The restraint scale: a psychometric investigation

The psychometric characteristics of the Restraint Scale in obese and normal-weight subjects were compared. Scores were significantly higher and more homogeneous in the obese than in the normal-weight group. In light of previous studies indicating that obese subjects behave like normal-weight subjects whose Restraint scores are several points (approx. 3–6) lower, the present result was interpreted as suggesting that numerically-equivalent scores may represent less restraint in obese individuals than in normal-weight people.The psychometric evaluation of the Restraint Scale also revealed that the scale was less reliable in the obese than in the normal-weight population and seemed to tap somewhat different constructs in the two subpopulations. Factor analyses yielded a two-dimensional solution in the normal-weight group and a four-dimensional solution in the obese group. Correlations of the scale with a measure of Defensiveness also differed in the two samples.These results indicate that the norms, reliability and construct validity of the scale differ for obese and normal-weight populations. If restraint theory's predictions concerning the relations between restraint and obesity are to be adequately tested these differences must be taken into account.     

Assessing muscular fatigue with a portable tremor measurement system suitable for field use

The utility of a portable tremor measurement system for detecting muscle fatigue was evaluated. Static arm extension was used to induce fatigue. A probe containing two accelerometers, held in the extended hand, recorded horizontal and vertical tremor oscillations in the 1- to 18-Hz range. Several summary amplitude and frequency measures were then derived to analyze hand/arm tremor in the unfatigued and the fatigued states. Large increases from unfatigued to fatigued states were observed in all of the amplitude measures in both axes. Summary frequency measures were far less sensitive to fatigue. Correlations between consecutively measured observations revealed high levels of reliability (r τ .80) in all of the amplitude measures, but not in the frequency measures. The most robust index of fatigue was the total power in the entire 1- to 18-Hz spectrum. The other amplitude measures, however, are suitable for examining the effects of fatigue in isolated portions of the spectrum.     

The Caregiver Eating Messages Scale: Development and psychometric investigation

Certain caregiver eating messages – restriction of food intake and pressures to eat – are associated with body dissatisfaction and eating disturbances among young girls. This study explored whether these messages are also associated with body attitudes and eating behaviors of young adult women and men. The Caregiver Eating Messages Scale was developed to measure this construct. Two studies (Ns = 238, 288) indicated that it contained two factors (restrictive/critical messages and pressure to eat messages) and yielded internally consistent, stable, and valid scores. Both factors were positively related to women's BMI, and restrictive/critical messages were positively related to men's BMI. Restrictive/critical messages predicted lower perceived familial body acceptance and intuitive eating and higher perceived familial pressure to be lean and disordered eating. Restrictive/critical messages predicted participants’ body attitudes indirectly via their perceptions of their family's attitude toward their body, with one exception: restrictive/critical messages uniquely predicted men's body appreciation.     

Individual differences in chess expertise: a psychometric investigation

Starting from controversies over the role of general individual characteristics (especially intelligence) for the attainment of expert performance levels, a comprehensive psychometric investigation of individual differences in chess expertise is presented. A sample of 90 adult tournament chess players of varying playing strengths (1311-2387 ELO) was screened with tests on intelligence and personality variables; in addition, experience in chess play, tournament participation, and practice activities were assessed. Correlation and regression analyses revealed a clear-cut moderate relationship between general (and in particular numerical) intelligence and the participants' playing strengths, suggesting that expert chess play does not stand in isolation from superior mental abilities. The strongest predictor of the attained expertise level, however, was the participants' chess experience which highlights the relevance of long-term engagement for the development of expertise. Among all analysed personality dimensions, only domain-specific performance motivation and emotion expression control incrementally contributed to the prediction of playing strength. In total, measures of chess experience, current tournament activity, intelligence, and personality accounted for about 55% of variance in chess expertise. The present results suggest that individual differences in chess expertise are multifaceted and cannot be reduced to differences in domain experience.     

