The Fantasy Engagement Scale: A Flexible Measure of Positive and Negative Fantasy Engagement

Despite the prevalence of fantasy activities in day-to-day life, there has been little systematic psychological research on fantasy. Existing work is scattered across numerous fantasy-related topics and are rarely viewed as a collective body of work. We propose a scale of fantasy engagement that addresses this scattered and often-contradictory literature by assessing both positive and negative aspects of fantasy engagement. Across four studies we develop and validate the Fantasy Engagement Scale, establishing its reliability, validity, and applicability to topics including well-being, escapism, and mental imagery. The results begin to reconcile contradictions in the existing research and have implications for future work on fantasy specifically and for studies of fantasy-related activities.     

Developing a Scale to Measure the Creative Environment Perceptions: A Questionnaire for Investigating Garden Variety Creativity

A scale is presented to measure worker creative environment perceptions. The scale has good measurement properties, is brief enough for easy administration, and can be used on a wide range of garden variety creativity workers. Structural equation modeling testing of the underlying factor structure showed 3 significantly interrelated latent variables—creativity support, work characteristics, and creativity blocks. This finding indicated that managers should improve all aspects of their organizations' creative environment in order to maximize worker creative output.     

A New Measure to Assess Psychopathic Personality in Children: The Child Problematic Traits Inventory

Understanding the development of psychopathic personality from childhood to adulthood is crucial for understanding the development and stability of severe and long-lasting conduct problems and criminal behavior. This paper describes the development of a new teacher rated instrument to assess psychopathic personality from age three to 12, the Child Problematic Traits Inventory (CPTI). The reliability and validity of the CPTI was tested in a Swedish general population sample of 2,056 3- to 5-year-olds (mean age?=?3.86; SD?=?.86; 53 % boys). The CPTI items loaded distinctively on three theoretically proposed factors: a Grandiose-Deceitful Factor, a Callous-Unemotional factor, and an Impulsive-Need for Stimulation factor. The three CPTI factors showed reliability in internal consistency and external validity, in terms of expected correlations with theoretically relevant constructs (e.g., fearlessness). The interaction between the three CPTI factors was a stronger predictor of concurrent conduct problems than any of the three individual CPTI factors, showing that it is important to assess all three factors of the psychopathic personality construct in early childhood. In conclusion, the CPTI seems to reliably and validly assess a constellation of traits that is similar to psychopathic personality as manifested in adolescence and adulthood.     

Utilizing a Creative Task to Assess Langerian Mindfulness

Despite the growing interest in mindfulness and its demonstrated benefits, there are concerns about the reliance on subjective assessment tools. This study focused on the measurement of Langerian mindfulness, which refers to the active process of noticing new things and flexibly responding to the current context. Some of its key features overlap with the construct of creativity, which can be used to create a direct assessment for central components of mindfulness. The aim is to start a discussion in the field about how a direct creativity-based tool to current subjective measures might best be used.     

Development and Preliminary Validation of a New Measure to Assess Shame: The Shame Inventory

Research on the emotion of shame has increased significantly in recent years. However, there remains a need for more psychometrically sound measures of shame, including measures of shame in response to specific, idiographic experiences. The Shame Inventory was developed in order to assess both global feelings of shame as well as shame in response to specific life events or personal characteristics. Two studies were conducted to determine the preliminary psychometric properties of the Shame Inventory. Across both studies, results indicate that the inventory has high internal consistency, test-retest reliability, construct validity, and predictive validity. The Shame Inventory holds promise as a new measure designed to assess both global feelings of shame as well as specific shame-eliciting cues.     

