A Dialectic on Validity: Where We Have Been and Where We Are Going

It has been suggested that the primary issue in considerations of validity today is the discrepancy between currently accepted theory and the practice of validation. The reason for this discrepancy may be that although considerable discussion has taken place in educational measurement and psychometrics regarding changes in our conceptions of validity, that has not been the case more generally in the social and behavioral sciences. A dialectic on the current status of validity theory for social and behavioral scientists is presented to help bridge this gap.     

Missed Conceptions: A Gendered Extension of Early Conception Among Street Youth

The moral sentiment concerning teenage pregnancy among unmarried youth is that it is an act of deviance or non-conformity. Using data from a multidisciplinary study of high-risk youth, this article explores the notion that early conception among street youth is an opportunity for youth to conform to the conventional societal role of becoming a parent, not an act of deviance. The article further highlights the importance of including young men in discussions about early conception. Drawing on general strain theory and social bonding theory, experiences of strain in the family of origin as well as current social bonds are explored. Findings indicate that both general strain and social bonding contribute to a gendered understanding of early conception among street youth.     

It takes one to know one: Relationship between lie detection and psychopathy

We investigated primary and secondary psychopathy and the ability to detect high-stakes, real-life emotional lies in an on-line experiment (N = 150). Using signal detection analysis, we found that lie detection ability was overall above chance level, there was a tendency towards responding liberally to the test stimuli, and women were more accurate than men. Further, sex moderated the relationship between psychopathy and lie detection ability; in men, primary psychopathy had a significant positive correlation with the ability to detect lies, whereas in women there was a significant negative correlation with deception detection. The results are discussed with reference to evolutionary theory and sex differences in processing socio-emotional information.     

On Johnson's (2000) Relative Weights Method for Assessing Variable Importance: A Reanalysis

This article provides a reanalysis of J. W. Johnson's (2000) “relative weights” method for assessing variable importance in multiple regression. The primary conclusion of the reanalysis is that the derivation of the method is theoretically flawed and has no more validity than the discredited method of Green, Carroll, and DeSarbo (1978) on which it is based. By means of 2 examples, supplemented by other results from the literature, it is also shown that the method can result in materially distorted inferences when it is compared with another widely used importance metric, namely, general dominance (Azen & Budescu, 2003; Budescu, 1993). Our primary recommendation is that J. W. Johnson's (2000) relative weights method should no longer be used as a variable importance metric for multiple linear regression. In the final section of the article, 2 additional recommendations are made based on our analysis, examples, and discussion.     

Size does matter: Women mentally rotate large objects faster than men

Performance in a computerized “mental rotation” task was measured in groups of males and females while they rotated Shepard‐Metzler‐like cube assemblies on either a standard laptop screen (size = 36 cm) or on a large display wall (584 cm) where the stimuli appeared at considerably larger sizes and within a much wider field of view than that typically used in most spatial tasks. Males and females did not differ significantly in performance in the standard size condition with regards to response time but females performed faster than males in the large display condition. Males were also found to be significantly more accurate than females, regardless of display. We found no sign of trading accuracy for speed for either of the sexes or screen size conditions. We surmise that such an effect may be due to differences in task‐solving strategies between the sexes, where a holistic strategy – which may be preferred by males is negatively affected by large object sizes, whereas a piecemeal approach, that may be preferred by females, is virtually unaffected by display size.     

Extending Łukasiewicz Logics with a Modality: Algebraic Approach to Relational Semantics

This paper presents an algebraic approach of some many-valued generalizations of modal logic. The starting point is the definition of the [0, 1]-valued Kripke models, where [0, 1] denotes the well known MV-algebra. Two types of structures are used to define validity of formulas: the class of frames and the class of ? _n -valued frames. The latter structures are frames in which we specify in each world u the set (a subalgebra of ? _n ) of the allowed truth values of the formulas in u. We apply and develop algebraic tools (namely, canonical and strong canonical extensions) to generate complete modal n + 1-valued logics and we obtain many-valued counterparts of Shalqvist canonicity result.     

Synchronization with competing visual and auditory rhythms: bouncing ball meets metronome

Synchronization of finger taps with periodically flashing visual stimuli is known to be much more variable than synchronization with an auditory metronome. When one of these rhythms is the synchronization target and the other serves as a distracter at various temporal offsets, strong auditory dominance is observed. However, it has recently been shown that visuomotor synchronization improves substantially with moving stimuli such as a continuously bouncing ball. The present study pitted a bouncing ball against an auditory metronome in a target–distracter synchronization paradigm, with the participants being auditory experts (musicians) and visual experts (video gamers and ball players). Synchronization was still less variable with auditory than with visual target stimuli in both groups. For musicians, auditory stimuli tended to be more distracting than visual stimuli, whereas the opposite was the case for the visual experts. Overall, there was no main effect of distracter modality. Thus, a distracting spatiotemporal visual rhythm can be as effective as a distracting auditory rhythm in its capacity to perturb synchronous movement, but its effectiveness also depends on modality-specific expertise.     

Reaction time measures in deception research: Comparing the effects of irrelevant and relevant stimulus–response compatibility

Evidence regarding the validity of reaction time (RT) measures in deception research is mixed. One possible reason for this inconsistency is that structurally different RT paradigms have been used. The aim of this study was to experimentally investigate whether structural differences between RT tasks are related to how effective those tasks are for capturing deception. We achieved this aim by comparing the effectiveness of relevant and irrelevant stimulus–response compatibility (SRC) tasks. We also investigated whether an intended but not yet completed mock crime could be assessed with both tasks. Results showed (1) a larger compatibility effect in the relevant SRC task compared to the irrelevant SRC task, (2) for both the completed and the intended crime. These results were replicated in a second experiment in which a semantic feature (instead of color) was used as critical response feature in the irrelevant SRC task. The findings support the idea that a structural analysis of deception tasks helps to identify RT measures that produce robust group effects, and that strong compatibility effects for both enacted crimes as well as merely intended crimes can be found with RT measures that are based on the manipulation of relevant SRC.