Sternberg's Behavior Check List, and Trapnell's Smart scale). All measures were administered to two large samples of undergraduates ( N s = 310, 326), who also took an IQ test. Although results showed some success for both direct and indirect measures, the failure of their validities to exceed .30 impugns their utility as IQ proxies in competitive college samples. The content of the most valid items referred to global mental abilities or reading involvement. Aggregation benefited indirect more than direct measures, but prototype-weighting contributed little.     

Socioeconomic Status and Health: What is the role of Reserve Capacity?

ABSTRACT— A robust, linear association between socioeconomic status (SES) and health has been identified across many populations and health outcomes. This relationship is typically monotonic, so that each step down the SES hierarchy brings increased vulnerability to disease and premature mortality. Despite growing attention to health disparities, scientists and policymakers have made little progress toward confronting their causes and implementing effective solutions. Using the reserve capacity model ( Gallo & Matthews, 2003 ) as an organizing framework, the current article examines the contribution of resilient psychosocial resources to socioeconomic disparities in physical health. Findings suggest that deficient psychosocial resources, such as low perceptions of control and social support, may be one of many factors that connect low SES with poor health. Additional research is needed to test these relationships and their underlying mechanisms, to consider interventions to enhance reserve capacity, and to evaluate the efficacy of such efforts in fostering resilience to socioeconomic hardship.     

Are animal models predictive for humans?

It is one of the central aims of the philosophy of science to elucidate the meanings of scientific terms and also to think critically about their application. The focus of this essay is the scientific term predict and whether there is credible evidence that animal models, especially in toxicology and pathophysiology, can be used to predict human outcomes. Whether animals can be used to predict human response to drugs and other chemicals is apparently a contentious issue. However, when one empirically analyzes animal models using scientific tools they fall far short of being able to predict human responses. This is not surprising considering what we have learned from fields such evolutionary and developmental biology, gene regulation and expression, epigenetics, complexity theory, and comparative genomics.     

Are Divided Attention Tasks Useful in the Assessment and Management of Sport-Related Concussion?

This article is a systematic review of the literature on divided attention assessment inclusive of a cognitive and motor task (balance or gait) for use in concussion management. The systematic review drew from published papers listed in PubMed, MEDLINE, EMBASE and CINAHL databases. The search identified 19 empirical research papers meeting the inclusion criteria. Study results were considered for the psychometric properties of the paradigms, the influence of divided attention on measures of cognition and postural control and the comparison of divided attention task outcomes between individuals with concussion and healthy controls (all samples were age 17 years or older). The review highlights that the reliability of the tasks under a divided attention paradigm presented ranges from low to high (ICC: 0.1–0.9); however, only 3/19 articles included psychometric information. Response times are greater, gait strategies are less efficient, and postural control deficits are greater in concussed participants compared with healthy controls both immediately and for some period following concussive injury, specifically under divided attention conditions. Dual task assessments in some cases were more reliable than single task assessments and may be better able to detect lingering effects following concussion. Few of the studies have been replicated and applied across various age groups. A key limitation of these studies is that many include laboratory and time-intensive measures. Future research is needed to refine a time and cost efficient divided attention assessment paradigm, and more work is needed in younger (pre-teens) populations where the application may be of greatest utility.     

Are Immigrants from Asia Healthier than Immigrants from Other Regions?: Self-reported Health Status and Functional Difficulties of Immigrants in the USA

This study examines how regions of origin are related to immigrant health status in the USA. This paper uses the National Health Interview Survey to examine health status differences between East and Southeast Asian immigrants and immigrants from other regions. The models control for duration, socioeconomic factors, and behavioral factors. Two health indicators are examined: self-reported health and functional difficulties. Results from ordered logit regression analyses demonstrate that some of the regions of birth do significantly predict differences in health for immigrants. Specifically, immigrants from Central America and the former Soviet Union do exhibit significant health disadvantages when compared with immigrants from East and Southeast Asia. The duration effect was positively related to functional difficulties but not to self-reported health status. Overall, economic resources and education typically have a strong relationship to the measures of immigrants’ physical health. It was also found that drinking is persistently associated with better measures of physical health while smoking appears to have the opposite effect.     

III. WISC-R scatter indices: Useful information for differential diagnosis?

This study analyzed the WISC-R verbal-performance, full scale IQ, verbal IQ, and performance IQ scatter indices of 101 verified special education students. The results indicated that none of these measures discriminated among emotionally disturbed, learning disabled, minimally brain injured, and educable mentally retarded children. These scatter indices were also compared with analogous data collected from a nationwide, representative sample of normal children (Kaufman, 1976a, 1976b). Statistically significant differences were obtained between the two groups on verbal-performance, full scale IQ, and performance IQ scatter dimensions. Further analyses revealed, however, that 40% of the normal children exhibited as much or more scatter than the average special education student on each of these three scatter indices. There were no significant differences between the two groups on the verbal IQ scatter index. The results are discussed in terms of the limited utility of WISC-R scatter indices for the purpose of differential diagnosis.     

Are microsaccades responsible for the gap effect?

Extinguishing a fixation point shortly before, or concurrently with, the onset of a peripheral visual target reduces the latency of saccades to that target. Saslow (1967) hypothesized that thisgap effect might occur because fixation point offsets reduce the incidence of corrective microsaccades with an associated saccadic refractory period. In the present study, a robust gap effect was obtained. However, using a Purkinje image eyetracker with 1 arcmin of resolution, we found that fixation point offsets had no effect on the occurrence of microsaccades and that the occurrence of microsaccades had no impact on the magnitude of the gap effect. Microsaccades therefore do not appear to play any part in the production of the gap effect.     

Are UN Peacekeepers at Risk for Suicide?

Media reports connecting UN peacekeeping duties by Canadian soldiers to their subsequent suicide prompted this study of peacekeeping as suicide risk. In a case-control design we retrospectively compared 66 suicides in the Canadian military between 1990 and 1995 with two control groups: (a) 2,601 controls randomly selected from the electronic military database and (b) 66 matched controls with complete personnel and medical data. We found no increased risk of suicide in peacekeepers except among a subgroup of air force personnel. Here confounding individual factors, isolation from supports, and possibly inadequate preparation for deployment elucidated their suicides. Theater of deployment (e.g., Bosnia) did not affect the suicide rate. Military suicides experienced psychosocial stresses and psychiatric illness more often than their matched controls. We conclude that although peacekeeping per se does not increase overall suicide risk, military life-styles may strain interpersonal relationships, encourage alcohol abuse, and contribute to psychiatric illness and suicide in a minority of vulnerable individuals irrespective of peacekeeping assignment. Careful selection, and preparatory military training that encourages intragroup bonding and mutual support, may protect against suicide risk.