Development and validation of the Male Body Talk Scale: A psychometric investigation

This paper details the development of the Male Body Talk (MBT) scale and five studies supporting the psychometric soundness of scores on this new measure. Participants were 18–65-year-old men recruited via Amazon's Mechanical Turk, introductory psychology courses, and snowball sampling. The MBT scale assesses the frequency with which men engage in negatively valenced body-related conversations with others. Two subscales were identified through a combination of exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis. The Muscle Talk subscale assesses men's tendency to express concerns regarding degree of muscularity and being too small. The Fat Talk subscale assesses men's tendency to express concerns regarding level of body fat and being overweight. Scores on the MBT scale demonstrated strong internal consistency and moderate test–retest reliability. Evidence of convergent, discriminant, and incremental validity of scores on the MBT scale is presented. This new measure is a useful tool for examining how often men engage in negative body talk.     

Measuring Machiavellianism with Mach V: a psychometric investigation

This study re-examines the reliability of the Mach V Scale using two different scoring procedures: Christie's scoring system and an alternative scoring system by Rogers and Semin. Using commonly accepted standards, results for 123 business managers indicate that the Mach V Scale is not a reliable instrument. Regardless of the scoring Scheme or the method of assessment employed, reliability estimates found in this study are well below conventionally accepted criteria and are also well below reliability estimates previously reported in the literature. In addition, the investigation indicates that although the alternative scoring system appears to increase the precision of the Mach V Scale, the effect of this increase is negligible in hypothesis testing.     

The Maudsley Obsessional-Compulsive Inventory: a psychometric investigation on Chinese normal subjects

The 30-item Maudsley Obsessional-Compulsive Inventory (MOCI) was administered to 183 normal English-speaking Chinese subjects. The inventory achieved modest to relatively low internal consistency as a scale and as four subscales. Three independent dimensions of obsessional complaints interpretable as Perfectionistic and Repetitive Checking, Fear of Contamination, and Doubting Rumination emerged in the factor analysis of item responses. While the first factor corresponded to the Checking component, the second to the Cleaning component, the third was reminiscent of the Doubting, Ruminating and Slowness components. The responses to the MOCI were also explored in their correlations with depression and assertiveness. These results were discussed in in terms of the development of a refined and shortened version of the MOCI and their implications for developing differential treatment models for obsessive-compulsive patients.     

A psychometric investigation of the Rigorous Eating Scale

A psychometric analysis of the Rigorous Eating Scale was carried out based on data of Smead from 1986 and also from 1987 by Smead and Boyd. This 13-item scale was designed to measure hunger, deprivation, and restraint in eating style and used in both of the foregoing studies to investigate the relationship between dieting and eating style and scoring higher on measures of subclinical symptoms of anorexia and bulimia. This brief report highlights internal consistency reliability, factor structure, and item-criterion correlations. Results indicate appropriately high reliability, but inadequate factor structure. Item-criterion correlations suggest several aspects of eating style which may be important to include in similar scales of the future.     

Condom use among high-risk adolescents: testing the influence of alcohol use on the relationship of cognitive correlates of behavior.

The goal of this study was the exploration of distal effects of alcohol use on condom use. Criminally involved adolescents completed an initial measure of attitudes, beliefs, and prior behavior. Of the 300 who completed the initial measurement, 267 (89%) completed a behavioral assessment 6 months later. Analyses validated a theoretical model of condom use intentions and indicated that intentions and attitudes measured at baseline were significant predictors of condom use behavior 6 months later. Neither alcohol use nor alcohol problems moderated relationships among model variables or the influence of intentions and attitudes on behavior. The findings do not support a distal role for alcohol use in altering the cognitive correlates of condom use intentions and behavior among high-risk adolescents.     

Development and validation of a psychometric instrument for the assessment of depression in the elderly

Depression is one of the main the psychological disorders in the gerontological population. However, in many cases the depressive alterations can go unnoticed or masked by the elderly s somatic complaints; or even the depressive symptoms can be ascribe to the own aging process. Moreover, it has to be added that old patients tend not to request help to specialised mental health centres. Therefore, the correct diagnosis of the depressed elderly's emotional problems becomes into a question of extraordinary importance. In this work is presented a new specific instrument for the evaluation of depression in the elderly people which has, among other characteristics, the advantage of requiring a little time to its application and a low knowledge on psychopathology. The initial results show an extraordinary sensitivity and specificity regarding to DSM-IV-TR criteria. Nevertheless, further studies with a higher number of clinical populations are necessary to confirm and enlarge these preliminary results.     