Preliminary Development of a Measure to Assess Children's Trauma Attributions

ABSTRACT

The Trauma Attribution Checklist (TAC) is a brief self-report measure of children's trauma-related attributions. A preliminary study with school-aged children, 12 months after exposure to a series of tornadoes, demonstrated significant correlations between TAC items and the Reaction Index, a measure of posttraumatic distress. Children with higher posttraumatic distress scores made more attributions of responsibility for negative tornado-related events, were more concerned with making attributions, had higher expectations of a tornado recurrence, and were more hypervigilant than children with less severe symptoms. Regression analyses indicated that items addressing expectations of recurrence and hypervigilance explained 53.3% of the variance in posttraumatic distress, with having made an attribution of responsibility for a tornado-related event accounting for an additional 5.6% of the variance.     

The Oxford Happiness Questionnaire: Transformation from an Ordinal to an Interval Measure Using Rasch Analysis

The scientific study of happiness requires accurate measurement of the construct that satisfies assumptions of parametric statistics and thus allows both researchers and clinicians to make reliable and valid comparisons with the relevant data sources. The 29-item Oxford Happiness Questionnaire (OHQ) is a widely-used scale for assessment of personal happiness. While its psychometric properties are acknowledged to be acceptable, it presents scores on an ordinal scale and may thus not discriminate precisely between individual happiness levels. The current study aimed to improve precision and item functioning of the OHQ by applying Rasch analysis to a sample of 281 participants. To correct disordered thresholds items were rescored in a uniform fashion. Four items displayed poor relationships with the latent trait of happiness and were removed. Best fit to the unidimensional Rasch model was achieved after locally dependent items were combined into subtests and adjusted for personal differences. Using the ordinal-to-interval conversion tables published here, ordinal OHQ scores can now be transformed to interval level data and thus subjected to parametric statistical analysis without violating fundamental assumptions. The precision of the instrument can be improved significantly by these minor modifications without the need to modify the original response format.     

Jonah: A Fantasy of Flight

This paper “Nostalgia” has two distinct parts: One, accounting for nostalgia, by pointing out a systematic distortion in cases of nostalgic memories—idealizing the past and presenting it as a sentimental realm of pure innocence. This distortion typifies kitsch morality, morality guided by sentimentality that can easily turn into brutality. For attacking the innocent seems to justify any brutality in return. Two, an account of what is an ethics of memory, claiming that memory as the case of nostalgia suggests is a fertile ground for ethical discourse, which is different from the politics of memory.     

The Social Anxiety Questionnaire for Children: Cross-Cultural Assessment with a New Self-Report Measure

This study describes a series of exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses that were conducted with the 44-item Social Anxiety Questionnaire for Children- 4th version (SAQ-CIV) to identify a reduced set of items that might be used to construct a new abbreviated instrument for measuring social anxiety in children and adolescents. The fourth version of the Social Anxiety Questionnaire for Children (SAQ-CIV) was administered to 12,801 non-clinical participants (ages 9 to 15 years) from 12 Latin American countries and Spain. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis supported a 6-factor structure of social anxiety in children, replicating a similar structure to that of adults (Caballo et al. in Behavioral Psychology/Psicología Conductual, 18(1), 5–34, 2010; Caballo et al. in Behavior Therapy, 43(2), 313–328, 2012): 1) Interactions with the opposite sex, 2) Criticism and embarrassment, 3) Speaking in public/Talking to teachers, 4) Assertive expression of annoyance and disgust, 5) Performing in public, and 6) Interactions with strangers. Each of the factors contains 4 items, yielding an abbreviated 24-item instrument, the Social Anxiety Questionnaire for Children (SAQ-C). The present results suggest this is a reliable, valid, and culturally sensitive instrument to assess social anxiety in youth.     

