Commentary on Coefficient Alpha: A Cautionary Tale

The general use of coefficient alpha to assess reliability should be discouraged on a number of grounds. The assumptions underlying coefficient alpha are unlikely to hold in practice, and violation of these assumptions can result in nontrivial negative or positive bias. Structural equation modeling was discussed as an informative process both to assess the assumptions underlying coefficient alpha and to estimate reliability     

Reliability of Summed Item Scores Using Structural Equation Modeling: An Alternative to Coefficient Alpha

A method is presented for estimating reliability using structural equation modeling (SEM) that allows for nonlinearity between factors and item scores. Assuming the focus is on consistency of summed item scores, this method for estimating reliability is preferred to those based on linear SEM models and to the most commonly reported estimate of reliability, coefficient alpha.     

Teaching Children to Confront Peers’ Sexist Remarks: Implications for Theories of Gender Development and Educational Practice

Elementary-school children (81 boys, 72 girls, aged 5–10 years) in the Southwest United States were taught to challenge peers’ sexist remarks to (a) improve school climate for gender nontraditional children, (b) decrease children’s gender-typed attitudes, and (c) test hypotheses linking gender identity and peer-directed gender role behaviors. Children either practiced using retorts to peers’ sexist remarks (practice condition) or heard stories about others’ retorts (narrative condition). At pretest, children rarely challenged peers’ sexist remarks. At posttest, children’s challenges were significantly more common in the practice than narrative condition. At the 6-month posttest, data showed intervention effects had become more widespread. Behavioral changes led to decreases in gender-typing of others among girls but not boys.     

Comfortably Numb: Desensitizing Effects of Violent Media on Helping Others

ABSTRACT— Two studies tested the hypothesis that exposure to violent media reduces aid offered to people in pain. In Study 1, participants played a violent or nonviolent video game for 20 min. After game play, while completing a lengthy questionnaire, they heard a loud fight, in which one person was injured, outside the lab. Participants who played violent games took longer to help the injured victim, rated the fight as less serious, and were less likely to "hear" the fight in comparison to participants who played nonviolent games. In Study 2, violent- and nonviolent-movie attendees witnessed a young woman with an injured ankle struggle to pick up her crutches outside the theater either before or after the movie. Participants who had just watched a violent movie took longer to help than participants in the other three conditions. The findings from both studies suggest that violent media make people numb to the pain and suffering of others.     

Examination of the Extent to which Employment Factors are Associated with Reduced Child Maltreatment Potential and Drug Use

Job assistance programs are commonly recommended for parents of children who have been victimized by child maltreatment, particularly when illicit drugs are indicated. However, the relationship between employment factors, substance abuse, and risk of child maltreatment has received limited empirical attention. Therefore, the current study examines employment factors in a sample of 72 mothers, who were referred by child protective services for treatment of substance abuse and child neglect. Child maltreatment potential was found to be negatively associated with number of hours employed and self-reported happiness with employment. The association between child abuse potential and personal income of participants approached significance (p?=?.057), and the results were not influenced by social desirability. Employment satisfaction significantly contributed to the prediction of child maltreatment potential over and above other employment factors and control variables. These findings suggest that when mothers are involved in child protective services their risk of perpetrating child maltreatment may be reduced when they are assisted in gainful employment that is personally satisfying. Happiness with employment was the only employment factor correlated (inversely) with substance use (biological testing, self-report of participants). Future directions are discussed in light of the results, including the importance of considering employment satisfaction when conducting vocational assistance programs in this population.     

Beyond the Isolated Self: Extended Mind and Spirituality

Extended Cognition is a theory from philosophy of mind that has its roots in the more general notion of Embodied Cognition. Embodied cognition understands all human thought as involving the body (not just the brain), and as always situated in particular contexts. Cognitive extension goes further to suggest that intelligent mental processes often include things outside the brain and body, involving interactions with other persons or external artifacts that significantly enhance cognitive capacities. Thus, while intelligence was once thought to be an attribute of a single individual’s brain, it is now understood to extend into processes outside the person within immediate interactive space. For example, smart phones or problem-solving groups expand cognitive capacities beyond what is possible on one’s own. This article explores the possibility of supersizing-through-extension spirituality and Christian life within the interactive space of congregations and religious communities.     

Revised Diagnostic Profile 2016: Revisions,Rationale, and Further Thoughts

ABSTRACT

In 2001, a working party at the Anna Freud Centre undertook the task of looking at Anna Freud’s original Provisional Diagnostic Profile and seeing if, in the light of current knowledge, modifications should be made. A broad view of the mind as a complex dynamic system sculpted out of biopsychosocial forces underpins the chapter with reference to allied disciplines and research. The chapter considers the rationale for adding certain features and highlighting and/or reframing others. In shifting the emphases from the original drive theory perspective to an explicitly object relational one, the authors acknowledge the altered metapsychology while arguing that the revisions preserve the original psychoanalytic and developmental template, including the importance of the psychosexual organization. The authors offer their suggestions to the question in 2015: would yet further revisions need to be made and if so which? The working party reconvened in 2016 to further revise the Provisional Diagnostic Profile.     

Survey Experiments on Candidate Religiosity,Political Attitudes,and Vote Choice

Because identification with and affect toward social groups is a primary heuristic for citizens, the social group profiles of candidates are important for electoral behavior. We focus on an increasingly important element of candidates’ social characteristics: their levels of religiosity and secularism. We argue that as religious groups and identities become structured less by what religion they are and more by how religious they are (or are not), candidate religiosity and secularism should condition the impact of political orientations such as partisanship and cultural policy attitudes on vote choice. Highly religious candidates should attract more support from Republicans and from cultural conservatives, while overtly secular candidates should appeal more to Democrats and cultural liberals. Using a survey experiment in which respondents evaluate a state legislative candidate with varying levels of religiosity and secularism, we find strong support for our argument.     

Working memory representations persist in the face of unexpected task alterations

It is well known that information can be held in memory while performing other tasks concurrently, such as remembering a color or number during a separate visual search task. However, it is not clear what happens to stored information in the face of unexpected tasks, such as the surprise questions that are often used in experiments related to inattentional and change blindness. Does the unpredicted shift in task context cause memory representations to be cleared in anticipation of new information? To answer this question, we ran two experiments where the task unexpectedly switched partway through the experiment with a surprise question. Half of the participants were asked to report the same attribute (Exp. 1?=?Identity, Exp. 2?=?Color) of a target stimulus in both presurprise and postsurprise trials, while for the other half, the reported attribute switched from identity to color (Exp. 1) or vice versa (Exp. 2). Importantly, all participants had to read an unexpected set of instructions and respond differently on the surprise trial. Accuracy on the surprise trial was higher for the same-attribute groups than the different-attribute groups. Furthermore, there was no difference in reaction time on the surprise trial between the two groups. These results suggest that information participants expected to report can survive an encounter with an unexpected task. The implication is that failures to report information on a surprise trial in many experiments reflect genuine differences in memory encoding, rather than forgetting or overwriting induced by the surprise question.