A portable device for group modification of classroom attending behavior

There is a need for a portable means of signalling appropriate classroom behavior that the teacher can carry with her as she moves about the room. An inexpensive wireless switch, adapted for classroom use, was used to turn on a clock when all children were attending to their work. When a movie was made contingent on accumulating a specific number of minutes on the clock, class-attending increased. Throughout these conditions, the records of class attending made by an independent observer with a stopwatch correlated highly with the remote controlled clock.     

Invariance of the psychometric function for character recognition across the visual field

The psychometric function for recognition of singly presented digits as a function of digit contrast was measured at 2° steps across the horizontal meridian of the visual field, under monocular and binocular viewing conditions. A maximum-likelihood staircase procedure was used in a 10-alternative forcedchoice recognition paradigm to gather the data. Both the Weibull and the logistic psychometric functions provide excellent fits to the observed data. The slopes of these functions at their point of inflection ranged from 4.0 to 5.0 proportion-correct/log₁₀-unit contrast, for both monocular and binocular viewing and for all loci in the visual field. These slope values correspond to short-term measurements (around 30 trials, or 1 min) and do not include performance variations of longer duration; the latter are estimated to increase slope by a factor of about 1.5. A single psychometric function shape, centered around a threshold value, therefore describes recognition performance at all retinal loci and binocularity. An empirical comparison of slope results across the literature shows that the function’s slope is about twice that reported for a number of detection tasks. The comparison of recognition contrast thresholds, percentage correct values, and other performance measures across studies requires the knowledge of the psychometric function’s slope, and our results thus provide a firm basis for the study of low-contrast character recognition     

Remembering intentions: testing a new method of investigation

The paper examines some of the methodological difficulties associated with the investigation of remembering intentions in a laboratory and reports the development of a new and easily administered naturalistic task. The task requires participants to act as a narrator and read aloud a story that they are informed will help the experimenter to obtain necessary test material for another study. Remembering intentions (‘prospective memory’) is examined by presenting a plausible cover story requiring to make a correct substitution for a ‘target’ word which appears on several occasions during the story. This method seems to capture adequately the nature of prospective remembering and preclude the occurrence of ceiling, floor and practice effects in performance. By distinguishing late responses from on-time or successful prospective memory responses it also stresses the importance of taking into account the speed with which one recovers from his or her prospective memory failures. Finally, this task enables us to collect reliable and consistent quantitative measures of remembering intentions and to investigate a variety of methodologically and theoretically important problems. The results of Experiments 1a and 1b (Study 1) suggest that both the type of prospective memory task (main versus extra) and subjects' awareness of the phenomenon under investigation are important influences on performance. On the other hand, no effects of (1) a short 5-minute delay between prospective memory instruction and onset of background activity and (2) information about the frequency of target word were revealed (Study 2). The design of a popular experimental paradigm (Einstein and McDaniel, 1990) is examined in the light of these findings. Copyright © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Reducing alcohol consumption during pre-drinking sessions: testing an integrated behaviour-change model

Objective: Pre-drinking, the practice of consuming alcohol prior to attending a subsequent event, increases the risk of alcohol-related harm, and is common in undergraduate student populations. The current study tested an integrated behaviour change model to identify the motivational, social-cognitive, and implicit predictors of pre-drinking.

Design: University students (N?=?289) completed an online questionnaire comprising measures of motivational and social-cognitive constructs related to reducing pre-drinking alcohol consumption and past behaviour, and an implicit association test for drinking identity. Participants reported their pre-drinking alcohol consumption at follow-up, 4 weeks from baseline.

Main Outcome Measures: Self-reported pre-drinking alcohol consumption.

