Inventory responding as a model of people's acceptance of personality interpretations

The hypothesis was tested that inventory responding modeled the acceptance of personality feedback. A barnum group (n=40) was asked to rate the personal accuracies of a list of personality inventory items and then an equivalent list of bogus personality feedback. The two lines of evidence which supported the model were (a) that the correlation between their inventory ratings and their feedback ratings was not only Significant (p < .001) but achieved a ceiling magnitude, as evidenced by a control group's (n = 40) data; and (b) that the variables influencing, inventory responding exerted an equal influence upon feedback acceptance, Contrary to the model, it was found that feedback was accepted more highly than were the inventory items. Conclusions were that inventory responding, as a model of feedback acceptance, is accurate with respect to individual differences but somewhat inaccurate with respect to overall levels of acceptance due to the additional influences of persuasion. It was also concluded that clients' acceptance or rejection of personality feedback is not evidence of the validity or invalidity, respectively, of assessment devices. A reformulated model of personality feedback acceptance was proposed.     

Ethics education or moral persuasion?

The question, "What is virtue and how can it be taught?" has been with us for quite a while. H. Steven Moffic, John Coverdale, and Timothy Bayer address it in a particular setting -- psychiatric practice -- with a particular group of students -- GY-III residents -- and employ a particular strategy -- a seminar... The course sounds like a good one -- wide ranging, open minded, and relevant to students' interests and experiences. I am less convinced than they are that education in ethics leads to moral behavior, but nonetheless I share their belief that it belongs in the curriculum... The authors are right to emphasize that ethical issues go beyond the doctor-patient relationship and include the profession-society interface as well.     

Instructions for Authors

Instructions for Authors

Instructions for Authors     

The role of familism in stress and coping processes among African American and White dementia caregivers: effects on mental and physical health.

OBJECTIVE: To explore how familism, burden, and coping styles mediate the relationships between ethnicity and the mental and physical health of caregivers. DESIGN: A probability sample of 65 White and 95 African Americans respondents caring for an older family member with dementia was used to test hypotheses from a sociocultural stress and coping model using path analysis. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Measures of caregivers' health included subjective health, self-reported diseases, blood pressure, and heart rate. Mental health measures included self-reported depression and psychological symptoms. RESULTS: Contrary to the hypothesis, familism had an adverse effect on outcomes and was related to low education levels rather than to African American ethnicity. A buffering effect of active coping between being African American and diastolic blood pressure was found even after controlling for levels of education. CONCLUSIONS: Findings supported a core stress and coping model in which more behavior problems of care recipients were associated with poorer mental health of caregivers via greater burden and more use of avoidant coping. Results also demonstrate that this core model can be extended to physical health.     

The role of causal models in multiple judgments under uncertainty

Two studies examined a novel prediction of the causal Bayes net approach to judgments under uncertainty, namely that causal knowledge affects the interpretation of statistical evidence obtained over multiple observations. Participants estimated the conditional probability of an uncertain event (breast cancer) given information about the base rate, hit rate (probability of a positive mammogram given cancer) and false positive rate (probability of a positive mammogram in the absence of cancer). Conditional probability estimates were made after observing one or two positive mammograms. Participants exhibited a causal stability effect: there was a smaller increase in estimates of the probability of cancer over multiple positive mammograms when a causal explanation of false positives was provided. This was the case when the judgments were made by different participants (Experiment 1) or by the same participants (Experiment 2). These results show that identical patterns of observed events can lead to different estimates of event probability depending on beliefs about the generative causes of the observations.     

Newly learned word forms are abstract and integrated immediately after acquisition

A hotly debated question in word learning concerns the conditions under which newly learned words compete or interfere with familiar words during spoken word recognition. This has recently been described as a key marker of the integration of a new word into the lexicon and was thought to require consolidation Dumay & Gaskell, (Psychological Science, 18, 35–39, 2007; Gaskell & Dumay, Cognition, 89, 105–132, 2003). Recently, however, Kapnoula, Packard, Gupta, and McMurray, (Cognition, 134, 85–99, 2015) showed that interference can be observed immediately after a word is first learned, implying very rapid integration of new words into the lexicon. It is an open question whether these kinds of effects derive from episodic traces of novel words or from more abstract and lexicalized representations. Here we addressed this question by testing inhibition for newly learned words using training and test stimuli presented in different talker voices. During training, participants were exposed to a set of nonwords spoken by a female speaker. Immediately after training, we assessed the ability of the novel word forms to inhibit familiar words, using a variant of the visual world paradigm. Crucially, the test items were produced by a male speaker. An analysis of fixations showed that even with a change in voice, newly learned words interfered with the recognition of similar known words. These findings show that lexical competition effects from newly learned words spread across different talker voices, which suggests that newly learned words can be sufficiently lexicalized, and abstract with respect to talker voice, without consolidation.