Narcissism and belief in the paranormal

The present study was designed to assess whether the relationship between narcissistic personality and paranormal belief identified by Tobacyk and Mitchell earlier could be replicated with a general population and to see whether the effect could be found with a narrower definition of paranormal beliefs that focuses only on belief in psychic phenomena. 75 participants completed the Narcissistic Personality Inventory and two measures of paranormal belief, the Paranormal Belief Scale and the Australian Sheep-Goat Scale. There was no correlation between narcissism and Paranormal Belief Scale scores, but narcissism and Australian Sheep-Goat Scale scores were significantly positively correlated. Of the three subscales to the Australian Sheep-Goat measure, scores for narcissism correlated with belief in ESP and PK but not in Life after death. These relationships were interpreted in terms of need for control.     

Attractiveness of own-race, other-race, and mixed-race faces

Averaged face composites, which represent the central tendency of a familiar population of faces, are attractive. If this prototypicality contributes to their appeal, then averaged composites should be more attractive when their component faces come from a familiar, own-race population than when they come from a less familiar, other-race population. We compared the attractiveness of own-race composites, other-race composites, and mixed-race composites (where the component faces were from both races). In experiment 1, Caucasian participants rated own-race composites as more attractive than other-race composites, but only for male faces. However, mixed-race (Caucasian/Japanese) composites were significantly more attractive than own-race composites, particularly for the opposite sex. In experiment 2, Caucasian and Japanese participants living in Australia and Japan, respectively, selected the most attractive face from a continuum with exaggerated Caucasian characteristics at one end and exaggerated Japanese characteristics at the other, with intervening images including a Caucasian averaged composite, a mixed-race averaged composite, and a Japanese averaged composite. The most attractive face was, again, a mixed-race composite, for both Caucasian and Japanese participants. In experiment 3, Caucasian participants rated individual Eurasian faces as significantly more attractive than either Caucasian or Asian faces. Similar results were obtained with composites. Eurasian faces and composites were also rated as healthier than Caucasian or Asian faces and composites, respectively. These results suggest that signs of health may be more important than prototypicality in making average faces attractive.     

Benefit System Effects on Employees’ Benefit Knowledge,Use, and Organizational Commitment

We identified four attributes of benefit systems thought to influence employee attitudes and behavior: employee participation, system quality, communication quality, and benefit importance. Survey data from 974 employees of a Fortune 500 energy industry firm supported a partially mediated model in which these benefit system features exerted both indirect and direct effects on benefit knowledge and use, as well as on affective and continuance commitment. However, the findings differed across benefit system features and across types of benefits. Specifically, improving organizational communications about benefits appears more useful than increasing employee participation or improving benefit system service quality.     

Feared identity and obsessive-compulsive disorder

We tested predictions from cognitive-behavioural theory that people with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) regard their intrusions as revealing unacceptable aspects of their character. We compared an OCD sample with anxious controls (AC) and non-anxious controls (NAC) on a measure of the extent to which intrusions led to negative inferences about the self, assessed the discrepancy between their actual and feared self, and recorded the traits making up the feared self. The OCD sample did not differ from AC on self-discrepancies, but did differ from both control groups on the measure of negative inferences about the self. In addition, the feared self of the OCD sample was significantly more likely to consist of bad and immoral traits.     

Effect of intermittent exercise on multiple-choice reaction times of soccer players

The influence of intermittent exercise on a choice-response time task was investigated. Two groups of 8 male soccer players (M age = 20.9, SD = 2.0) participated. They spent 4.4 (SD = 1.3) weekly hours on soccer training and had been playing soccer for 13 (SD = 3.3) years. Multiple-choice reaction speed and response accuracy were measured four times. Between measurements, one group performed 8-min. blocks of intermittent exercise on a bicycle ergometer and one group rested. Analysis showed that reaction speed and response accuracy were not significantly different between the two groups. Furthermore, there were significant faster reaction times and a larger number of correct reactions through Block 2 in both the exercise and control group (p < .05), probably a result of learning processes and familiarization with the task procedures. Further research towards the specific influence of mode of exercise, intensity, work-rest ratio and duration of intermittent exercise, and the sensitivity of reaction time tasks will be necessary to clarify the relationship between intermittent exercise and cognitive performance.     

The self in action: lessons from delusions of control

Patients with delusions of control are abnormally aware of the sensory consequences of their actions and have difficulty with on-line corrections of movement. As a result they do not feel in control of their movements. At the same time they are strongly aware of the action being intentional. This leads them to believe that their actions are being controlled by an external agent. In contrast, the normal mark of the self in action is that we have very little experience of it. Most of the time we are not aware of the sensory consequences of our actions or of the various subtle corrections that we make during the course of goal-directed actions. We know that we are agents and that we are successfully causing the world to change. But as actors we move through the world like shadows glimpsed only occasional from the corner of an eye.     

Using genetic programming to discover nonlinear variable interactions

Psychology has to deal with many interacting variables. The analyses usually used to uncover such relationships have many constraints that limit their utility. We briefly discuss these and describe recent work that uses genetic programming to evolve equations to combine variables in nonlinear ways in a number of different domains. We focus on four studies of interactions from lexical access experiments and psychometric problems. In all cases, genetic programming described nonlinear combinations of items in a manner that was subsequently independently verified. We discuss the general implications of genetic programming and related computational methods for multivariate problems in psychology.     

Exploring issues of personality measurement and structure through the development of a short form of the Eysenck Personality Profiler

In this article, we develop a revised short form of the original Eysenck Personality Profiler (EPP; H. J. Eysenck & Wilson, 1991). In addition, we address topics of broad theoretical importance such as the recurrent empirical finding of correlations between conceptually orthogonal personality dimensions and the possibility that gender differences in these dimensions are partly spurious. In Study 1 (N = 227), we demonstrate that the existing short form of the EPP (EPP-SF; H. J. Eysenck, Wilson, & Jackson, 1996) provides a poor fit to the data and we develop a revised well-fitting version. In Study 2, we retest this version on an independent new sample (N = 3,374) where it is again found to fit the data well. We show that most of the structural and measurement parameters of the revised EPP-SF are invariant across genders. Structured means analysis indicated a significant gender difference in Psychoticism, with men scoring higher than women, but no differences in Extraversion or Neuroticism. Our discussion focuses on issues concerning personality measurement and structure, including an examination of the role of confirmatory factor analysis in personality research.     

Semantics and semantic errors: implicit access to semantic information from words and nonwords in deep dyslexia

In this paper we describe dissociations of implicit versus explicit access to semantic information in a patient with deep dyslexia. This acquired reading disorder is characterized by the production of morphological (e.g., SLEEP read as SLEEPING) and semantic errors (e.g., HEART read as BLOOD) and consequently provides a potential window into the operation of both aspects of the language system. The deep dyslexic patient in this study (JO) demonstrated implicit semantic access to items in a number of tasks despite the fact that she was unable to correctly read these items aloud. The findings from this study are consistent with a model of lexical deficits that distinguishes between explicit and implicit access to lexical representations on the basis of inhibitory processes.