Results: A variance-based structural equation model revealed that few model hypotheses were supported. Although the effects of past behaviour, perceived behavioural control, and implicit drinking identity, on follow-up pre-drinking alcohol consumption were statistically significant, the effect of intention was not.

Conclusions: Current findings indicate pre-drinking alcohol consumption is associated with past behaviour, perceived behavioural control and implicit drinking identity, and no intentions to reduce pre-drinking alcohol consumption. The finding raise questions over the validity of applying the integrated model in this context. Interventions should consider these factors and attempt to facilitate the formation of intentions that lead to subsequent behaviour.     

A psychometric investigation of the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire.

The Eysenck Personality Questionnaire was administered to 139 females and 123 males. Scale statistics were obtained and hierachial factor analyses were performed. The P scale was found to have low internal consistency reliabilities and to covary with the L scale in the female subsample. Factor analyses showed recovery of E scale items in a secondary factor, Social Extraversion, without an impulsivity primary factor. No P and N dimensions recovered; rather components of each scale interrelated in two meaningful dimensions at the tertiary level.     

A psychometric investigation of the content of the structured interview

The responses of 92 British males to the questions of the Structured Interview (SI) were content analysed. The consistency of the content in measuring a single concept was investigated by means of item and factor analyses. A simple, unweighted sum of the content ratings was then compared with the scores achieved on the three prospectively validated Type A measures—the Jenkins Activity Survey, the Framingham Scale and the SI. The results from the analyses suggest that the content of the SI has many similarities with the questionnaire assessments of Type A behaviour and is a poor predictor of SI assessment. It is argued that the added dimension of style of response that is considered in the SI is the reason for different assessments being made by the SI and the questionnaire measures of Type A behaviour. The implications for the measurement of Type A behaviour are discussed.     

Traditions and alcohol use: a mixed-methods analysis

An integrative mixed-methods analysis examined traditional beliefs as associated with beliefs about self-care during pregnancy and with alcohol abstinence among young adult women from two rural U.S.-Mexico border communities. Quantitative (measured scale) variables and qualitative thematic variables generated from open-ended responses served as within-time predictors of these health-related outcomes. A weaker belief that life is better in big cities was associated with stronger self-care beliefs during pregnancy. Also, a weaker belief that small towns offer tranquil environments was associated with total abstinence from alcohol. Regarding the Hispanic Paradox, these results suggest that a critical appreciation of cultural traditions can be protective, as this avoids stereotypical or idyllic views of urban or rural lifeways, and promotes self-protective beliefs and behaviors.     

A portable four-channel cassette recording system for short-term electroencephalogram in the field

A portable four-channel electroencephalogram (EEG) cassette recording system has been designed which offers good performance, is simple to construct, and moderate in cost. The recorder is compatible with a commercially available, portable, battery-operated power source, and is therefore usable in the field where line power is unavailable. The system incorporates a small, lightweight, portable, battery-powered oscilloscope which provides monitoring and playback capability. While a few experimental portable EEG recorders have been reported in recent years with more channel capacity or perhaps lighter weight, the engineering details of these units are rarely published and, in any event, would require a substantial effort for most electronics support shops to reproduce. The recording system described here, however, should be within the capability of most electronics support groups to assemble in a very short time and provide good performance.     

Design,data, and theory regarding a digital hand inclinometer: a portable device for studying slant perception

Palm boards are often used as a nonverbal measure in human slant perception studies. It was recently found that palm boards are biased and relatively insensitive measures, and that an unrestricted hand gesture provides a more sensitive response (Durgin, Hajnal, Li, Tonge, & Stigliani, Acta Psychologica, 134, 182-197, 2010a). In this article, we describe an original design for a portable lightweight digital device for measuring hand orientation. This device is microcontroller-based and uses a micro inclinometer chip as its inclination sensor. The parts are fairly inexpensive. This device, used to measure hand orientation, provides a sensitive nonverbal method for studying slant perception, which can be used in both indoor and outdoor environments. We present data comparing the use of a free hand to palm-board and verbal measures for surfaces within reach and explain how to interpret free-hand measures for outdoor hills.