Faking on self-report emotional intelligence and personality tests: Effects of faking opportunity, cognitive ability, and job type

We assessed the combined effects of cognitive ability, opportunity to fake, and trait job-relevance on faking self-report emotional intelligence and personality tests by having 150 undergraduates complete such tests honestly and then so as to appear ideal for one of three jobs: nurse practitioner, marketing manager, and computer programmer. Faking, as expected, was greater (a) in higher-g participants, (b) in those scoring lower under honest conditions (with greater opportunity to fake), and (c) on job-relevant traits. Predicted interactions accounted for additional unique variance in faking. Combining all three factors yielded a “perfect storm” standardized difference of around 2, more than double the overall .83 estimate. Implications for the study of faking are discussed.     

Neural activation underlying cognitive control in the context of neutral and affectively charged pictures in children

The neural correlates of cognitive control for typically developing 9-year-old children were examined using dense-array ERPs and estimates of cortical activation (LORETA) during a go/no-go task with two conditions: a neutral picture condition and an affectively charged picture condition. Activation was estimated for the entire cortex after which data were exported for four regions of interests (ROIs): ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (VLPFC), dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC), dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), and orbitofrontal/ventromedial prefrontal cortex (OFC/VMPFC). Results revealed faster reaction times, greater N2 activation, and greater prefrontal activation for the affectively charged picture condition than the neutral picture condition. The findings are discussed in reference to the impact of affective stimuli on recruitment of specific brain regions involved in cognitive control.     

Metacognitive therapy in treatment-resistant depression: a platform trial

Patients with treatment-resistant depression received up to 8 sessions of metacognitive therapy (MCT) targeting attentional control, rumination, worry, and metacognitive beliefs. A baseline period was followed by weekly sessions with follow-up assessments at 6 and 12 months post treatment. Large and statistically significant improvements occurred in all symptom measures at post treatment and were maintained over follow-up. Two out of 3 process measures significantly improved at post treatment and all of these measures were improved at follow-up. Treatment was associated with similar response rates on the BDI and Hamilton rating scale. Using liberal criteria 80% of completers were classified as recovered at post treatment and 70% at follow-up on the BDI. In the intention to treat sample 66.6% were recovered at post treatment and 58.3% at follow-up. More stringent criteria showed 60% recovery rates at post treatment and at 12 m. The results suggest that MCT could be a brief and effective treatment and they provide a precedent for more definitive randomized controlled trials.     

Recognizing prosody across modalities, face areas and speakers: examining perceivers' sensitivity to variable realizations of visual prosody

Prosody can be expressed not only by modification to the timing, stress and intonation of auditory speech but also by modifying visual speech. Studies have shown that the production of visual cues to prosody is highly variable (both within and across speakers), however behavioural studies have shown that perceivers can effectively use such visual cues. The latter result suggests that people are sensitive to the type of prosody expressed despite cue variability. The current study investigated the extent to which perceivers can match visual cues to prosody from different speakers and from different face regions. Participants were presented two pairs of sentences (consisting of the same segmental content) and were required to decide which pair had the same prosody. Experiment 1 tested visual and auditory cues from the same speaker and Experiment 2 from different speakers. Experiment 3 used visual cues from the upper and the lower face of the same talker and Experiment 4 from different speakers. The results showed that perceivers could accurately match prosody even when signals were produced by different speakers. Furthermore, perceivers were able to match the prosodic cues both within and across modalities regardless of the face area presented. This ability to match prosody from very different visual cues suggests that perceivers cope with variation in the production of visual prosody by flexibly mapping specific tokens to abstract prosodic types.     

It's in the sample: the effects of sample size and sample diversity on the breadth of inductive generalization

Developmental studies have provided mixed evidence with regard to the question of whether children consider sample size and sample diversity in their inductive generalizations. Results from four experiments with 105 undergraduates, 105 school-age children (M = 7.2 years), and 105 preschoolers (M = 4.9 years) showed that preschoolers made a higher rate of projections from large samples than from small samples when samples were diverse (Experiments 1 and 3) but not when samples were homogeneous (Experiment 4) and not when the task required a choice between two samples (Experiment 2). Furthermore, when a property occurred in large and diverse samples, preschoolers exhibited a broad pattern of projection, generalizing the property to items from categories not represented in the evidence. In contrast, adults followed a normative pattern of induction and never attributed properties to items from categories not represented in the evidence. School-age children showed a mixed pattern of results.     

Do procedures for verbal reporting of thinking have to be reactive? A meta-analysis and recommendations for best reporting methods

Since its establishment, psychology has struggled to find valid methods for studying thoughts and subjective experiences. Thirty years ago, Ericsson and Simon (1980) proposed that participants can give concurrent verbal expression to their thoughts (think aloud) while completing tasks without changing objectively measurable performance (accuracy). In contrast, directed requests for concurrent verbal reports, such as explanations or directions to describe particular kinds of information, were predicted to change thought processes as a consequence of the need to generate this information, thus altering performance. By comparing performance of concurrent verbal reporting conditions with their matching silent control condition, Ericsson and Simon found several studies demonstrating that directed verbalization was associated with changes in performance. In contrast, the lack of effects of thinking aloud was merely suggested by a handful of experimental studies. In this article, Ericsson and Simon's model is tested by a meta-analysis of 94 studies comparing performance while giving concurrent verbalizations to a matching condition without verbalization. Findings based on nearly 3,500 participants show that the "think-aloud" effect size is indistinguishable from zero (r = -.03) and that this procedure remains nonreactive even after statistically controlling additional factors such as task type (primarily visual or nonvisual). In contrast, procedures that entail describing or explaining thoughts and actions are significantly reactive, leading to higher performance than silent control conditions. All verbal reporting procedures tend to increase times to complete tasks. These results suggest that think-aloud should be distinguished from other methods in future studies. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.     

The Color of Safety: Ingroup Associated Colors make Beer Safer

Individuals display high levels of trust and express feelings of safety when interacting with social ingroup members. Here, we investigated whether cues related to ingroup membership would change perceptions of the safety of alcohol. Participants were exposed to images of beer in either a standard can or a can featuring the colors of their university (i.e., ‘fan cans’). We hypothesized that exposure to fan cans would change perceptions of the risks of beer drinking. Results showed that participants exposed to fan cans rated beer consumption as less dangerous (Experiment 1), were more likely to automatically activate safety-related mental content after unconscious perception of beer cues (Experiment 2), and viewed their ingroup's party practices as less dangerous (Experiment 3). These results provide evidence that ingroup-associated colors can serve as a safety cue for alcohol, which may in theory perpetuate alcohol-related risk-taking, already a cause for concern on college and university campuses.     

How Sensation Seeking provides a common basis for functional and dysfunctional outcomes

This research determines if Mastery Goal Orientation mediates Sensation Seeking in the prediction of functional performance and if Sensation Seeking directly predicts dysfunctional behavior. Using two different measures of Sensation Seeking, a sample of fulltime Australian workers was used to test the proposed learning mechanism in the prediction of supervisor rated work outcomes, self-reported work outcomes, and self-reported dysfunctional behavior. As predicted, mediation and suppression analyses provided strong support for the proposed model but with just one of the measures of Sensation Seeking. It is concluded that this mechanism of learning has much to offer our understanding of functional and dysfunctional outcomes.