Validity of Two Questionnaires to Assess Social Fears: The Dutch Social Phobia and Anxiety Inventory and the Blushing, Trembling and Sweating Questionnaire

This report evaluates some psychometric properties of the Dutch Social Phobia and Anxiety Inventory (SPAI-N) as well as a newly developed instrument to assess fear of showing somatic symptoms among social phobic, the Blushing, Trembling and Sweating Questionnaire (BTS-Q). Results support the reliability and discriminative validity of the Dutch SPAI and the BTS-Q. Both questionnaires are able to discriminate social phobics from a community sample. Social phobics with fear of blushing, trembling, and sweating as the main complaint could be discriminated from social phobics without fear of blushing, trembling, and sweating as the main complaint using the BTS-Q. In contrast with expectations derived from cognitive models of social phobia, social phobics with fear of blushing, trembling, and sweating did not have stronger dysfunctional beliefs about (the social consequences of) blushing, trembling, and sweating than social phobics without such fears.     

创造力成就问卷的中文修订

为验证Carson等人的创造力成就问卷（Creative Achievement Questionnaire,CAQ）在中国成人群体的适用性,对其进行翻译、回译和文化调适后转换为中文版（C-CAQ）。以59名成人为被试,间隔3周的重测信度为斯皮尔曼相关系数ρ=0.77（p<0.01）;以107名成人为被试,施测C-CAQ、托伦斯创造性思维测验（TTCT）的非常规用途任务（UUT）和补全图画任务（PCT）、中国大五人格简式版考察C-CAQ的聚合效度,结果发现与TTCT两个任务的多个指标及大五人格的开放性相关显著（与UUT任务各指标相关为：流畅性0.22、灵活性0.19、独创性0.26,与PCT任务的精致性相关为0.24,与大五人格的开放性维度相关0.29）;用瑞文标准推理测验考察C-CAQ和智力的区分效度,结果显示二者为弱相关且不显著;以324名成人为被试对C-CAQ的10个领域进行探索性因子分析,结果支持问卷的领域特殊性构想;以122名成人为被试施测考夫曼创造力领域量表（K-DOCS）和C-CAQ以考察C-CAQ的效标效度,结果显示二者的科学、艺术领域及总分相关均显著（ρ=0.62, 0.47和0.41）。研究表明,CAQ问卷中文版在我国的成人群体具有较好的信度和效度。     

The Lost E-Mail Technique: Use of an Implicit Measure to Assess Discriminatory Attitudes Toward Two Minority Groups in Israel

The effectiveness of the "lost e-mail technique" (LET) as an unobtrusive attitude measure was successfully demonstrated in 2 studies. In Study 1, we found that Israeli students were more likely to reply to a similar other than to a minority group member (an Israeli-Arab or an immigrant from the former Soviet Union). In Study 2, LET was administered to professors and administrators, and its effectiveness was compared to a more traditional self-report measure. Although professors showed less discrimination on the self-report measure than did administrators, they were nevertheless discriminative in their responses to lost e-mails. These results suggest that professors are not necessarily less prejudiced, but probably are better able to detect attitude probes and more motivated to appear unbiased.     

The Life Attitudes Schedule: A Scale to Assess Adolescent Life-Enhancing and Life-Threatening Behaviors

The purpose of this study was to develop a questionnaire to measure suicidal and other risk-taking behaviors, the Life Attitudes Schedule (LAS), and to test a theoretical model that postulates a single domain of behaviors to which all life-threatening and life-enhancing behaviors belong. The LAS was developed and piloted on 1539 high school students and young adults. The schedule measures four different content categories: death related, health related, injury related, and self-related. Each content category includes an equal number of items designed to assess actions, thoughts, and feelings. Consistent with the theoretical model, the LAS includes positive (life-enhancing) and negative (life-threatening) behaviors. In this paper we present psychometric information for the LAS. The results are interpreted as providing support for a broad, bipolar conceptualization of suicidal and other risk-taking behavior that encompasses life-threatening and life-enhancing behaviors.     

A Creative Model: The Three-Selves

This article presents a Three-Selves Model illuminating ways the self can be expressed: closed, absorbent, and flexible. This model integrates three counseling approaches which are described, and a creative poster is offered to illustrate the model. Then, the model is applied to a hypothetical case to reveal how the model can promote awareness, congruence, and choice.