Methods of data collection,perceptions of risks and losses,and motivation to give truthful answers to sensitive survey questions

Two experiments examined survey respondents' concerns about risks and losses when answering sensitive questions in a survey. In Experiment 1 subjects watched one of eight different versions of a videotaped staged interview of a woman being asked about abortion and drunk driving. Experiment 2 was an actual survey interview about women's health issues, including abortion. In Experiment 2, a large proportion of the sample had a recent abortion for which validation information from the clinic was available. Results of both experiments indicate that, when responding to questions about sensitive topics, survey respondents are concerned about risks and losses other than those covered by standard confidentiality assurances and that these other concerns affect truthful reporting. Experiment 1 showed the importance of privacy in surveys of sensitive behaviours. The experiments suggest that under some circumstances interviewer‐administration of sensitive questions may produce data as good as or better than self‐administration. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Historical shifts and underlying themes in ideas about rearing young children in the United States: Where have we been? Where are we going?

Common themes in ideas about rearing infants and young children in the United States can be traced from the nation's beginnings to the present day. These themes include a strong concern about child rearing; a belief that human beings are perfectible through better child rearing; an eagerness by parents to listen to the advice of ‘experts’; a belief that infants and young children should be educated in schools or day-care centers by experts, competing with the belief that infants belong at home with their mothers; a commitment to social reform, competing with the conviction that families should be autonomous. These themes provide a background for contemporary research, political controversy, and future discussion concerning how children should be reared. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Home correlates of aggression in preschool

Is aggressive behaviour in preschool more closely related to individual characteristics of the child as assessed at home, to aspects of mother-child interaction, or to the motherchild relationship? The issue was studied in three replications. Aggression in preschool was related to temperamental characteristics in girls but not boys, and to Self-esteem. There were very few significant correlations between aspects of mother-child interaction and hostility in preschool, but hostility with peers was related to the absence of positive or presence of mildly negative interactions with the sibling. Aggression in preschool was related to an aspect of the mother-child relationship; least aggression was shown by those childred whose mothers used warmth and control more or less “in balance” (authortative Mothers). Such children also differed in other aspects of the mother-child relationship, and these provided some explanation of those children who appeared to be exceptions to the “balance” hypethesis. © 1993 Wiley-Liss, Inc.     

Concealability beliefs facilitate navigating intergroup contexts

Living in a diverse world requires the ability to navigate intergroup contexts. However, interacting with outgroup members can cause anxiety that leads to lower-quality interactions and avoidance of future contact. One reason people experience this anxiety is the concern that others will judge them on the basis of an identity. These concerns may be reduced among people who believe the identity is unperceivable by others. The belief that one's identity is concealable may therefore reduce intergroup anxiety and ease people's experiences in intergroup contexts. The present work tests this proposition in two studies and finds that individual differences in concealability beliefs are negatively associated with intergroup anxiety and positively associated with the propensity to initiate intergroup contact and with the quantity and quality of people's cross-group friendships. Materials, data, and code for both studies and a pre-registration for Study 2 are available online ( https://osf.io/4cjhg/ ).     

Predictors of individual variation in reversal learning performance in three-spined sticklebacks

Animal Cognition - Behavioral flexibility is a type of phenotypic plasticity that can influence how animals cope with environmental change and is often measured with a reversal learning paradigm....     

The development of children's ideal and ought self-guides: parenting, temperament, and individual differences in guide strength

Regulatory focus theory (RFT; Higgins, 1997) predicts that individual differences in the strength of promotion (ideal) and prevention (ought) orientations emerge from patterns of parent/child interactions that emphasize making good things happen versus keeping bad things from happening. This article examines the development of individual differences in the strength of children's promotion and prevention goals and presents selected findings from three studies exploring the origins of regulatory focus. We found a three-factor structure for parenting behaviors that differentiated between the presence/absence of positive outcomes versus the presence/absence of negative outcomes in two different data sets and validated that factor structure by examining its associations with maternal temperament. In turn, the parenting factors predicted individual differences in children's orientations to ideal and ought guides, and those associations were moderated by individual differences in child temperament.     

The predictive capacity of the MMPI-2 and PAI validity scales and indexes to detect coached and uncoached feigning

The objective of this study was to examine the relative effectiveness of the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-2 (MMPI-2) and the Personality Assessment Inventory (PAI) validity scales and indexes to detect malingering. Research participants were either informed (coached) or not informed (uncoached) about the presence and operating characteristics of the validity scales and instructed to fake bad on both the MMPI-2 and PAI. The validity scale and index scores produced by these research participants were then compared to those scores from a bona fide sample of psychiatric patients (n = 75). Coaching had no effect on the ability of the research participants to feign more successfully than those participants who received no coaching. For the MMPI-2, the Psychopathology F scale, or F(p), proved to be the best at distinguishing psychiatric patients from research participants instructed to malinger, although the other F scales (i.e., F and Fb) were also effective. For the PAI, the Rogers Discriminant Function index (RDF) was clearly superior to the other PAI fake-bad validity indicators; neither the Negative Impression Management scale nor Malingering Index were effective at detecting malingered profiles in this study. Overall, RDF proved to be marginally superior to F and F(p) in distinguishing MMPI-2 and PAI protocols produced by research participants asked to malinger and psychiatric patients. Both the RDF and the F and F(p) scales, however, were able to increase the predictive capability of one another.